avant_garde_a_clue raze "imagine you're a hyper-educated avant-gardist in grad school learning to write. screen gets all fuzzy now as the viewer is invited to imagine this. coming out of an avant-garde tradition, i get to this grad school, and it turns out all the teachers are realists. they're not at all interested in post-modern, avant-garde stuff. now, there's an interesting delusion going on here. they don't like my stuff. i believe that it's not because my stuff isn't good, but because they just don't happen to like this kind of aesthetic. in fact, known to them but unknown to me, the stuff was bad. was indeed bad. so in the middle of all of this, hating the teachers but hating them for exactly the wrong reason, this was spring of 1986. i remember. i remember who i went to see the movie with. blue_velvet comes out. blue_velvet is a type of surrealism. it may have debts. there's a debt to hitchcock somewhere. but it is an entirely new and original kind of surrealism. it is completely david lynch. and i don't know how well you or your viewers would remember the film, but there's a moment when a guy named the yellow man is shot in an apartment. the guy's dead but still standing there. there's no explanation. he's just standing there. it's almost classically francophilistically surreal. and yet it seems absolutely true, and absolutely appropriate. there was this way in which i all of a sudden realized that the point of being postmodern or being avant-garde or whatever wasn't to follow in a certain kind of tradition. that all that stuff is b.s. imposed by critics and camp followers afterwards. that what the really great artists do — and it sounds very trite to say it out loud — but what the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. they've got their own vision. their own way of fracturing reality. and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings." — david_foster_wallace 230927 what's it to you? who go blather from