"Writing Fiction in a 9/11 World"

[shereads]

Washington Post

The author of "In the Time of the Butterflies" considers the challenge of fiction in a post-9/11 world.

By Julia Alvarez
Sunday, September 11, 2005


You've probably noticed it, too. How often a reviewer will allude to a novel as such and such an author's first post Sept. 11 work. Or mention Sept. 11 as an influence on the novel. Or assess the novel in the context of a post Sept. 11 world.

And not just reviewers. As a reader, I am reading in a different way. Just as I am traveling on mass transit and going through airports with a higher level of tension. A picture in my head of what can happen that won't go away.

As a writer, too, I have been struggling with what my writing has to offer in a world where terrors are now color-coded, where the dust from our tumbled-down towers is still floating in the air, where most recently a hurricane has created our very own refugee situation. "It's just not something we're used to," a baffled local official in New Orleans being interviewed on NPR noted. "I mean if we were in a third world country, we'd be used to this." I heard much the same remark about terrorism on our own shores after Sept. 11.

At different points in the writing of my new novel, which has been the hardest for me to write so far, I kept telling a friend who hears about all my writing woes that I didn't think I could finish it. Now, I'm no stranger to the Furies of self-doubt, which have always been after me, and the race is always on as to whether they or I will make it through the next paragraph and the next. But since Sept. 11 these Furies seemed to have multiplied in number. What was my fear exactly? That I couldn't put my arms around the whole thing. That I would yield to the temptation to leave things out, to tidy things up. That I would lower the blinds and write the very same novel I would have written before Sept. 11.

It's not that I felt compelled to write about Sept. 11 or attendant issues. Fiction does not register these shock waves so directly. I'm talking about something harder to measure or pinpoint. A new tone and tension. "Everything has changed, though nothing has," Jay Parini writes in his haunting villanelle "After the Terror."

Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A deadening earnestness and political self-awareness that do not meet the delight component that is a story's bottom line. Too much ideological hand-wringing. We've all sat through readings by authors whose politics we admire but whose prose cannot hold us. We are reminded of the definition of "camp" by Susan Sontag: "a seriousness that fails."

But it is a danger that must be risked -- this attunement to a larger world than the local gated habitation we might be living in. Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz once commented that "poetry below a certain awareness is not good poetry . . . that we move, that mankind moves in time together and there is a certain awareness of a particular moment below which we shouldn't go because then that poetry is no good." The same can be said of fiction.

The need for this level of awareness in our fiction has always been there, of course. And for years there have been writers reminding us that this was so. But now it is the air we are all breathing, regardless of our politics or prose. A sea change has happened, which might explain the current predilection for nonfiction. In an essay last month in the New York Times, "Truth is Stronger Than Fiction," the reporter Rachel Donadio alludes to V.S. Naipaul's belief that fiction is no longer adequate to make sense of the world. Donadio agrees. "No novels have yet engaged with the post-Sept. 11 era in any meaningful way," she writes. But, she adds, "it's still early. Nonfiction can keep up with the instant messenger culture; fiction takes its own sweet time."

Writers from other parts of the world would say that too many United States of American writers (and our British cohorts across the pond) have been taking our own sweet time far too long. We can all think of a dozen exceptions. But I confess that I myself am now much more aware of having to create in an environment that writers of other more politically or socially compromised nations know only too well. Writers in dictatorships. Writers in what the anthropologist-physician Paul Farmer calls the triage nations of the world. Desperate places where desperate things happen right in your face, not just in some "bad neighborhood" or barrio that only ethnic writers, accredited by hard-luck backgrounds, are allowed to write about. I would bet that many of my fellow U.S. writers these days feel the tension raised within the radar level of their own fiction. Raised by none other than their own hands. Even the Harry Potter books are getting darker.

In our defense, it makes sense that a visceral understanding of the world so many people live in did not come to us until Sept. 11. "It is new to Americans," writes Ronald Steel, author of many books about American and world politics, "because nothing is truly real until it happens to us." As we say in Spanish, nadie aprende en cabeza ajena . No one learns in somebody else's head. Or maybe we can, in novels and stories, if those insights are in there, if the fictional world has met Milosz's criteria and does not sink below a certain level of awareness. And yet, and yet. Journalist Salil Tripathi notes in a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal that several novelists have been writing about the turbulence within Britain's Muslim community for many years. (One thinks of Hanif Kureishi or Zadie Smith or Monica Ali.) "But while they have been honored, their warnings have gone unheeded." And then the bombs went off in the London underground . . .

