Coincidences and sudden connections?

Tonight I had the priveledge of being in the effervescent presence of John Nehring, always a touch of Shangri-la, and we were talking about Alice in Sunderland. I asked him how he liked it and, although he did very much, he described some pages as being overloaded with images and text boxes, describing it as "flashes and flashes of images man, all coming at once!" Last night I was talking about how postmodernism is all about images, a world comprised entirely of images that have no concrete reality because one image is covered up by another. There is no Urr Story, or original story. What Johnny felt is known as a "procession of Simulacra", or, as Don Delillo (who I mentioned earlier in this blog) calls it in his novel of the same noise, White Noise. It is, basically, the constant barrage of images we are subjected to on a daily basis, mostly in the form of media, consumer capitalism. I think I might know that I understand to believe that children are a product of their environment, the simulacra they are subjected to. Many of these images, as I mentioned, come to them in the form of their parents' own nostalgia for their past.

Another note on nostalgia: Many of us are familiar with Pulp Fiction Novels, and they are very Nostalgic for our parents, the baby boomers, and even more so for the vast amount of enthusiastic collectors. Pulp Fiction Novels (called so because of the cheap pulp paper they were printed on, one reason why few exist today in good condition) reached their height during the 1950's and, interestingly enough, were preceeded by Dime Novels such as Buffalo Bill Cody, and the Waverly Fireside Chats for Women, and they were incredibly successful in spreading literacy. They were very similar, and if not in some cases the exact same, as the early primers we have discussed that may have asserted a didactic moral, taught young girls how to be ladies, and gave young boys pages of adventure for only a dime!. Dime Novels of the 1800's were preceeded by Penny Novels of England, such as The Mysteries of London.