Some background from today's New York Times—
From DeLillo's novel Mao II in the paragraph immediately preceding
the Ritz-hat passage quoted by Soltan—
"He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what's outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility. This poet you've snatched. His detention drains the world of one more thimble of meaning."
For related ways of draining the world of meaning, see the politically loaded leftist vocabulary of International Art English—
IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia , radically , space , proposition , biopolitical , tension , transversal , autonomy . An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. [Alix Rule and David Levine, July 30, 2012]
See also this evening's post Issue 16.
