Mr. M. J. Bowen

More than just a situ curiosity, 15 Jan 2009

I am a bit of a situationist completist and bought this book to keep my library up-to-date. Was I merely fetishizing the return of some better-forgotten book commodity? Perhaps, but I did not expect much. The situationists were no fans of the novel form and Bernstien, apparently, only wrote this book in order to bring in some cash.

The limitations of the 'dead art' of novel writing are clearly pushed to extremes throughout. The characters are thin charactures of the situ gang, the plot is scant and tedious, the dialogue pretentious. This was no doubt Bernstien's intention. Representing the activities of her and her friends in this manner - a novel - served to give them a… Read more

Montano, 7 April 2008

I got alot out of Vila-Matas' other book, Bartleby & Co. It is a pretty simple case book of writers who suffer not so much from being blocked as from disenchantment with the whole business. This book pursues a simular theme; a critic is "literature sick" and wishes to live without perpetually referencing his experience to its literary dopleganger.He fails...and is forever being annoying; "making things up ex nilho" and making unwarented comparisons between mundane incidents and books he has read (Guy Debord and the scene of an accidents, for example).

There are interesting ideas in the book but they are always second hand. The 'novel' is an annoying "...but that didn't really… Read more

Radically not random, 10 Mar 2008

This is a really good bit of secondary situ literature. Sadie Plant starts off with a magesterial summery of situationist thought. Her original contribution comes later. She compares their work with that of the post modernists and concludes that they held to clear distinctions between the real and the spectacular world...a division that their false heirs collapse. This is the main dialectic of the book. It is an interesting new persepctive from which to encounter Debord and Co. Whether or not this insight is revolutionary enough to justify some of these inflated prices is another matter! Commodity Fetishism!