Extended Mind Joke

Why did the pencil think that 2+2=4?

Because it was connected to a mathematician.

– from Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa, “Defending the Bounds of Cognition”

I’m not a complete curmudgeon with respect to extended mind theory. I acknowledge that I’ve not read the primary documents other than this seminal paper by Clark and Chalmers, and I’ve not thought carefully about the implications. Tentatively, I’d say that thinking is an intentional action performed by some agent, using whatever materials and tools it has at its disposal to perform this action: pencil and paper, calculator, human expert consultant, etc. When using external tools in performing a cognitive act, the thinking agent has to wield those tools with skill and intent, which requires deploying cognitive capabilities internal to the agent. However, the external tools deployed by the agent as part of the thinking process do not thereby become part of the thinking agent.

These distinction between action and agent and tool apply to more mundane activities as well. When I cook a scrambled egg I use a bowl, a fork, a skillet, a stove, and a big spoon. These are tools I use in cooking, and I couldn’t cook a scrambled egg without them: the tools are as integral to the cooking process as is the cook. But the cooking tools aren’t part of the cook. The tools aren’t even part of the scrambled egg, even though there would be no scrambled egg without them.

The Diving Pool by Ogawa, 1990

In a recent thread on the Impostume, Carl said that he liked Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool. On this recommendation I picked the book up from the library, and now I like it too. It consists of  three novellas, each told by a different young woman narrator, each possessed of a creepy passivity and a delicate lascivious cruelty. These days I read fiction not just for its own sake but also for its potential exemplary value in crafting my own writing. A couple of things here with Ogawa’s book. First, the length of these stories: they’re about 13K words each, maybe 40 pages in typical book print. That’s long enough to explore some territory and dig under the surface a little without obligating oneself to the sweep and intricacy of a full-length novel. I recently read the excellent Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, which is a set of interrelated short stories narrated by and centered around the same main character. Now, after reading Ogawa, I’m thinking about maybe stretching this structure into a set of interrelated novellas.

The other exemplary thing for me about Ogawa’s book is signaled in the first sentence of the first novella:

It’s warm here: I feel as though I’ve been swallowed by a huge animal.

The places in which theses stories unfold — an enclosed swimming pool, a maternity hospital, a university dormitory — assume a subjective presence, as if these places were themselves characters. In our discussion of Kubrick’s The Shining we observed that the Overlook Hotel is a presence affecting the guests and caretakers who stay there, almost as if the humans and the events that befall them are repressed memories of the hotel itself, locked up in the rooms waiting for someone to unlock them. Is the hotel’s madness a projective expression of the occupants’ disturbed psyches, or vice versa? This sort of expressionistic personification of place surely predates cinematic exemplars like The Shining — Poe’s stories come most readily to mind. Ogawa does it too. Here’s another example, this one from the third novella. The manager of the dormitory is dying: he’s lost both arms and a leg, and now his ribs are curving inward toward his heart. The narrator has begun tending to the manager…

“Could you get my medicine?”

“Of course,” I said. I took a packet of powder from the drawer of his nightstand and filled a glass from the pitcher of water that had been left by his bed. Everything he might need — the telephone, a box of tissues, the teapot and cups — had been brought from elsewhere in the apartment and arranged close to the bed. The change was minor, but to the Manager it must have seemed as though his world was shrinking along with the space in his chest. I watched a drop of water fall from the lip of the pitcher, and a chill went down my spine.

“I hope this helps,” I said, trying to appear calm as I tore open the packet of powder.

“It’s just to make me more comfortable,” he said, his face expressionless. “To relax the muscles and soothe the nerves.”

“But isn’t there anything they can do?” I asked again.

The Manager thought for a moment. “As I’ve told you, the dormitory is in a period of irreversible degeneration. The process has already begun. It will take some time yet to reach the end — it’s not a matter of simply throwing a switch and turning out the lights. But the whole place is collapsing…”

Ogawa’s Dormitory, like The Overlook Hotel, is a variant on the traditional haunted house. I’m not trying to write horror stories or weird fiction. I’ve written a book about a set of characters whose various motivations eventually converge; now I want those merged subjective trajectories to take shape as a set of interrelated places in the world. I don’t think Ogawa’s sensibility is right for my project; still, her expressionism gives me something to work with, to immerse myself in, to be possessed by…

Breaking Local News

Did you happen to read about the failed pipe bomb planted last week at a shopping mall in suburban Denver, near Columbine High School, on the anniversary of the massacre? And that the prime suspect had recently been released from jail, present whereabouts unknown? Well, this morning he got arrested here in Boulder, about a mile down the road, at the grocery store where we regularly shop. “It is unclear what connection, if any, he has to Boulder,” says the news story.