Ian McEwan's Saturday has been touted as one of the few novels to successfully depict a post Sept. 11 world. It opens with an eerily reminiscent scene: Perowne, a surgeon, wakes up early one morning in London and witnesses, or so he believes, a horrid scene, not unlike that of "suicide planes" crashing into the Twin Towers. The surgeon is no fiction reader, "The times are strange enough. Why make things up?" It is a question which I think most writers are asking themselves at least subliminally these days. In a world of such horrors, what does a novel have to offer?

It is a rhetorical question, perhaps, which does not in any way negate its importance. We tell stories and listen to them because that is how we make meaning of reality -- how we while away the time if the fiction is escapist, or redeem it if the fiction in some way leads us through "the horror, the horror" to the other side. Seamus Heaney reminds us that although "history says, don't hope/ On this side of the grave," we must continue to work, to write, to read with the hope that even if only once in a lifetime.

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

In the midst of my ongoing attacks of writerly self-doubt, an elderly patient of my physician husband sent home a present for me. Periodically, these gifts come my way. A crocheted potholder. Pretty earrings that my husband might have complimented. Jams and jellies and pickled beets, newly canned, at summer's end. (This is Vermont, after all.) They are gifts in character, so to speak, of an older generation living in a quiet, rural Eden-like state. But this latest trinket unsettled me: a glass ball inside which the Twin Towers stand. Instead of shaking the ball and watching snow swirl inside it, one turns on a tiny switch, and the Towers are awash in garish colors. Talk about camp. Why would anyone send me this? My husband shrugged. "She's a fan," he tried. Perhaps he had mentioned my assortment of paperweights, pebbles, magical talismans strewn around my study to protect me from the aforementioned Furies. It struck me that even the least politically motivated person wanted her local bard to remember that the world has changed.

Not that I am likely to forget. Everything has changed, though nothing has. As a writer, I struggle with how to address this different world in my fiction. Perhaps that is all any of us can do with whatever work we do. As Charlie Parker might say, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." We are living it, and how it will play out in our work, we have yet to learn.

Rest.

 

[shereads]

"Taken in Willamsburg on 9/11. The man fishes. For him life goes on. When I approached him, he picked a fish he had caught and said in heavy Polish accent 'Look, Red Snapper' Then I thought he was crazy. Now perhaps I think he was far wiser than me."

Aaron Levene, Image #2805, The September 11 Digital Archive, 7 September 2005

http://storage.chatropolis.com/userfiles/shereads/2805.500px


http://911digitalarchive.org/images/details/2805

 

[rgraham666]

I find this attitude both surprising and not surprising.

9/11 changed nothing for me. I was sickened by it, but it was not a surprise or a shock.

Without wanting to be cruel, 9/11 broke the bubble many Americans lived in. To many, the rest of the world was 'out there somewhere' and it never impinged on their lives. On 9/11, they lost that fantasy.

The world has always been a dangerous place to me. I'm always too aware, probably unrealistically so, of how near the edge is. I've always known that other people can reach out and hurt you badly, and that the reasons for doing so will be unfathomable or silly, even to the perpetrators.

But that doesn't change what I believe, that we should be good to one another.

 

[Guest]

 

[Liar]

The years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the same thing kind of went on in parts of Europe. Everything that was preformed, written or uttered was applied with a "post iron curtain" perspective. I remember reading about a German author who bemoaned the fact that he found himself unable to realte to this milestone event in what he wrote. Critics dissected his new book for references and a change of focus, disspointed when they found none.

It's only natural to try to put things in context, even though I suspect it is often more in the eye of the beholder than the creator.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I find this attitude both surprising and not surprising.

9/11 changed nothing for me. I was sickened by it, but it was not a surprise or a shock.

Without wanting to be cruel, 9/11 broke the bubble many Americans lived in. To many, the rest of the world was 'out there somewhere' and it never impinged on their lives. On 9/11, they lost that fantasy.

