Ennui

I remember squirming in Herbert Blau's Modernism seminar at UW while he tirelessly paraded through Eliot's Wasteland and lingered especially on the Jewish vignettes. Or at least, could be likened to a Jewish persuasion. And I, freshly placed out of post-modernism studios prodded by student teachers with dirty cufflinks and desperate needs for grooming, grasped the Blau-colored translations in true pomo epiphany; ontological discrepancy, contingent on the subjective; shared by linguistic noise. A gross over-simplification, I know, but I have Motion practice to get to.
I've contemplated post-pomo presence in literature and its' most visible imprint, fashion, for some time, only to have been met with what I dubbed "revivalism" (after seeing a sordidly familiar ditsy floral romper cira 1992 on the Q-train,complete with bangs and granny boots) that can arguably have begun in the early 90's as a sideshow to the still-developing body of "grunge" that has now become a slideshow in the Revivalist deck. But what was Pomo missing? Why was every discussion weary, every essay unended, and most students preferring an alcove in the ancient verse of James or Dickens? What solace do checkered-print slip on Vans give that Saussure and Derrida couldn't? Did deconstruction after Yeats' bellowing "the center cannot hold" uncover the most sinister picture of all, a sort of twisted, masturbatory image of self love that led us to celebrate what was always shunned as banal, and drag it to the forefront of artistic vision? Do Americans finally have history? Or has the Body become inseparable from the consumer? No matter what they say, I don't think anyone foresaw the megacult of the Wayfarer.
While it was easy to recognize once the icons peppered the populace, perhaps the future of Rev'ism is what pomo disdained, and what was hungered; a common identity. A fixed, confident Body resplendent with solipsistic Passion. We are not the same repressed, Freudian-closeted, Neitzche-nihilist churchgoers that reveled in the unwinding of conformity. For it is somehow less frightening when it is corporations that are pulling the strings, and not G-d. (After all, unlike G-D, commercialism truly is made in our image).