I'd like to cast my vote for classifying Sherman Alexie as a "Post-Boringist"

Captivated by its beauty, Sherman Alexie speaks about the game of basketball.  He calls it jazz.  He talks about its improvisational choreography.  See for yourself:

"All you need is something resembling a ball and something resembling a hoop."

I bring this up because in class today I was completely baffled that the subject of classification was brought up.  In order for any piece of art to meet anyone's expectations of what that art should be, it should be viewed in a singular light.  We can acknowledge the "accretion" (to use the snappy word from today's class) of influence but if our goal is to see beauty we must focus on the beauty in front of us and not validity gained through the association of genre or style.

Post-genre, post-style, post-boring.

I say "post-boring" because to me Sherman Alexie is engaging the structure of the universe--of time, space, souls, memories, everything he can get his hands on.  Page 184 of "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven:

"Give me a Cherry Slushie, too."

"What size?" he asked, relieved.

"Large," I said, and he turned his back to me to make the drink.  He realized his mistake but it was too late.  He stiffened, ready for the gunshot or the blow behind the ear.  When it didn't come, he turned back to me.

"I'm sorry," he said.  "What size did you say?" 

"Small," I said and changed the story.

"But I thought you said large."

"If you knew I wanted a large, then why did you ask me again?" I asked him and laughed.

This entire scene in the 7/11 is fantastic.  And I say "scene" deliberately--there is very much a visual and spatial dimension to Alexie's prose that helps to provide stability among the time shifts.  What do you think Alexie's trying to say about memory and security and paranoia... or slushies?  Personally, I think he's just allowing the accretion of mundanities to slowly weave themselves into a story.  I recall a Mark Twain quote:

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't."

Through the act of defining an object, you create a framework of possibilities for said object to stick to.  I feel as if this might be the reason as to why many "post-modern" authors don't proclaim themselves as such.  I'll end with a little slow-motion b-ball: