A Momentary Taste of Being

Some half-formed, less-than-half thought out gropings toward meaning.  To be continued--perhaps. When looking at much modern fiction it often seems that the art of story telling has been lost. One reads through reams of metafictional games and post modern pandering to self.  Ulysses does not really tell a story, but collectively, we seem to have forgotten that meaningful books without story are the exception, not the rule. Literature as game-playing has a long and interesting history--but like modern art and much of classical music in the last 50 years, one begins to feel tired of the avant-garde blather of the modern literary world.  Is Paul Auster really all that?  What about something like The Interrogative Mood--is that really meaningful or powerful or memorable fiction.  Even Jennifer Egan's powerpoint display of text as part of A Visit to the Goon Squad --what is that all about, really--how does it really enhance the story.  I am surprised and a ...

But it's worth hearing again: an apology for fiction excerpt: Just about every literary nerd has had this conversation at least once (and I had one recently): Me: Oh, you're a reader - cool! What do you like to read? Non-Literary Nerd: Non-fiction, almost exclusively. Me: You don't like fiction? NLN: Nope. There's too much to learn about the real world to read stuff that's made up. Me: Sure, dude. I've said it, nearly everyone I know who reads fiction has said it, and it is ultimately unpersuasive because those who read nonfiction do not really do so to gain information about the world--such information is of its time and of the prejudice of the writer and ultimately subject to revision and rerevision.  Truth is, most of us don't really know why we do much of anything.  There are relatively few choices that we could explain rationally, and of those few, what we choose for recreation may be the least explained choice of all. But it never fails ...

Lee Seigel on fiction

The Two Lönnrots-Gabriel Josipovici I just love electronic sources--if you're inclined to, Go!  Enjoy! (Haven't read it yet myself, just found it thanks to: This Space.)

Perhaps one does well to let the author speak for himself: from The White Tiger Aravind Adiga It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices. See Muslims have one god. The Christians have three gods. And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods. Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to shoose from. Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of dark around us.  I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work--much like our politicians, and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones ...

I know what few readers may frequent here are probably bored out of their minds with the constant threshing of Kertész.  But I think he is a prime example of why one can't just completely dismiss the Nobel Committee as irrelevant (were one inclined to that position anyway.)  Here is an author who deserves a wider readership--and it has taken me a long while to get around to his work. from Liquidation Imre Kertész Bee: Dying is easy life is one enormous concentration camp that God has established here on Earth for mankind and that man has refined yet further as an annihilation camp for his own kith Taking ones own life amounts to outwitting those who stand on guard escaping deserting those who are left behind laughing up one's sleeve in this big Lager of life the neither-in-nor-out neither-forward-nor-back in this wretched world of lives held in suspended animation where we grow decrepit without time moving any further forward. . . this is where I learned t...

Kertész, himself an Auschwitz survivor articulates what seems to be a recurrent theme in his writing: from Liquidation Imre Kertész "Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate. On the other hand, he lives with an awareness of tragic fate. This is a paradox . . . which manifests itself in him, the writer simply as a problem of style. A striking notion I have to say, " he adds with the smile of approbation that he was clearly in the habit of awarding the more polished essays at the university. "In his classification, survivors represent a separate species. . . . just like an animal species.  In his view we are all survivors; that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz. Then the forty years that we have put behind us since." Sometimes I feel the wattage of the old bulb is simply too dim to cast anything like the light needed to elucidate a passage.  This is one of th...

An online friend and I have what I hope is a congenial disagreement over the relative merits of the two broad categories of writing featured in the title of this post.  Like most men (if I'm to believe the polls and studies) he finds the world of nonfiction more substantive, or perhaps more comfortable, or still again perhaps, more interesting and lively than the world of nonfiction. Naturally, this is the source of our disagreement.  I find the world of nonfiction useful, but apart from a few scattered books and one whole category (religion and philosophy) relatively uninspiring.  And when I cast an eye over what remains to us from the Canon and the great works of the past, what I discover is that except for foundational works and the category identified above, nonfiction perforce supersedes itself and doesn't really enter the realm of the eternally readable.  That is nonfiction as a genre tends not to last beyond its usefullness for the age.  There are many ...