Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars

Rating:
Summary: Sh*t Sandwich: a good comic effort
Review: After "The Rants" and "Ranting Again", Miller really delivers here. If you liked his work on Saturday Night Live, you will really enjoy this work, which should've been titled "Late Night Modernism." I didn't know whether to laugh or take out a note pad. Miller's parody of academic idiom reproduces the real thing so closely that it might fool a tenured mind. His comparision of Beckett with Giacommetti was a hoot, but bringing in Bim and Bom went too far- that is my only gripe. Fans of Miller might have expected in this context a kind of "Surrealist Weekend Update." But the knotted and loopy references of his stand up routine have been translated well into pseudo-academic style, including footnotes. His pidgin academic is a veritable laugh griot.

Rating:
Summary: a better book than first meets the eye
Review: I was first drawn to this book while waiting for my paramour outside of a popular but nameless Manhattan bookstore. She was late, as always, and to kill the time I skimmed the remainder bins, where some untutored storeclerk had remorselessly dumped several copies of Miller's "Late Modernism." Was it the light winter breeze against my exposed neck, or Miller's icy analytical touch, as he claws his way through the work of Barnes, Joyce, and Brothers that produced that uncanny frisson of feeling I felt as I turned from page to page? Who can say. Clearly Miller has fulfilled the wish of Eliot's Prufrock, and we as readers feel compelled, altogether willingly, to scuttle silently across the pages of "Late Modernism." Reviewers on the book's jacket had promised readers a "crabbed journey through the unnoticed grottoes of late modernism, and at the same time, a forward walking approach to literary theory." Miller delivers. As Miller suggests, form and content can be conceived against the legendary late modernist binary of the shell and the inside, and with Miller's unrelenting hermenuetic in hand, we as readers become the recipients of the most succulent morsels of this most crustaceous period in Western literature. Miller casts his nets wide, revealing the fallacy of the classic distinction between the figurative and the littoral, which in recent criticism of this period has become something of a red herring. In the end, we recognize as readers what Miller has apparently known all along: that the crabs of modernism outnumber those of any cheap hotel.

Rating:
Summary: trouble to digest this book
Review: This book, very puzzling. I read last night on way back from very excellent smorgasborg dinner at friend house. He make extra fine meatloaf with bread and also butter. I never so full. In all my life, I say, and very happy too. So then what? I read book. So depressing, you see. Mr. Tyrus Miller, he crack open modernism like rotten coconut and pour out spoiled milk for all to see. Now I am so sick and in pain, surely I die soon.