The world has always been a dangerous place to me. I'm always too aware, probably unrealistically so, of how near the edge is. I've always known that other people can reach out and hurt you badly, and that the reasons for doing so will be unfathomable or silly, even to the perpetrators.

But that doesn't change what I believe, that we should be good to one another.

My feelings exactly.

I saw the National Guard in the streets if Milwaukee in 67, lived through the Chicago riots of '68, was beaten by the cops in Berkeley in '69, was shaken down by police in Orange County. We already had the Unibomber and Oklahoma City and Waco, as well as the attempted bombing of the WTC. The IRA had been at work in London, and the Aum in the Tokyo subways. It was only a matter of time.

I knew all about the causes of the Viet Nam war and our role in it, had read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," and knew about CIA involvement in South and Central America and Iran. I'd lived through Johnson's lies about the war and Nixon's lies about everything. I knew we had plenty of enemies.

The real shock of 9/11 was the revelation to Americans that there are people out there who really, really hate us. Americans are good people, but naive and ill-informed for the most part about what their government has done/is doing. The idea that we're not a shining beacon to the rest of the world shook us to our roots. Suddenly the world had changed and become dangerous and frightening, our place in it precarious.

Like Rob said, I was always something of an outsider, so it was always dangerous and frightening to me, and the danger usually wasn't from outside our borders.

I'm sure that, had I been living in Manhattan, I'd have a much more visceral reaction to what happened, but as it was, I was horrified but not surprised.

 

[LadyJeanne]

I'm with Rob and Dr. M on this. 9/11 didn't change a thing for me or my writing or my thinking. My family and I are immigrants, though, so the awareness that the world is not all roses and sunshine, and that no one is immune or 'safe' from others was not a new concept.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

The author of that article lived in New Hampshire, was it? Or Vermont? In any case, I'm sure she was a part of the New York cultural scene. Not to be cruel, but they do tend to be rather inward looking and self-absorbed in New York, and I'm sure the disaster felt much more personal and immanent.

It was kind of like living in Gaul when Rome fell, I guess. A tragedy to be sure, but nowhere near the way it felt to the Romans.

It was kind of tragic to see Chicago, which still does think of itself as the Second City even though LA has eclipsed us, work itself into a lather imagining that we were next, that we were big and important enough to deserve our own disaster.

 

[LadyJeanne]

The author of that article lived in New Hampshire, was it? Or Vermont? In any case, I'm sure she was a part of the New York cultural scene. Not to be cruel, but they do tend to be rather inward looking and self-absorbed in New York, and I'm sure the disaster felt much more personal and immanent.

It was kind of like living in Gaul when Rome fell, I guess. A tragedy to be sure, but nowhere near the way it felt to the Romans.

The thing with 9/11 is that it affected all people indiscriminately. Investment bankers and consultants were victims as well as janitors and secretaries. And it smacked everyone in the face, even those who normally don't go around getting smacked by life.

It's not the lower socio-economic classes who are bemoaning the effect of 9/11 on their writing. They already knew the world was a hostile place where they had to struggle to survive and feed their families and stay away from gangs who terrorize neighborhoods and protect their children from any number of evils from kidnapping to getting run over by a bus or perverts in the school yard.

While the seamy side of life is generally out of view for the writers married to doctors in New England, the 'common folk' lived in the harsh environment of NYC and saw people getting carjacked and murdered and assaulted in the Park on a daily basis - on the news if not right outside their front doors. The common folk are less sheltered and less prone to navel-gazing and wringing their hands over whether they convey an adequate gravity in their writing as a result of their changed world view. That is the luxury of the comfortable. I see it as self-centered, actually.

 

[TheEarl]

I find this attitude both surprising and not surprising.

9/11 changed nothing for me. I was sickened by it, but it was not a surprise or a shock.

Without wanting to be cruel, 9/11 broke the bubble many Americans lived in. To many, the rest of the world was 'out there somewhere' and it never impinged on their lives. On 9/11, they lost that fantasy.

The world has always been a dangerous place to me. I'm always too aware, probably unrealistically so, of how near the edge is. I've always known that other people can reach out and hurt you badly, and that the reasons for doing so will be unfathomable or silly, even to the perpetrators.

