Afterword: Friday, 1997

       "Yes. Well," I see that I've said here and there in the headnotes to this maiden collection of my nonfiction. Some 700 Fridays after its first publication, the author is currently

       -- older by five further books, including this volume's sort-of-sequel  (Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994);

       -- recently retired from professoring in the Johns Hopkins writing Seminars -- than which I can imagine no more agreeable venue for a writer who also enjoys swapping ideas about the craft and medium with gifted apprentices and first-rate colleagues -- and still feeling acutely both the absence of the presence and the presence of the absence of that excellent university from my working life (But really, now: Can writing be taught? And if so, ought it to be, in the university? See "Can It Be Taught?" in Further Fridays and, in the present volume, the Friday-pieces "Praying for Everybody" and "Doing the Numbers");

       -- pleased as punch -- since that working life has undoubtedly reached its Thursday late-afternoon if not quite yet its Friday (with hopes of an agreeable weekend therebeyond) -- to see The Friday Book back in print, under the distinguished aegis of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

       My agreement themwith was to supply for this new edition a foreword of "about 500 words": a dollop of new wine in the old bottle, proverbial advice to the contrary notwithstanding. Something of that sort is par for the course with reissues, if the author is still breathing air and penning sentences, and I had no objection: "I learn by going where I have to go," sings Theodore Roethke, and one often learns where one has to go by dead-reckoning where one is by reviewing where one has been, musewise and otherwise. The programmatically self-conscious gimmick of this book in its first edition, however, was to front-load it with semi-satirical "front matter" -- subtitles, sub-subtitles, commentaries on titling and subtitling, author's introduction and table of contents and epigraphs, all replete with footnotes -- in order to make and demonstrate some critical points about such festoonery. At the time (1984), it seemed a good idea; but to add now yet another foreword to these several mock-prefaces would surely be de-tropping the already deliberately de trop. Thus this afterword, or "postface," as heavy-humored Postmodernist literary theorizers sometimes say.

       I should talk.

       And I shall, for another paragraph, to give good measure on that contractual half-thousand words. Among my Friday opinions is that for all its loose use, the adjective "Postmodernist" really does name, approximately, a category of aesthetic sensibility as distinct to the second half of the twentieth century as was Modernism to its first. My basic position-papers on the subject are "The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment," herein; for chapter and verse on such mattersome hairsplits as "Postmodern" versus "Postmodernist," uppercase versus lowercase postmodernity, and the readerly reactions "So what?" versus "Ah, so!," see "4½ Lectures: The Stuttgart Seminars on Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque," in Further Fridays. Enough here to note, vis-à-vis those elaborate mock-prefaces, that among the field-identification marks of PMhood is a sportive but impassioned self-consciousness and medium-consciousness (by which I do not mean half-consciousness) that enables one successfully to tie one's necktie, say, in a perfect full-Windsor in the presence of one's beloved while nattering knowledgeably about both the technique of necktie-tying and the history of male neckwear, and in so doing to make sleighthandedly, as it were between the lines, a declaration of love more serious, graceful, and responsible to the already-said than any mere hackneyed blurt "I love you."

       Yes?

       Well.

J. B.

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