"John Husvar" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:


Ha! Of course, we're not really being fair, but this is such a strange
and
arcane field that it's easy to take pot-shots at it.

In any case, it's not one for this NG. There is OT, and there is
Off-The-Planet. This one is OTP.

Yes, I guess so!

Just a couple of comments and I suppose I'd best get back to the right
planet.


If you happen to be into it, though, sometime when you're Googling, go
to
Google Book Search and type in "Ed Huntress," in quotes. There you'll
see a
note from the author of _Koolaids: The Art of War_, in which he's a bit
over-gracious in crediting me with "teaching him what good writing is."
g
In fact, what I tried to do was to steer him away from bad
post-modernism
and towards some very good post-modernism. So then he wrote a wildly
post-modernist book, which Amy Tan, among others, thought was brilliant
but
which I can hardly follow. d8-)

Oh, well.

Thanks for the reference!

Oy! I think I actually understood a bit of the excerpts. Guess I'm going
to have to either buy or borrow a copy of this one.

Fella seems to be the post-modernist of post-modernists! The excerpts of
his writing portray post-modernist angst in an unusually easily read and
airy style. It'll be fun to see if the first impression is accurate.

Rabih is a polymath genius who doesn't take himself seriously. A self-taught
artist, he had a one-man show of his paintings at the Tate Museum in London.
He's also a self-taught writer. He has many degrees from around the world,
but his Master's is an MBA. g

Your impression is accurate. He is a brilliant writer; Amy Tan is on the
mark. The trouble I had with _Koolaids_ is that it's a series of vignettes,
and probably should have been broken up into small collections that tie
together.

He was much influenced by the writing of Robert Coover, which is one of the
sources I introduced him to. If you want to see some post-modernist
(actually, metafiction) writing that anybody can read and really enjoy, try
Coover's _A Night at the Movies_. Start with the last chapter, which is a
pornographic send-up of "Casablanca." It is hilarious.

Rabih also is the only person I know whose family home, in Lebanon, was
flattened by a 16-inch shell from the Battleship New Jersey. But that's
another story.

And he has HIV. He's writing against time.

--
Ed Huntress