But that doesn't change what I believe, that we should be good to one another.

Agreed.

I found it interesting that the author made a reference to 'our British cohorts across the pond' suffering the same problems, presumably in a nod to the London bombings. To be honest, Britain has been under threat from terrorist attack since before I was born; the IRA has been killing people since long before July 7th. To behonest, find me a N.Irish author who doesn't reference the troubles and I'll be amazed.

The Earl

 

[oggbashan]

... The common folk are less sheltered and less prone to navel-gazing and wringing their hands over whether they convey an adequate gravity in their writing as a result of their changed world view. That is the luxury of the comfortable. I see it as self-centered, actually.

It is far more difficult in a crowded country like the UK to distance yourself from the evils of the world. Gated communities and elderly ghettos are very rare here. Even country towns suffer from the impact of drug abusers and binge drinkers.

Terrorists have been a fact of life in the UK intermittently since the Nihilists of the 19th Century. The IRA's bombing campaigns on the mainland had impact on the UK's consciousness that made what was occurring in Northern Ireland significant to those who barely knew where it was.

My generation, and the generation before mine, grew up with bombing in World War 2. My parents were bombed out of their home in World War 1. Even today, I visited Dover, Kent and could see exactly where German shells fired across the Channel from France destroyed large parts of the town in the 1940s.

Almost every European country except Switzerland has experienced major devastation in the 20th Century and the signs are still there to be seen.

I don't think British and European writers would see a break in their awareness between before and after 9/11. For us, perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the USSR were greater changes.

9/11 was significant. Many countries' nationals were involved and died. But was it a sea-change in our awareness of the evil in the world? From this side of the Atlantic it just confirmed what we already knew - people are dangerous.

Og

 

[amicus]

Both Shereads and Sweetsubsarah on another thread have put into words some serious thoughts about deep issues.

Here, about post 9/11 and concerning god and prayer on the other.

I read Sweets first and decided not comment as I do not pray and do not have religious beliefs of any kind. The I read here about writers and the past four years since the destruction of the world trade center.

There is a high IQ lady in Canada I speak with on a daily basis and have for the past three years, she is genius level 170 plus and quick and bright and like many here, challenges every word I write to her.

She had a religious upbringing and background and was, as many are here, liberal in her political and social thoughts.

I recently shared an Ayn Rand essay with her, as she is both a poet and a sketch artist, "The Psycho Espistemology of Art" from the Objectivist Newletter in the spring of 1962, I believe.

I sent her that particular essay for a particular reason, my friends art, for the most part is deep and dark and contorted, cynical and pessimistic to a degree.

The Ayn Rand article discussed the psychological implications of art and a sense of life that was in stark opposition to my friends view.

I have something to communicate to both Sweetsubsarah and Shereads and I will try to be gentle in presentation, but if I am successful in presenting this, it may come as a shock to both, which is not my intent.

I have said many times that the concept of religion is inherently dangerous and evil. Seldom am I requested to justify that statement, just ignored.

The healthy human mind functions in a rather precise manner. It does not easily accept contradictions in the reasoning and logical faculties and will not conceptualize abstractions without foundations to support them.

That sounds complex, but it is not. Said another way, the mind rebels when disinformation is presented it.

A rational, reasoning mind, attempting to discern the reason and logic in religion will refuse to function when you give it a contradiction such as exists in christian theology, 'that god is responsible for both all the evil and the good that occurs'.

That is irrational and the mind will not encompass the contradiction.

On this day, 4th anniversary of 9/11, and in the midst of other threats and dangers, those who turn to faith and prayer to comprehend the events and the concommitant emotions that well up, find no answers, only doubt.

And the doubt is very deep, psychologically deep, to the very roots of ones existence and comprehension of the universe.

For the second issue, post 9/11, I offer the analogy of the fall of the Soviet Union, the failure of world communism as an event equal to the failure of religion to provide comfort in a changing world.

The Katrina disaster exemplifies the inability of large government entities to protect people, just as the 9/11 disaster showed the vulnerability of the most powerful nation on earth.

The modern Liberal social philosophy held by so many today, is based on some loose assumptions about the nature of man and the nature of government.

