Life's Little
Deconstruction Book:
Self-Help for the Post-Hip
[huh?]

by Andrew Boyd [who?]
dec '98 • w.w.norton
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SELECTIONS from Life's Little Deconstruction Book

(Many of these fine post-modern maxims are now available on t-shirts at our PO MO TO GO store because, as the good book says: "197. Accessorize your rebellion.")

1. Talk about anything in the context of anything else.
2. Implicate yourself in every interpretation.
3. Dip into nihilism.
4. Sample.
5. Need what recently didn't exist.
6. Expose depth as another surface.
7. Pose.
8. Control the remote.
9. Read the text as you desire.
10. Learn to play a financial instrument.
11. Bathe in an image of the natural.
12. Play each role in good faith.
13. Publicize your privates.
14. Pretend to be real.
15. Fashion reason.
16. Reason about fashion.
17. Participate without belonging.
18. Disenchant.
19. Be as different from the Joneses as you can afford.
20. Dissolve truth into a patchwork of language games.
21. Indicate absence.
22. Beg the question.
23. Debt-finance immediate gratification.
24. Resist—only to find yourself disarmed and reabsorbed.
25. Inflate.
26. Disdain theorists.
27. Don't seek the whole.
28. Confuse art and advertising.
29. Replace your models of reality with models as reality.
30. Sport amused, matter-of-fact cynicism.
31. Withdraw into shell-shocked blasé.
32. Helplessly and forever, contain the Other.
33. Be as if.
34. Reformat.
35. Speak to be spoken—language composes you.
36. Maneuver between pastiche and mish-mash.
37. Don't despair at the absurd, go with it.
38. Regard conversation with the prestige once reserved for inquiry.
39. Perform your gender.
40. Disregard the intentions of dead authors.
41. Supplant the original.
42. Scrutinize power.
43. Suspend belief.
44. Write more about less.
45. Complicate race.
46. Shop as though money were a consensual hallucination.
47. Stake all on the charisma of the story-tellers.
48. Reduce meaning to a hodge-podge of signifiers.
49. Enjoy plural sexualities.
50. Lay claim to one fragment.

Collect all 365!  Buy the actual book.

Readers can also write their own.  See contest & other reader entries.