notes | Jason Roberts [.net]

Don’t Get Me Wrong: The dangers of lecturing your readers

esquire Dont Get Me Wrong: The dangers of lecturing your readers

One of the strange, heady powers that the writing of fiction awards is the arrival of multiple mouths. You’ve got one brain, but get a story going and all of a sudden you’re compelled to speak in several voices. Here’s the temptation: since you’ve got to put words in all those mouths, why not channel an opinion or two? Heck, your friends thought you were witty/interesting/insightful the other day, when you held forth on claret/basset hounds/[insert topic here]. Seems like a win-win to incorporate that into dialogue. Your brilliance gets immortalized, and your characters get to have something to say.

Whoa there.

Let me put it this way: lectures in literature are not only a misuse of intimacy, they’re a misuse that can destroy that intimacy. And when you think about it, intimacy is the engine of fiction. The empathic leap that lets us believe, for hours at a time, that we’re not physically in a chair, turning pages–that’s an act of intimacy. Which is why we often feel a personal connection with authors whose work we admire; heck, we’ve been inside their heads. read more »

01.11.10 § 0

The Cutesy Whimper: How the L.A. Times is Eating Itself

The Los Angeles Times is doing what a lot of drain-circling newspapers are doing, i.e., spewing content onto the web, in the vague hope that it will somehow add up to a full-scale transition from one medium to another. But they’ve made a crucial mistake, one that undermines not only their old (dead trees) brand, but their new (online) one as well. Let me demonstrate.

Here’s a screen grab of the latimes.com home page for this morning (November 9, 2009). As you can see, I’m about to click on a story: ‘Bling ring’ burglaries put websites in spotlight.

Here’s where my click takes me: to a blog! In fact, of the eighteen stories listed on the prime “above the fold” portion of the homepage (visible without scrolling down on most monitor), ten do not take you further into latimes.com, but into the subsite latimesblogs.latimes.com. Apparently, LAT management has decided that “blog” is equivalent to “beat”–if they can categorize a story, they might as well turn that category into a entity. read more »

11.11.09 § 0

Annexing Tomorrowland: when fantasy invades the future

A smaller-scale "tribute" on the site of the Rocket to the Moon ride. It's now a pizza place. Photo by Tom Arthur.

I’ve been surprised to find myself re-reading, after god knows how many years, the massive Titan science fiction trilogy by John Varley. Berkeley Original paperbacks from 1985. The three books (Titan, Wizard and Demon) weren’t even side by side on my bookshelves, but their broad spines beckoned. How come?

Oh yeah: I recently visited Disneyland. That’s why. read more »

11.05.09 § 0

Annals of Obfuscation: We’re Committed!

longsposter1 225x300 Annals of Obfuscation: Were Committed! This sign adorns the pharmacy of a drug store in Marin City, California. I was so taken by the utter opacity of the language that I snapped a photo, and when that photo didn’t come out I returned to take another one. In case you don’t feel like squinting, here’s the entire text: read more »

06.07.09 § 0

Bad Blurbs, Good Books

The first edition of William Burroughs' first novel, published under a pseudonym..

The economist Brad DeLong puts forth an interesting “parlor game” on his blog: write the worst blurb you can imagine for the best book you can think of. It’s an illuminating exercise, because it helps one realize a couple of things. One, that “literary” is really a perceptive filter, a sort of lighting effect that casts a work as somehow Important. Two, that even works of high literature are propelled by plots. When you strip them down to that level, some ethereal classics have rather down-to-earth dynamics at their core.

06.04.09 § 0

Return of the prodigal writer

(note the book under pig's foot.)

It’s been a while since I posted an entry. For the best of reasons, I assure you.

I’ve been in what my friend Katie Crouch calls “lockdown” mode, trying to concentrate as much as possible on writing the next book. Update my website? Heck, I haven’t even visited the website in months. In fact, I’ve been trying to stay off the web as much as possible.

But there’s a limit to self-imposed isolation, and I think I’ve reached it. So I’m going to start easing myself back into the digital mix, with your forebearance. What? Did I miss much?

One more thing: I’m going to start enabling comments here. As an experiment at first, and with the proviso that the experiment might not work out. But it’s another instance of appropriate technology: it’s there, so let’s see if it’s useful.

06.03.09 § 0

John Updike: our impromptu tribute

When word came that John Updike had passed away, I asked my friends over at The Rumpus if they were planning any sort of tribute to him. Their immediate response: What a great idea. Could you put it together?

Um, okay. Why not? I dispatched the following email to some of the novelists I knew: read more »

02.22.09 § 0

David Foster Wallace: mapless territory

(The text of my remarks on David Foster Wallace, delivered January 31 at the Koret Auditorium. This was part of the San Francisco Public Library’s Writers Remembered, an annual tribute to writers who passed away in the previous year.)

davidfosterwallace 300x199 David Foster Wallace: mapless territory David Foster Wallace didn’t just bring his own style, he brought his own relationship to words. He didn’t arrange them, like pretty things, on the page. He was not a tour guide, ushering us through neatly trimmed, topiary wordscapes. Asking us to admire them from the path.

A David Foster Wallace wordscape is a sort of wilderness, through which you can find yourself staggering, careening, losing the line of horizon. But rather than feel abandoned by a careless author, full of himself and overwriting, you get the sense that the Wallace himself is undergoing a process of discovery, of chance orientation and disorientation, very similar to yours. The territory bears his name, but it is mapless. There is creation, but there are no pretenses of control. read more »

02.18.09 § 0

Reading: Alice Munro’s The Progress of Love , p. 86

amunro 231x300 Reading: Alice Munros <em>The Progress of Love </em>, p. 86 Cynthia Ozick calls Alice Munro “our Chekhov”, and I couldn’t agree more. Not only am I amazed that she hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet, I’m amazed that hordes of dazzled, appreciative readers haven’t gathered in the Ontario countryside, woven their own Nobel Prize out of roots and branches, and presented it to her door. It’s a deep pleasure to come across a collection of Munro stories that you haven’t read yet, as I did last week with The Progress of Love, first published in 1986.

There’s one fascinating element I find myself noticing in these stories—and now that I look, in other Munro stories as well. It’s just one facet of her talent (and I’m sure there are PhD theses on it) but worth noting nonetheless. read more »

02.16.09 § 0

A book-inspired award

A few months ago I was contacted by Mike May, who happens to be the subject of the Robert Kurzon’s recent book Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure and the Man who Dared to See. If you’re familiar with the book, you know that Mike was blinded at the age of three, but that didn’t stop him from being a daunting overachiever. CIA employee, world record-setting skier, businessman, inventor–like I say, daunting. It was gratifying to learn that he’s a fan of A Sense of the World, and that he rightly views James Holman as a kindred spirit. Unlike Holman however, his story has a fascinating, modern twist. Thanks to innovations in stem cell research, he was able to undergo an operation that actually restored a measure of sight–a surprisingly mixed blessing, considering how well-adapted he had been to the non-visual world.

crashingthrough A book inspired award

Mike is also CEO of Sendero Group, the company that pioneered “talking map” software for the GPS. That innovation that has greatly increased the independence of many modern-day blind travelers, and in the spirit of both Crashing Through and A Sense of the World, Sendero is sponsoring an annual scholarship award “for the most impressive travel adventure for the year” by a non-visual traveler. read more »

02.13.09 § 0