Like religion, it is a belief that a large and caring government can solve all or most problems.

And like religion, when that liberal 'belief' is challenged and threatened as unworkable and irrational, then the whole belief foundation is shattered.

And so I extend my concern to both those mentioned and to any others who may feel that loss of understanding and direction as all that you believe in shatters around you.

Without advocating any particular methodology, I can only suggest that one look deep inside at some basic assumptions and test them against what is real and true and absolute.

There was a time when most people believed in the existence of Dragons and Fairies and elves and goblins and trolls. We know now that these things were imaginary and not existent in reality.

As time passes and humanity grows and learns, one must sort through similar 'imaginary' entities and ideas and reject those that do not exist in reality.

'God' is one such imaginary entity.

Sacrificing one life for the greater good of others is an idea that should be interred along with god.

Well...I tried...even if you don't agree, perhaps I can piss you off enough to get over feeling sorry for yourself about the death of god and the greater good.

cheerio...


amicus the illiterate, uneducated, retarded cannibal(part cherokee) atheist, right wing neo con nut....

 

[shereads]

It is far more difficult in a crowded country like the UK to distance yourself from the evils of the world. Gated communities and elderly ghettos are very rare here.

Distance is the word I was looking for, og.

With some exceptions, Americans before 9/11 were used to observing large-scale horror from a distance, geographically and emotionally. We had evil and violence and poverty and injustice, but most of us knew of them from reading the news. To be middle-class in America came with the privilege of remaining uninvolved politically, unaware socially, unafraid of having tragedy inflicted on our families from the outside. Maybe that's why our Vietnam veterans were treated so poorly. They had spent time immersed in horror and we feared being contaminated.

I'm not saying we were all ignorant of what goes on in the broader world. I'm not one of the Americans who were surprised to find out we were hated; in fact, I was surprised that so many were surprised. But even some of us who considered ourselves well informed were shocked by 9/11. It robbed us of distance. It introduced a degree of vulnerability that we used to face when we traveled, but felt protected from here.

That said, I think the use of 9/11 as a political tool made it more damaging to more people than if we had gone after Bin Laden, added some safety measures, and been allowed to put that day in the past. Fom 9/12/2000 until election day, 2004, not a single day went by when the word "Terror" wasn't mentioned in a speech, a debate, a press conference, or an announcement by Homeland Security that our Terror Risk had gone up from Yellow to Orange.

Announcing that everything has changed, like announcing that the economy is about to go into a recession, may have been a self-fulfilling prophesy. How often can people hear that they are being targeted for attack, without internalizing the fear of being attacked?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Amicus,

You rpost was so restrained and reasonable that I'm going to suspend my usual "don't ever even try to talk to Amicus again" rule and jump in.

All I would ask is that you broaden your definition of religion from "irrational belief in a supreme being" to what should more properly be called "the religious impulse." This religious impulse is not rational and doesn't try to be. It's a feeling, just like beauty is a feeling. If you've ever stood in awe of the heavens at night, or a sunrise, or a birth or a death, then you've experienced that sense of awe. The religious impulse is that thing within us that tries to make something permanent and understandable out of those feelings of awe.

I know that there are believers that take a very kindergarten view of religion, believing in God as The Old Man Upstairs and taking the bible as literal truth, and I know that's the kind of religion you're talking about as silly and irrational, and I agree for the most part. But it's a mistake to think that all religious people take that same, simplistic view.

Science deals with things that can be measured and manipulated, but in the end it can't give us any real answers. It can tell us "how" but not "why", and we humans seem to be obsessed with the "why" more than the "how". We do things and believe things that transcend the rational, because each of us is much more than mere rationality, otherwise there would be no love, no hope, no pleasure, no art, no humor. Religion is that dimension of awe that transcends the rational.

I'm a religious person, even though I don't believe in God. I don't believe in God, but I'm aware of those religious feelings of beauty, grace, awe, whatever--things that transcend my ability to understand or explain them, that fill me with emotion and a sense of meaning that's just beyond my grasp.

Theists may observe the anniversary of 9/11 with silent prayer. Atheists may observe it with a moment of silence for the dead. We can say that both are irrational exercises--after all, the dead don't care what we do--but something human in us demands them. That something is the religious impluse.

