Every once in a while somebody invents a new art form, and does a really good job of it. It doesn’t happen too often, so when someone manages to do it, you sit up and take notice.<\/p>\n
I am about half way through George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo<\/i>, and I am realizing that I am in the presence of such an accomplishment. I suppose that technically it is a novel, since it tells a single fictional story of book length.<\/p>\n
But calling Lincoln in the Bardo<\/i> a novel is like calling Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective<\/i> a TV miniseries. On some technical level you might be sort of right, but you would also be completely missing the point.<\/p>\n
I wonder how many clear-cut cases there are of a truly new form being introduced into popular culture, with the result being a spectacularly successful work of genius.<\/p>\n
I can’t think of very many.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every once in a while somebody invents a new art form, and does a really good job of it. It doesn’t happen too often, so when someone manages to do it, you sit up and take notice. I am about half way through George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, and I am realizing that I … Continue reading “Something really new”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21441"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21442,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21441\/revisions\/21442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}