“Post-modern” is one of those oxymoronic terms referring to a general type of art and literature after a “modernist” age, evidently near the beginning of the twentieth century. Explaining it is a bit difficult, but I will try in very basic terms. For thousands of years, most people were illiterate—unable to read, not stupid. Stories and poems were placed in forms so they could be told, re-told and remembered. Rhyming poems and plays satisfied these needs. Around 1400 AD, Gutenberg came along and invented the printing press, making the written word transportable and making literacy a big deal. For a few hundred years, writers told good and bad stories about whatever they chose. The industrial age raged on and by the 1800s life got so easy to what it had been that people got too smart. Good old realistic and romantic stories weren’t good enough any more for these smart people. In art, they decided a portrait of a person that looked like the person wasn’t artistic enough, so it had to look like a bunch of red circle intersecting blue squares—abstract art was born. Plays, poetry and stories marched down this road, too. A lot of it seems to make no sense because a lot of it doesn’t make sense, except for the artistic smart people who pretend to figure it out. (If you ask me, these smart people wanted the newly literate world to think they were still illiterate.) This age of art is called “modernism.” Good old-fashioned stuff was still being created and that stuff would rise up bestsellers lists and what-not, but the artistic, smart people considered it low-art. By the twentieth century, life got comparably easy, people working only ten hours a day, then eight, then four, then on unemployment. “Post-modernism” tried to make the weird “modernist” stuff even weirder, and sometimes tried to make seem like it wasn’t art at all.
Fine, lots of people who buy into this modernist stuff and post-modernist stuff should take offense to the above explanation. You are now reading what I call an “appendix” to a novel that is written in a post-modern style. There’s lots of good and funny stuff here if you get past the post-modern style, which is really easy if you try. For instance, this is a novel—A FICTIONAL STORY—that tries to look like it’s not fictional. Many characters are referred to as letters to avoid potential law suits, even though the law suits could never happen since they are characters, not real people. If the letters bother you, stick in names as you read. The narrator is first person and is writing an autobiography, but he’s not real and it’s not an autobiography. He’s a character, too, and the thing is a novel. I give you his take on the occurrences of his life, but life isn’t necessarily the way he sees it because everyone who tells their story can only put their take on it, and he doesn’t even really have a life, since he is a character in a novel.
I am only giving the first few chapters here because I would love some agent or publisher to like the novel and want to publish it, making me money, which is really useful nowadays. If you do like it, let me know so I can let publishers know you might buy books.
