I'm not sure yet if she read my recent piece on Grover, but Christine has posted a piece on her site ("The Pomo(nster) At The End Of This Book"= best title EVAR) where she's dug up a piece which calls Grover "a poet of tragic knowledge."
Something's up, here. I never heard the writers on Sesame Street refer to Grover as a teacher of postmodern ideas, but maybe they were working under that assumption subconsciously.
Happily, Christine found that someone has posted The Monster At The End Of This Book online! And that's good, because the book is really quite excellent, whimsical and fun. It stands in proud counterpoint to many of the things Sesame has recently licensed their characters to (sugary fruit juice?! adult underwear?! cmon.)
Posted by Gus at January 26, 2007 12:52 AMThanks for pointing me to that. I have to say, though, despite Christine's cute title, that there's nothing perceptibly "postmodern" at all in the O'Hara review she quoted. Unless "postmodern" in this context just means "literary criticism that I find uncomfortably ironic in tone." (I concede that boundary 2 identifies itself as a postmodern journal in some sense, but the review itself bears no such hallmark.) He spends half the review talking about Harold Bloom, for chrissake, even if it is to (rather gently) refute him. It's actually quite a nice piece, and directly after referring to "The Monster at the End of This Book" he quotes a rather dark Kinsella poem written from the perspective of a stuffed animal -- which is hard to read to myself in any voice but Grover's now.
Posted by: Roger at January 26, 2007 2:05 PM
'Unless "postmodern" in this context just means "literary criticism that I find uncomfortably ironic in tone."'
good call.
red-handed,
christine
Posted by: sushiesque at January 29, 2007 9:41 AM
Wait -- that's not what "postmodern" means?
(crumples up doctoral certification exam and tosses it in wastebasket)
Posted by: gus at January 30, 2007 5:55 PM