Imagining Ourselves Into Other People's Experiences

Quote of the day: "In fiction, we imagine ourselves into other people’s experiences."

That comes at very end of an interview of Sunil Yapa, author of "Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist," a recent novel about the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and riots in Seattle. He was interviewed by Bethanne Patrick.

The quote is interesting and perceptive because it helps explain why people like or dislike certain novels. If one doesn't find a character with whom one wishes to identify for one reason or another, books are often not that interesting.

That can be true no matter how well characters are "developed."

The Immediately Shocking, The Immediately Charming

"Does anything less than the immediately shocking or charming get attention?" asks Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review in a recent New York Times "Critic's Take" column.

Not if one spends much time on Facebook or some other form of electronic social media. Topics hurtle past and those who post them have learned they had better not require much thought on the part of viewers. What's up front has to be sufficient to generate a "like" or perhaps a three-word comment. Few viewers will bother to read any further.

The Independent Lives of Fictional Characters

I think it is natural that when people read a book, they wonder to what extent writers have cast themselves, family members, friends or acquaintances as characters, perhaps with an agenda in mind.

Some friends who have read my novella, "Manhattan Morning", have expressed surprise to discover that neither I nor anyone else they know appears therein. The main characters -- Dan, Marcy, Gloria and Rev. Saddleford -- are inventions I set in motion and who then, to at least some degree, took on lives of their own during the writing process.

Dead Doormen, Caricature and Helen Ellis

One way to illuminate the truth of something is to enlarge its most pertinent features out of proportion. We are all familiar with caricature in art, often with respect to political figures or celebrities. For example, Richard Nixon was rarely caricatured without having considerable emphasis placed on his trademark five o'clock shadow, suggesting an ever-present dark side to his character and a certain degree of shiftiness.

All too true.

Caricature is also a form of literature and when deployed, an author exaggerates or over-simplifies certain aspects of a character or a situation to entertain readers or to make a point. If the point is to ridicule the subject, the technique is akin to satire.

Death of a Shapeshifter: David Bowie

David Bowie, identified first and foremost in his New York Times obituary as "infinitely changeable" died on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016. He was 69 years old.

"In concerts and videos, Mr. Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to space suits," the newspaper said. It called him "a constantly morphing persona" and "a person of relentless reinvention."

Why mention this is a bog about fiction?

New Yorker Fiction: Life is a Downer

If one reads fiction in The New Yorker regularly, as I have over the past couple of years, it is hard to escape coming to the conclusion that life is fundamentally a downer and often disgustingly so.

One of the latest such depictions is "The Beach Boy" from the magazine's Jan. 4, 2016, edition in which a Manhattan dermatologist who initially appears to be leading a reasonably satisfactory, comfortable middle class married life falls to pieces and ends up drunk on a tropical beach, attempting unsuccessfully to get the attention of a male prostitute he thinks could tell him something, surely degrading, about his former wife.

His former wife? Oh, I almost forgot. In an extremely well-wrought and imaginative plot twist, she dropped dead. Just like that.  This development was required it appears, to expose John, the dermatologist, as the pathetic creature he really had been all along.

George Orwell: Frighteningly Prescient With More To Come

A May 2015 post entitled "Fiction of the Future" was the first in which I discussed the idea that one purpose of literature is to look ahead and try to imagine what might come of us, unconstrained by prevailing limits of scientific or other relevant knowledge. Therein, I cited George Orwell's 1940 novel "Nighteen Eighty-Four" as probably the most famous title within this genre.

Thanks to a service called "LitHub Daily," I just read a thoroughly researched, exceptionally chilling article by Stephen Rohde that shows how very prescient Orwell was.  Entitled "Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America at Risk of Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this rather lengthy piece is highly recommended.

There is little more to say about the subject now, but I suspect I will return to the topic in the future.
 

A Story of Manners That Calls To Mind Graphic Novels

I'm going to stay with the Dec. 21 & 28 New Yorker for the moment and talk about Tim Parks' concise short story called "Bedtimes," which I like for two reasons: first it is essentially a story of manners -- that once popular genre that few writers seem to view as a suitable subject for contemporary fiction.

Novels of manners -- Jane Austin, of course, immediately comes to mind -- concern how people behave toward each other in conventional social situations, or, to put it another way, in ordinary life.

Second, I like this story because it is written in prose so straight forward it reads like an ever-so trendy graphic novel. All that is missing is the pictures, but the nature of the story is such that one can easily imagine them.

"There is a willful simplicity and a mechanical, monosyllabic repetition to the prose. Almost as if it were written for children, in places, as if everything were terribly simple and clear, when in reality none of the important or complicated things are being said," Parks explained in an author interview.

What important or complicated things? A marriage has stagnated, but perhaps not terminally, and neither spouse wants to take the issue on. Among other things, there are children in the picture.

To say more would give it away. It's only two pages. Read it and see what resonates.

Will Advanced Robots Recreate Us As Works of Art?

As I have previously noted, one of the purposes of fiction is to look into the future and try to imagine what the world might be like if, say, terrorism reigns supreme or climate change overwhelms us.

Then there is the much-discussed topic of artificial intelligence and whether it might get out of control. The Washington Post carried an op-ed piece on that topic last month and I've written about it in earlier blog posts that readers can find here and here.

All of which brings me to a short poem in the Dec. 21 & 28 New Yorker by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky entitled "The Robots."

In it, Pinsky, imagines a world in which exceptionally advanced robots ("Their judgement in its pure accuracy will resemble grace ...")  reign supreme. Man is gone, but the robots can comprehend the nature of humans through the dust that remains of them "and recreate the best and the worst of us, as though in art."

It's an arresting image. Picture yourself framed and hanging in a museum for the edification of a bunch of robots which "when they choose to take material form they will resemble dragonflies, not machines."

A Paperless Society? Not When Bill Gates Reads Books

I took a break from blogging during most of the month of December, passing up many interesting topics in the process, but instead, got a number of other things done. So I'm starting the New Year with more of a clean slate than usual.

Here's a very brief item to get back into harness.

The New York Times has a story today (Jan. 2, 2016) about Microsoft founder Bill Gates reviewing books on his blog Gates Notes.  No surprise, as a celebrity, when he recommends a book, a bounce in sales follows.

What would we, a nation of sheep, do without celebrities? How in the would would we know what to  eat, what to drink, what to wear and (think Oprah) what to read?

What struck me about the article was not what Gates has been reading -- non-fiction for the most part, it appears -- but how he reads. According to The Times, not in an electronic format.

"Mr. Gates says he reads about 50 books in a year, eschewing digital readers for old-fashioned books on paper. When he is busy with work, he reads about a book or two a week but will consume four or five in the same period while vacationing with family," the newspaper reported.

One advantage of paper is that one can scribble in the margins.

"He (Gates) rarely posts negative reviews of books, explaining that he sees no need to waste anyone’s time telling them why they shouldn’t bother reading something. He doesn’t spare himself, though. 'I have a habit, which I don’t recommend, of finishing essentially every book I start,' he said. 'And if I disagree with a book I spend lots of time writing notes in the margins. Perversely, this means that the more I dislike a book, the longer I spend reading it.'" the article said.

I like to scribble notes in the margins of books that I read, too, but generally not to argue with the authors. It's a way to more easily get back to material I like or think is interesting or important.

Fortunately, Gates isn't the only one who finds books in print more satisfying that a stream of text on some electronic device. We are fortunate to have a bookstore a block and a half away and it is doing exceptionally well -- right under the nose of Amazon, which, by the way, recently opened its own bricks-and-mortar store selling books in print at our local high-end shopping mall.