Two years ago, on the tenth anniversary of Columbine, the bomb squad evacuated and swept our daughter’s high school. A couple driving a van with out-of-state plates had been seen attempting to place a parcel at the base of the flagpole in front of the school. Turned out the suspects were looking for a geocache planted there at least a year earlier by one of the teachers at the school.

Besides being the anniversary of Columbine, 4/20 is also international smoke weed in public day. Every year the University of Colorado in Boulder hosts an enthusiastic celebration.

Quantitative Dis-easing

I’m reluctant to write about politics or economics because I don’t know that much about them. But I don’t know much about ontology or education or the origins of human language either, so what the hell…

According to this article in the NY Times, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledges that the Fed’s “quantitative easing” interventions haven’t had much effect on the average American’s economic situation. The idea as I understand it was for the Fed, comprised of a bunch of privately-owned banks, to buy a lot of debt issued by the Federal Government. This sudden increased willingness to lend would reduce long-term interest rates in financial markets, which in turn would stimulate the private sector to borrow more cheap money to expand production capacity. This expansion would include hiring more US workers, thus reducing unemployment. In addition, the banks’ purchase of Federal debt would pump hundreds of billions of additional dollars into circulation. More total dollars reduces the value of any particular dollar; i.e., the currency is devalued relative to other world currencies. The weaker dollar would effectively reduce wages paid to US workers, and reduce the prices of US-made goods on the world market.

However, even before the quantitative easing was enacted it seemed evident that industry was in no mood to borrow. The bank bailout, pushed through Congress in the aftermath of the housing crash, was justified as a credit easing move, inasmuch as the “toxic assets” held by the mortgage lenders wouldn’t collateralize any new lending. But even before the bailout the long-term interest rates were low, and still the corporations weren’t borrowing. In the two-plus years since then American businesses have amassed huge profits, which presumably means that they have enough cash to finance expansion without borrowing heavily. And yet the US unemployment rate hovers near 9 percent.

The implication seems clear: profits have gone up largely because US unemployment has gone up. American workers are expensive relative to third-world workers. More profits can be generated by laying off American workers and rehiring elsewhere in the world — which is what has happened. Meanwhile, the only big borrower has been the Federal government: the national debt has doubled in less than ten years. This is the new money that’s been used to keep American demand — and prices — growing.

During the current Republican resurgency, panic is mounting about government debt being out of control, about how 42 cents of every dollar spent by the Federal government is used to pay interest on the debt and so on. Now Bernanke is setting the stage for discontinuing the quantitative easing, which means that interest rates on government borrowing are about to increase, which will increase the panic level. Surely the bipartisan political solution won’t be to raise taxes or (God forbid) for the government to default on its loans, but to cut government spending. More hundreds of thousands of people who hold government jobs or contracts will be cut loose, flooding the job market, increasing the unemployment rate, reducing the wage rate. At some point the private sector’s rehiring of American workers will generate as much marginal return on investment as further expanding third-world production capacity. Maybe that recovery will happen in two years, as the experts contend. I wonder if it will always be two years away.

Origin of Human Language?

I’ve been thinking about the rationale behind the recently-released study by Quentin Atkinson tracing the original human language to southwest Aftrica. Atkinson predicated his work on the “serial founder effect” in biological ecology. When a small group splits off from a larger population of a species, that group carries with it only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in the entire species. When this fragmentation occurs frequently, relatively homogeneous divergent subpopulations of the same species arise. When the fragmentation occurs serially, then the diversity of each newly-budded subgroup is lower than that of its predecessor.

It’s known that the human species evolved in Africa and spread from there, and that the serial founder effect reduced the genetic diversity within human subpopulations branching off during this spread. Atkinson contends that the serial founder effect works not just with human genetics but with human language as well. Rather than looking at vocabulary or grammatical elements, Atkinson studied phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound used in building meaningful utterances (e.g., in English the “k” sound is a phoneme). It turns out that the languages of southwest Africa use the largest number of phonemes (including various clicking noises). Atkinson presents evidence demonstrating that the longer it took for any given subpopulation of humans to migrate from Southwest Africa, the smaller the number of phonemes there are in that subpopulation’s language.

