Darwin

This year I have decided, come hell or high water, to read Origin of Species. How long this will take is a big question. Seeing as this year is the 200th anniversary of his birth, I owe it to the man - and myself - to do this. After reading almost all of Stephen Jay Gould's books, with the exception of his last, which was a very technical book about evolution, I think I owe it to him, too.

It seems almost beyond bizarre to think that people in this country are still questioning Darwin's work and the relevance of the theory of natural selection. To me, Darwin possessed one of the greatest minds that ever addressed a question. Even though he did not understand genetics, he instinctively knew that there was a mechanism for transmitting traits from one individual to another. Time has simply proved this to be true.

... after much delay and procrastination

Now I must write something.

I was forced to name this thing when I made it and called it "Sundays" because that was the first thing that came to mind. Four of us plan to meet on Sunday for conversation, and Sunday is often the day of the week more committed to ideas than others: catching up on magazines, The Times, conversations with Annie.

This morning over coffee, I read a review by one of my favorites, Louis Menand, of a biography of Donald Barthelme, of whom I knew very little. If someone had asked me who he was, I think I would have said short story writer, modernist style, and I could not have provided a title or a plot.

Louis, as always, placed the book reviewed and the life in the widest possible context of intellectual history: in this case modernism vs postmodernism. After neatly pointing  out that it's hard to know whether pm is a continuation of m or some break from it, he does provide an intelligent survey of what pm might be from soup cans through Rauschenberg and Barthelme. Found things, deconstruction, "anti-art" (whatever that might be-Louis does not know either). 

I am still left without the ability to fully verbalize the reason why this stuff is interesting, and even though I do, I worry somewhere whether the interest is there because of events in my life when I was told it's important. Like the Duchamp show in houston when I was 19. Interestingly, to me, as a coincidence, Barthelme may have been involved in preparing that show.

And the mention of Duchamp and dada challenges the m and pm distinction. Louis says something to the effect that dada plans whereas pm finds, but I'm not sure this is properly general.

In the end, and somewhat influenced by words of Peter Scheldahl, the overall meaning of this stuff, pm or whatever, is a huge negative, blurry, blob that somehow touches us in intimate points of humor, pleasure or pain.