I've done this one before. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. Given the nature of the book it seems entirely appropriate to simply cut and past the best bits as one long slab. Find the meaning where you fancy.
There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: it had the best distribution network and the most mass-produced item—the Bible.
“This is a work of fiction. No person in it bears any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, etc., etc. London does not exist.”
Emerson called the new literature he’d been looking for “a panharmonicon. Here everything is admissible—philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdote, jokes, ventriloquism—all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech.”
Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.
The tour guide said, “Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered.
Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground. The sound of voice alone grew less compelling; the longing for narration rose up again, asserting the oldest claim on the reading heart: the tale. What could be more literal than The Story of My Life now being told by Everywoman and Everyman?
Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were.
Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art—underprocessed, underproduced—splinters and explodes.
The lyric essay asks what happens when an essay begins to behave less like an essay and more like a poem. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or leaving the blanks blank? What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation?
Copies don’t count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.
Contemporary narration is the account of the manufacturing of the work, not the actual work.
Have you ever heard a song that makes you feel as good as Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips—Part 2”? I haven’t. It’s so real. When you listen to the song, you can hear a guy in the band yelling, “What key? What key?” He’s lost. But then he finds the key, and boom. Every time I hear that guy yelling, “What key?” I get excited.
Plot, like erected scaffolding, is torn down, and what stands in its place is the thing itself.
There isn’t any story.It’s not the story. It’s just this breathtaking world—that’s the point. The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there.
People like you are in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality (judiciously, as you will), we’ll act again, creating other realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out.
Facebook and MySpace are crude personal essay machines.
—the transformation, through framing, of outtakes into totems.
There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock’s (the film is complete in the director’s mind) and Coppola’s (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola’s approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.
You don’t need a story. The question is How long do you not need a story?
Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation.
What we realized was that the novel was a machine to get to twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and art and music and list-making and masculine distance and the masculine drive for art and the masculine difficulty with intimacy.” This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention. It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. It often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically, its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.
Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.
First person is where you can be more interesting; you don’t have to be much but a stumbling fool. And I find this often leads to the more delightful expedition. The wisdom there is more precious than in the sage overview, which in many writers makes me nearly puke.
We have too many things and not enough forms.
For if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
Previously on Kindle
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