Let’s assume that Atkinson’s findings stand up to subsequent empirical scrutiny. The question is why the serial founder effect would work for languages. I can see why a small group of migrants might between them use only a fraction of the vocabulary of their native tongue. Even so, wouldn’t they have occasion to use most if not all of the distinct sounds of their language? English has something like 45 phonemes. I suspect that even a 3-year-old knows enough words to use all of those phonemes. Why would even a very small subset of language-users drop start dropping their phonemic diversity? And how in the world did the Hawaiians, way out on the farthest frontier of the serial-founder dispersion from Africa, manage to lose all but 13 phonemes? Someone else reviewing Atkinson’s work cited Dave Barry’s hypothesis:

The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal’ia’iou’amaa’aaa’eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night.

I came across a study suggesting two possibilities accounting for this phonemic erosion in subpopulations. Maybe the leaders of these splinter groups are so powerful that, if they get sloppy with their phoneme use, no one around them is likely to risk correcting them. Instead, the followers adopt the regressed linguistic practices of the leaders. Alternatively, maybe splinter groups are already so cohesive that they understand one another without having to enunciate their meanings and intentions clearly. As a consequence the language within the entire subgroup deteriorates. Both of these ideas presume that less complex social structures demand less complex language use, a proposition that is supported by another line of research showing that more widely-spoken languages tend to use more phonemes than languages spoken by smaller numbers of people.

If that’s the case, then why do the southwest African languages use twice as many phonemes as English, when English is clearly a more widely-spoken language? Maybe it’s because English is still a relatively new language. Maybe it took tens of thousands of years for the African languages to achieve their level of phonemic complexity. The phonemic deterioration resulting from the serial founder effect must be rapid, and the recovery slow.

Is this argument persuasive? Not to me it isn’t, though I might be missing something. Is the empirical evidence persuasive? I suppose I should actually read the original article in Science, but I’m sure this one study won’t stand without challenge in the field.

I See BETTER With Glasses

Here’s what Daniel Dennett has to say about vision in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:

We know that eyes have evolved independently many times, but vision is certainly not a necessity on Earth, since plants get along fine without it. A strong case can be made, however, that if an organism is going to further its metabolic projects by locomoting, and if the medium in which the locomoting takes place is transparent or translucent and amply supplied with ambient light, then since locomoting works much better (at furthering self-protective, metabolic and reproductive aims) if the mover is guided by information about distal objects, and since such information can be garnered in a high-fidelity, low-cost fashion by vision, vision is a very good bet. So we would not be surprised if locomoting organisms on other planets (with transparent atmospheres) had eyes. Eyes are an obviously good solution to a very general problem that would often be encountered by moving metabolizers. (p. 128)

Dennett makes a pragmatic case for the evolution of vision —  locomoting “works much better” with eyes. The pragmatic value of visual acuity can be understood only to the extent that the visual system accurately conveys information to the organism about the “ambient optic array” (JJ Gibson’s term) generated by the environment through which the organism locomotes.

It’s likely that, beyond a certain level of visual acuity, the costs of improved vision (more retinal cells, more refined neural processing of retinally-conveyed information, etc.) don’t outweigh the benefits (“at furthering self-protective, metabolic and reproductive aims”). So, for example, humans don’t need as much visual acuity as hawks because humans aren’t as likely to increase their chances of survival by spotting small prey animals at great distances. However, if an individual member of a species has less visual acuity than its conspecifics, then that individual will likely find itself at an adaptive disadvantage, since the visually-impaired individual is not equipped genetically to redeploy bioresources usually allocated for vision in order to compensate for its visual defects. In short, the visually-impaired individual doesn’t just see differently from its peers; it has poorer vision, both informationally and pragmatically. I would recommend that this creature be fitted with corrective lenses.

This all seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?