 

[shereads]

I'm a religious person, even though I don't believe in God. I don't believe in God, but I'm aware of those religious feelings of beauty, grace, awe, whatever--things that transcend my ability to understand or explain them, that fill me with emotion and a sense of meaning that's just beyond my grasp.

Maybe what you're calling a religious impulse is God. Not God, the authority figure or even God, the personality, but the spiritual dimension of life.

Until there is a rational way to explain our hunger to connect with each other in irrational ways, like Brahms 3rd symphony and leather ankle cuffs, I'll believe that cognizant beings are parts of one thing that will make sense to everyone when it's put together correctly.

We attract and repel each other like magnets seeking some kind of alignment. Irrational hatred and desire might both be symptoms of frustrated attempts to feel connected and made whole.

But maybe not. As an agnostic, I consider it irrational to assume that what can't be proven is true.

 

[amicus]

Dr. Mab...


I wonder if you have seen the film 'Contact', with Jodie Foster, I think the book from which the film was made was written by Carl Sagan, the late astronomer and physicist, I think.

The film implied there had been millions of civilizations over billions of years and the single thing they had in common was that they were all searching for 'meaning and purpose' in life....but that all they found...was each other.

You said, part: "...Science deals with things that can be measured and manipulated, but in the end it can't give us any real answers. It can tell us "how" but not "why", and we humans seem to be obsessed with the "why" more than the "how". We do things and believe things that transcend the rational, because each of us is much more than mere rationality, otherwise there would be no love, no hope, no pleasure, no art, no humor. Religion is that dimension of awe that transcends the rational....'

I am not comfortable saying, 'mere rationality', the assumption that there is something, some human characteristic beyond reason and logic.

I understand the 'awe' you speak of, the almost speechless profundity at some of the natural and human events we perceive in life.

When I attempt to comprehend my emotional response to issues and look for the source, I am left with more questions than answers.

The 'objectivist' definition of an 'emotion', is 'the automatic, emotional response to a previously made value judgement..."

That implies that the source of emotions is the mind, choosing those things of value that require more than thought to comprehend.

Surely there are some humans, perhaps many, that simply do not come equipped to deal rationally, intellectually with issues that face them. I surmise that is where 'faith' and belief come into play; and offers a means to deal with the larger questions.

The trouble is of course, that the spoken and written words of these faiths, the bible, the koran, et al, were written by men and are interpreted by men.

I have offered mused at what the feeling might be to bask in the security of belief, knowing there was a god in heaven and that eventually justice and kindness would rule. It is a luxury my particular mind cannot embrace.

Political ideology is a shallow attempt to deal with serious issues on a superficial, social level. Those things of which I, we, speak, require focused and accurate thinking.

Anyway...was up all night...just arose and appreciated your post.


amicus...

 

[SummerMorning]

Good points Mab and Amicus... and I'm surprised I've actually come across something to concede to Amicus. But give credit where credit is due.

 

[shereads]

Surely there are some humans, perhaps many, that simply do not come equipped to deal rationally, intellectually with issues that face them. I surmise that is where 'faith' and belief come into play; and offers a means to deal with the larger questions.

My instinctive reaction is to agree with you here, but only in part. I call it an instinctive reaction rather than an entirely rational one, because I can't pretend that a negative childhood experience of religion doesn't color my thinking.

When I use the word "religion," I refer to organized religion rather than the spiritual impulse Dr. M describes. I don't need the former to have faith that the latter is inherently good. I agree with Amicus that religion can become a substitute for rational thought, but that doesn't mean that all believers are weak. History is chockful of geniuses who claimed to be religious and lived according to the rules of a religion. Maybe they were pretending, to avoid being burned at the stake or to serve an addiction to church bingo. I'll bet some of them were just going along with the status quo because it's more pleasant to get along with the majority than to oppose them. But there's no evidence, is there?

The first priests and shamans were probably the smartest people in the tribe. Not the most moral, necessarily, but the ones who figured out the patterns in nature that were hidden from most people. Imagine experiencing a solar eclipse without knowing it was temporary. It wasn't the village idiot who made the sun come back in exchange for a portion of everyone's food, and a virgin. It was the mathemetician. Maybe he even believed that his power came from the gods. Maybe it did!

