The Post-post-post Post.

I just read a post-post-postmodern novel.

At least, that's what its author calls it. My Little Blue Dress, by Bruno Maddox, is the story of the autobiography of a hundred-year-old woman being forged by a young postmodern writer, also called Bruno Maddox. It's confusing, it's self-conscious, it's conscious of its self-consciousness...and so on. Basically, it's a satire on postmodern writing, and as such it's very funny. But it's also, maybe, on some level a serious "post-post-postmodern" book, whatever that means.

Culture is confusing now. Apparently irony is dead, and now we're into post-irony, where there are no jokes, or the jokes seem to be ironic, but actually they're not... In the sitcom Nathan Barley for example, the editor of an urban culture magazine defends his mag's "stupid" content by saying "stupid people think it's cool. Smart people think it's a joke - also cool." Which would seem to be ironic humour. But then you find critics saying that Nathan Barley only appears to be ironic, while actually the "stupid" jokes are meant at face value.

Some part of me finds all these convoluted games with art and meaning fun and interesting. But another part finds them utterly infuriating. While it might be intellectually stimulating, it's never emotionally satisfying to watch a sitcom with no jokes, or a film with no message, or look at an aesthetically unpleasing painting. However "clever" we might be now, we're still the same kind of animal we were thousands of years ago, and most of us still want emotion and authentic meaning in art, not mind games.