Attending the Narrative Convention

1975: The 8:45 a.m. Pan American to Honolulu this morning was delayed half an hour before takeoff from Los Angeles. During this delay the stewardesses served orange juice and coffee and two children played tag in the aisles and, somewhere behind me, a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife. I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone of his invective sounded practiced, although the only words I heard clearly were these: ‘You are driving me to murder.’ After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows behind me, and of the man rushing off. There were many Pan American employees rushing on and off then, and considerable confusion. I do not know whether the man reboarded the plane before takeoff or whether the woman came on to Honolulu alone, but I thought about it all the way across the Pacific. I thought about it while I was drinking a sherry-on-the-rocks and I thought about it during lunch and I was still thinking about it when the first of the Hawaiian Islands appeared off the left wing tip. It was not until we had passed Diamond Head and were coming in low over the reef for landing at Honolulu, however, that I realized what I most disliked about this incident: I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story, one of those ‘little epiphany’ stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis in a stranger’s life—a woman weeping in a tearoom, often, or an accident seen from the window of a train, ‘tearooms’ and ‘trains’ still being fixtures of short stories although not of real life—and is moved to see his or her own life in a new light. I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted room for flowers, and reef fish, and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not impelled, by the demands of narrative convention, to say so out loud on the 8:45 a.m. Pan American to Honolulu.

– from Joan Didion’s “In the Islands,” included in her 1979 edited compilation The White Album

Reasons Why v. Reasons For

In this video Daniel Dennett compares a termite mound with Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona to illustrate the distinction between the reason why a creature does something and a creature having a reason for doing something.

There is a good reason why termite colonies build mounds: the mound gives the colony an edge in the struggle for survival. However, the termites don’t necessarily understand the reasons for their mound-building activities. Says Dennett:

“Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder which ‘discovers,’ ‘endorses,’ and ‘focuses’ reasons over many generations… Natural selection tracks reasons, creating things that have purposes but don’t need to know them. Natural selection itself doesn’t need to know what it’s doing.”

Dennett says that termite behavior exemplifies “competence without comprehension.” Humans make the mistake of attributing more competence to agents, more awareness of the reasons why they do things, than is justified by the nature of the behavior or of the agent. That’s because so much of human competence derives from and is produced by comprehension. Gaudí spent a long time planning his cathedral, thinking about theological symbolism, drawing diagrams, raising money, etc. before anybody actually started digging the foundation. People are competent to solve specific math problems because they have acquired a general mathematical comprehension. In contrast, says Dennett, a computer has competency without comprehension — an intelligence that’s more like that of a termite mound than that of a human.

So what about chimpanzees: are they more like termites or humans? Dennett thinks that they’re somewhere in between: apes “sorta” understand what they’re doing, “sorta” have reasons for what they do. In short, apes have “semi-understood, quasi-representations” of their own behaviors. What’s important to remember, says Dennett, is that humans’ ability to have reasons for what they do evolved from creatures who didn’t. In Dennett’s words, “comprehension is constructed out of competence.” There is a good reason for having comprehension: it gives humans greater and more flexible competence to do adaptive behaviors, thereby enhancing the survival possibilities of the individual, the “colony,” and the species. Comprehension is a product of an evolutionary process that discovers, endorses, and focuses competence.

What distinguishes humans from ape comprehension from human comprehension? Language, says Dennett. But then he runs out of time before elaborating on the language distinction.

[Grâce à Enemy Industry for posting the Dennett video.]

Getting Full

Continuing on Reality Hunger…

238.  The contemporary vogue of not tucking in your shirttail (which I dutifully follow): a purposeful confusion of the realms.

I started this vogue decades ago.

242.  Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

This quote comes from Andrew O’Hehir’s 2005 “lyric essay” on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Here’s the quote in context:

“Most of the response to this book is not in fact a response to the book but to the life situation that occasioned it, and perhaps to the fact that it exists at all. A cynical, and not entirely wrongheaded, thing to say here is that our culture is obsessed with “real” events because we hardly experience any, and that the private deaths of Didion’s husband and daughter, along with her own private suffering, are in danger of being transformed by endless publicity into spectacles or pseudo-events. There’s more to it than that…”

253.  People like you are in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your 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 new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you — all of you — will be left to just study what we do.

I first read this quote (from one of GWBush’s aides) when I googled “hyperstition.” In Shields’  context, the implication is that creators of fictional realities are neocons. Seriously?

318.  Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Why “inherent,” rather than “traditional” or “expected”?