If so, and if the gods are offended, the line to apologize starts behind me.

 

[CharleyH]

Washington Post







Rest.

Well it is an interesting and sometimes humourous article. I disagree that "We are reminded of the definition of camp" by Susan Sontag: a seriousness that fails." The author certainly misses the point that camp is meant to fail as seriousness, which is why it is camp, but that's another issue.

I also disagree with "Truth is Stronger Than Fiction, the reporter Rachel Donadio alludes to V.S. Naipaul's belief that fiction is no longer adequate to make sense of the world." One needs only look at how news and messages are constructed to understand how not true this is. In fact, I would be willing to argue that fiction offers much more truth on more levels about culture than 'supposed' reality in fiction or film.

Re: Ian McEwan's "The times are strange enough. Why make things up?" It is a question which I think most writers are asking themselves at least subliminally these days. In a world of such horrors, what does a novel have to offer?"

LOL Funny. Skipping the rest (reading, just not commenting) ... to get to the gem of the piece ...

"Not that I am likely to forget. Everything has changed, though nothing has." funny, and circular, this has been the way of our world since time began.

"As a writer, I struggle with how to address this different world in my fiction. Perhaps that is all any of us can do with whatever work we do. As Charlie Parker might say, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." We are living it, and how it will play out in our work, we have yet to learn.

Nice read, thanks Sher. You live it, and I respect that. I think in the end, only American writer's, those who lived it will be compelled to 'play it out in their work.' I am not sure the rest of America, nor the world will play it out in their fiction in the same way Isn't that the beauty of fiction and opinion, though As she says in the end ... we live it, it plays in our work, and she needed to say ... we have much to learn not only in the future, but in looking toward the past.

 

[amicus]

Shereads....not my first or only love, but right up there with the best feminine foils I have known....

"...My instinctive reaction is to agree with you here, but only in part. I call it an instinctive reaction rather than an entirely rational one, because I can't pretend that a negative childhood experience of religion doesn't color my thinking..."


This is not meant to be 'picky' to reuse a word, but humans have no 'instints' such as you purported.

Even those attributes scientists themselves named animal instincts, such as birds to migrate and navigate flawless in time and direction, and salmon to return to the small streams they were born in to spawn and die, have been shown to be 'reaction to stimuli' and not 'intinct'.

Instinct: 1. "An inborn pattern of activity or tendency to action common to a given biological species."

I think it is important to eliminate the possibility that humans 'instinctually' do anything as it allows one to excuse one's actions as 'intinctual' or 'tendential' in some a way.

"...When I use the word "religion," I refer to organized religion rather than the spiritual impulse Dr. M describes. I don't need the former to have faith that the latter is inherently good. I agree with Amicus that religion can become a substitute for rational thought, but that doesn't mean that all believers are weak. History is chockful of geniuses who claimed to be religious and lived according to the rules of a religion. Maybe they were pretending, to avoid being burned at the stake or to serve an addiction to church bingo. I'll bet some of them were just going along with the status quo because it's more pleasant to get along with the majority than to oppose them. But there's no evidence, is there?..."

That contains some interesting thoughts. I personally maintain that no rational, educated person since about the 16th century professed an honest faith in god and formal religion of any form. I even think that men such as Thales and Aristotle, both men of science, had their doubts about divine intervention in the affairs of man.

And yes, going along with the status quo, even with men wearing tight white shirts and neckties to conform with the perceived status of profession.

Although I always smile at a few of the long haired, open collared Geeks at Nasa and Jpl when they are televised.

"...The first priests and shamans were probably the smartest people in the tribe. Not the most moral, necessarily, but the ones who figured out the patterns in nature that were hidden from most people. Imagine experiencing a solar eclipse without knowing it was temporary. It wasn't the village idiot who made the sun come back in exchange for a portion of everyone's food, and a virgin. It was the mathemetician. Maybe he even believed that his power came from the gods. Maybe it did!..."

That is probably the most delightful paragraph of yours I have ever read!

Historians imagine that the first 'profession' was one of medicine and alchemy and I tend to agree.

