Talking in the Library Series 2 - Julian Barnes 

I love this library series and wish it was available in full somewhere rather than fractured in various people's accounts

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Humorous: the only thing Julian and Martin have in common now is Finnegans Wake...?

Barnes is a fine speaker but his works, after History of the World, are trivial. I know “The Sense of Ending” won the Booker but I thought a slight work at best

Tracking the fate of (eg) the "post modern" in Literature, it has become obvious to me that writers are, painfully, even more weakly social (herd) animals than the masses at large (depending, as they do, not only on the "love" of those near but on the "love" of thousands, and more, they'll never know) and therefore follow the moods of the readership slavishly. Any young writer who started off a "post modernist" in, say, 2000, very probably soon learned to tone things down to the YA level (if he/she ever got published) by the late Aughties. The mood just isn't there to support the intellectually "experimental" in real numbers, now, and only the geniuses, most of whom are doomed to obscurity (unless they make influential friends, like JJ did), persist in their obsessions; the geniuses and the dilettantes. What too often looks likes individual genius concentrated in a celebrated work of music, lit or art is really only a reflection of a brilliant Zeitgeist ... genius crystallizing, cyclically, in the governing trends of the Collective Unconscious: Paris in the '20s, London in the '60s, NY in the '70s. Ie: the * '60s itself* was Genius but many individual contributions (Ginsberg's Howl, say, or Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots) didn't, in frankness, hold up after the Era moved on. Critics who continue to rave over Bellow, for example, are, in my opinion, reminiscent of certain men, now in their late middle age, who consider Gary Numan a visionary. The long view says no. Critical ego must learn to correct for this, even as writerly ego can't be expected to. berlin8berlin.wordpress.com/