321.  Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No it doesn’t.

The preceding sentence is a short-short story authored by David Shields.

322. If I’m reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be  too deeply under the sway of progress.

Admit it: you just want to skip to the end to see how it turns out.

324.  The absence of a plot leaves the reader free to think about other things.

So does the absence of a book.

325.  Plots are for dead people.

This quote comes from a short story written by Lorrie Moore.

347.  I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. I like work that’s focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will somehow mysteriously creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels.

To a considerable extent I share what seems to be Shields’s central complaint about fiction. A lot of fiction writers really do seem to care about the stories they’re writing, for the story’s own sake. I rarely read that sort of novel, though I will watch the movie. Novels in which the author uses story and characters serve as props for elaborating his big ideas? I’m with Shields: boring, contrived. But why should I be expected to care more about reality-based prose, be it fiction or essay or poetry? Mostly what’s needed is good writing, not a particular kind of writing.

361.  You don’t need a story. The question is: How long do you not need a story?

If you don’t need a story, don’t write a story. If the need arises, why is it better to hold out against this need for as long as you can?

371.  Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted.

Why not contemplate the narrative?

376.  The merit of style exists precisely in that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words.

Blah blah blah… This quote comes from somebody named Shklovsky, who according to Wikipedia wrote Theory of Prose in 1925. Wikipedia offers this quote from the book: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” So first he wants to condense style, and now he wants to prolong it? I guess you have to read his book to know what he wants when.

Reality Hunger Artists 2

Continuing from the prior post…

133.  I’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you.

Dude, just drive the car and watch the road as if nobody is watching you, since almost surely they’re not. But now I see in the appendix that the guy who wrote this remark, Dave Eggers, “no longer subscribes to the sentiment expressed here.”

140.  Plot, like erected scaffolding, is torn down, and what remains is the thing itself.

Elitist. I like plots myself, both as reader and writer. Plot is part of the experiment: it sets things in motion. You set the characters down somewhere in the universe, give them the keys to the car,  and let them drive. Otherwise the thing itself just sits there.

142.  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.

This quote comes from Donald Barthelme. I agree to an extent: the world is the road and the terrain that the characters drive through, the place where the stories unfold. But what world?

154.  Life isn’t about saying the right thing; life is about failing.

Speak for yourself, Jonathan Goldstein, whoever you are.

165.  Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable.

Maybe fiction-making is remembering things that never really happened or that happened in an alternate reality. It is an odd tradition to write fiction in the past tense, especially if the writer is making it up as he goes along. My memory is terrible; I find it easier to make things up.

180.  Nonfiction writers imagine. Fiction writers invent. These are fundamentally different acts, performed to different ends.

What?

185.  Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —

A great line from an Emily Dickinson poem.

195.  You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn’t any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I’m striving for is authenticity; none of it is real.

A quote from WG Sebald. He would have made an excellent Biblical author.

199.  You can’t even call my documentaries “documentary,” though; I fabricate, I invent, I write dialogue. The borderline between documentaries and feature films is blurred; in fact, it doesn’t exist.

Werner Herzog quote.

203.  Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?

This is not my experience of how life works. If it were, I’d think that part of making my fictional life would include remaking the world into a fiction as well.

210.  Genre is a minimum-security prison.

Maybe that’s what Stephen King was thinking when he wrote Shawshank Redemption. How many great stories involve characters dealing with some form of imprisonment? Revisiting paragraph 203, maybe to live is to make fiction inside a minimum-security prison.

 

Reality Hunger Artists (Part 1?)

“I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels.”

That’s Amazon’s teaser for Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). Now seems the perfect time for me to consider author David Shields’ position, which he presents in 618 numbered paragraphs, many of them quotes from other writers and artists. It strikes me that this book might have worked better as 618 blog posts with comments, so I’ll do that here, commenting on any of the paragraphs that happen to grab me as they’re passing by.

1.  Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

That’s the opening sentence of the book, and already I don’t agree. But I’m not in the mood for the big universal concepts; I want to think about whether I personally am wasting my time writing novels.

50.  The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe.

Did the creators ever believe that the characters were anything more than puppets? Oh, but now I see that it’s Robbe-Grillet who made this statement — he wrote novels, did he not? In a sense R-G’s characters are puppets, no more animate than the lampposts against which they lean. Maybe he regarded real humans as puppet-like.