As late as the Renaissance, the 'universal man' was thought to be one who was proficient in all the disciplines. And to go back, medicine, alchemy, mathematics, reading and writing were purposefully restricted to a 'priestly class' to keep the benefits in the fold, so to speak.


That 'spiritual impluse' referred to by Mab, is, I think tied to the 'awe' that humans experienced when seeing the Aurora Borealis, or a volcano explode, or a vast flood, or as you suggested, a total eclipse, or even the passing of a flock of a million birds...which happened here recently, they blackened the sky.

Things like that would have and do, give one a sense of insignificance in the over all scheme of things and that parleys into, 'there must be something bigger and smarter than me somewhere..."

Thank you for a lovely post. I personally find the history and pre history of man, fascinating; both for the archeological facts we can derive and for the speculations that lead to such interesting theories and debates.

regards...

http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=169109

amicus...

 

[CharleyH]

The Ayn Rand article discussed the psychological implications of art and a sense of life that was in stark opposition to my friends view.

I have said many times that the concept of religion is inherently dangerous and evil. Seldom am I requested to justify that statement, just ignored.

The healthy human mind functions in a rather precise manner. It does not easily accept contradictions in the reasoning and logical faculties and will not conceptualize abstractions without foundations to support them.

That sounds complex, but it is not. Said another way, the mind rebels when disinformation is presented it.

A rational, reasoning mind, attempting to discern the reason and logic in religion will refuse to function when you give it a contradiction such as exists in christian theology, 'that god is responsible for both all the evil and the good that occurs'.

That is irrational and the mind will not encompass the contradiction.

And the doubt is very deep, psychologically deep, to the very roots of ones existence and comprehension of the universe.

For the second issue, post 9/11, I offer the analogy of the fall of the Soviet Union, the failure of world communism as an event equal to the failure of religion to provide comfort in a changing world.

The Katrina disaster exemplifies the inability of large government entities to protect people, just as the 9/11 disaster showed the vulnerability of the most powerful nation on earth.

I know you are a trouble maker, and unfortunately your argument in this post does not stand up. You are contradictory to a beautiful fault, as you always are. The human mind understands contradictions precisely because the human changes thought in every breath that they breathe. There is nothing in human life that is not contradictory. The mind encompasses contradiction, bt the mind does not register the abstract, and that can be mathematical or philosophical. Communism, for example was an idealist philosophy, but greatly misinterpreted.

The Soviet Union needed to fail in the eyes of the great democratic force. China is still communist, though, my friend. Imagine economically and politically? If they were not. How far the US would fall.

My argument in the end is always: why do we blame governments? Did the US government fail in Katrina? They are pulling from every budget and resource they have. Did the government fail? Or did the people?

 

[amicus]

I think Charley H, wants me.

amicus

http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=129804

 

[CharleyH]

I think Charley H, wants me.

amicus

http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=129804

Ah, but you don't have a 170 IQ, Ami. How could I?

 

[amicus]

Ah, but you don't have a 170 IQ, Ami. How could I?

Well, no, about 15pts shy, but, ahem, I do have other sizeable assets.

"Live hard, love hard, die hard and leave a beautiful memory..." old song

Now you want me, fess up....(you liberal ladies are easy, just like earth girls)

Anyone here following the new series, Weeds? Starts in about 5 minutes, on Showtime, I think...maybe HBO...guess I could check...


amicus

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I don't know. Maybe it's the fact that my writing's out there in some little world of it's own, but it's not really affected by the real world that often. It reflects my own worries, point-provings, dare-solvings, fixations of the moment, and passions to a degree, but the real world itself only tangentally. 9/11 didn't change it, though I personally felt the day and I don't understand why it would change so many works. Sure, political thriller writers and more "real-life" writers are going to be hit by this and their work will reflect that hit, but genre writers...I would say hit or miss. Ditto about writers who write about more timeless subjects (like porn, romance, etc...). It seems these subjects can just sort of skirt the "need to be relevant in some post-9/11 world". Perhaps it's the escapism aspect or just the edge of reality feeling. Still it's give or take.

I remember a story of mine published about three years ago being published in a magazine that also published a story about facing the desire for suicide after a WTC-like attack in a cyberpunk New York.

I don't really know my point.

Hello, happy fun ball.