esrosedotblog

META THIS AND META THAT

I get seriously pissed off if I don't understand terms or jargon.

The latest repugnancy is the use of the prefix 'meta' for every fucking thing under the sun.

Yeh, it means nothing as usual. Beyond. Transcendant. The next thing.

Whatever.

The latest run in with this was in the NYTimes Book Review which we still get by subscription. (I know, we still have that long root going back east there).

There is a huge review of The Keep in which the reviewer all wets her or himself over the fact that this is (gasp) metafiction.

So, I had to go check. Sure enough there is an entry for metafiction in the Wikipedia.

OK. Go look it over.

The reviewer in the Times makes much of the fact that metafiction began with The Magus by John Fowles.

Well, I read that. Confusing. But interesting.

On the other hand, Wikipedia says that Tristram Shandy is the first metafiction!

My god! I am just starting it. We saw the movie a few weeks ago; the film that proved you couldn't make a film from the book. Very funny.

The book was written in the mid 1700s.

So much for contemporary invention.

So, shit!

It isn't anything new.

It is just something for book reviewers to one up about. Thesis topics. All that.

Another layer of useless abstracton.

Come to think of it, this blog could be metafiction! Or metareality. Ironic. Detached. Commenting on itself. The writer is the character in his own story and so on.

It is too much. I am getting a headache from it.