57.  Increasingly, the novel goes had in hand with a straightjacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary of watching writers’ sensations and thoughts get set into the concrete of fiction that perhaps it’s best to avoid the form as a medium of expression.

Is the straightjacket built into the form? Is the medium intrinsically concrete? But I see the point: it’s hard to evade or dismantle one’s own and others’ expectations about what a novel is supposed to be. Maybe migrate to other forms that are either so new that they’re not yet burdened by tradition, or so old that the traditions no longer exert any real force on the contemporary practitioner.

63.  …memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

Shields wants to blur the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, between author and character. In this context he commends Proust and Exley and Sebald. Shields I think wants to argue that, since every novel’s main characters are stand-ins for the writer, the writer should do away with the artifice and write in the first person. In so doing, the writer need not feel bound to tell the factual truth about himself and his life, inasmuch as memory is so distorted as to be nearly indistinguishable from imagination. Fine: that’s one way to go. The question I have to ask myself is whether the invention of fictional characters does anything I couldn’t do more directly with imaginative memoir. Of the cuff, I’d say that I’m more interested in writing about the fictional characters than about myself.

65.  The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of the fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened — which a fiction writer daily wakes to.

Shields goes on to commend the lyric essay throughout his book, but he never really says what it is. But why should the fictional aspect of the novel be deemed a “nasty fact” that both the author and the reader must overcome in order to take the writing seriously? This goes back to Shields’ opening salvo about smuggling reality into the art.

65a. The implied secret is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

This is precisely my reaction to much of the speculative metaphysics I’ve read on the blogs, as well pretty much all the religion. My instinct is to go the other way: call it fiction.

67. Biography and autobiography are the lifeblood of art right now. We have claimed them the way earlier generations claimed the novel, the well-made play, the language of abstraction.

So now Shields is going to talk about reality TV and the memoirists who get exposed on Oprah as having made up parts of their stories. This sort of reality-so-called fascinates me not at all. I’m way more interested in True Blood than in Survivor. I am interested in the Making-Of, but only if I like the movie that was made.

68.  I’m interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same.

Why be interested if they’re all the same? Maybe Shields should try discovering or inventing some beings whose secrets aren’t the same.

71.  Truth, uncompromisingly told, will always have its ragged edges.

Well said! Oh, but now I look in the Appendix and see that it’s Herman Melville who wrote this, in Billy Budd.

72.  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 pages, or leaving the blanks blank?

Okay, now I’m starting to get the lyric essay idea. Sure, that’s cool. Why not stick a lyric essay or two into your novel? Wait: that’s been done already. Maybe this is the straightjacketing imposed on the contemporary novelist: maybe readers don’t like essays built into novels, distracting them from plot and character development.

82.  Art is not truth; art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.

So said Picasso. I don’t think that Picasso was bent on smuggling reality into his paintings.

105.  Proust said that he had no imagination; what he wanted was reality, infused with something else… The book, by being about Marcel, a writer, is as much about the writing as it is about anything that “happens.”

When I read Proust’s book, I’m not thinking about how these characters were real people, or how the events in which they participate in Proust’s narrative once really happened. Maybe I’d like the book better if I did. Certainly A La Recherche is about the writing, and it’s indicative of  of my lowbrow literary tendencies that the writing doesn’t captivate me enough to distract me from the tedium of what “happens.” But I keep trying…

*****

So now I’m one-fifth of the way through Shields’ paragraphs. Maybe later I’ll pick up where I left off.

 

Draft One Done

My love to Wendy and the boys.

– the last line of the first draft

Once I started thinking about the fifth and final part of this novel, I realized that not much more needed to be said. So now the book is pretty much finished. I’ll let it rest for a week or so, then go back to the top and edit. I don’t believe that the editing will involve much rewrite though, since the current draft is already in pretty good shape from editing each of the parts separately.

My idea when I began this novel was that it would be the first in a sequence of some as-yet-undetermined number of installments — sort of like the first season in a television series. So now I’ll have to see if I’m intrigued enough with this fictional space and this set of central characters to move them on to the second season. As of now I think it will be a go. I expect to insert a gap between the books, with the center of action jumping geographically from someplace like Boulder to someplace like Nice and the stories jumping temporally maybe a year forward from the end of the first book.