Fiction and Non-Fiction

"I make few distinction between straight biographies and novels. They both are works of fiction." Jay Parini in bookslut.com

Definition of a Writer

Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. (Thomas Mann)

--from THE CYNIC'S DICTIONARY edited by Aubrey Dillon-Malone

Dialogue

Dialogue is not just about how characters talk. It is, more than anything else, a writer's trick. Dialogue in even the most "realistic" story is not how real people talk -- it is a convention created by the writer and accepted by the reader. The most effective realistic dialogue is dialogue that supports the illusion to such an extent that the reader forgets they are reading and begins to hear the words in their mind's ear, convinced that this is, indeed, how real people talk.

If you want to see the difference between real dialogue and fictional dialogue, record a conversation, and transcribe exactly what you hear. Written down, it will usually seem confusing, repetitive, fragmentary, and, paradoxically, unrealistic (or at least mannered), because our minds are not used to converting pure speech into text.

posted by Matthew Cheney in mumpsimus.blogspot.com

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.



By Wislawa Szymborska
From "No End of Fun", 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
© Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

The Almighty Dollar Trumps Human Rights

Google Defends China Stance
APRIL 13, 2006

GOOGLE has defended its widely criticised censorship policy for China, insisting it must follow local laws, as it launched its new brand for the lucrative internet market.

"We simply don't have a choice but to follow the law," chief executive officer Eric Schmidt said.

Mr Schmidt was attending a launch ceremony in Beijing for the US internet giant's new Chinese name, which translates to "Gu Ge."

"We must comply with the local law, indeed we have all made a commitment to the government that we will absolutely follow the Chinese law. We don't have any alternatives.

"It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you."

Google caused an uproar earlier this year when it launched its new service for China, google.cn, after agreeing to censor websites and content banned by the nation's propaganda chiefs.

The Silicon Valley company, whose rise as a global internet giant was accompanied by the motto: 'Do no evil', joined the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft in bowing to China's censorship demands.

While Google and the other companies have come under pressure in the US not to succumb to Chinese pressure, Mr Schmidt praised China's rulers for their internet strategy that has seen a huge online population develop.

"We look at the rise of China, the investment and the smart people and we are in awe of what has occurred here," Mr Schmidt said.

"And we salute the government, key leaders in the industry and all of you who have made the rise of the internet in China such a tremendous accomplishment."

In the case of Yahoo, it came under fire last year for supplying information to the Chinese government that led to the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison for passing on a government censorship order through his Yahoo email account.

Mr Schmidt refused to answer a reporter's question on whether Google would also supply personal information on its internet users to Chinese authorities if requested.

"I'd rather not answer a hypothetical question," he said.

Geraldine Brooks' MARCH Wins Pulitzer

NEW YORK Apr 17, 2006 (AP)— "March," Geraldine Brooks' novel that imagines the life of the fictional father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday.

For the first time since 1997, the Pulitzer board declined to award a prize for drama.

Brooks depicted the life of John March, the father absent for most of Alcott's famed 1868 novel of four sisters growing up in Massachusetts during the Civil War.

By RICHARD PYLE

A Temple of Texts

A Temple of Texts provides the most seductive introduction to Gass's world of words, if only because it includes an annotated list of his favorite books. Originally published as a pamphlet (I am looking at my own copy now), "A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars" reprinted the extended captions accompanying an exhibition at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gass taught philosophy for many years. He tells us that he dashed off these 100 to 200-word notes in just a few days, but they are marvelous miniatures nonetheless. Each is essentially a love letter, a Valentine. Plato's dialogues, Gass forthrightly claims, "are among the world's most magical texts." Paul Valéry's Eupalinos is "my favorite essay." "Of the books I have loved . . . there has been none that I would have wished more fervently to have written" than Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End stands as "the most beautiful love story in our language." Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space offers "writing which gives me a warm feeling, like sunny sand between the toes." See what I mean? You want to run to a bookstore already.

from a review of A Temple of Texts (William H. Gass) by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post February 19,2006

We Are Losing

"A book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading (provided you are significant) should be an essential segment of your character and your life. . . . In this country, we are losing, if we have not lost, any appreciation for what we might call 'an intellectual environment.' . . . Libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities . . . so that now they devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement, and to futile competition with the Internet. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is. . . . Of course libraries contain books, and books contain information, but information has always been of minor importance, except to minor minds. The information highway has no destination, and the sense of travel it provides is pure illusion. What matters is how the information is arranged, how it is understood, and to what uses it is going to be put. In short, what matters is the book the data's in."

from A Temple of Texts by William H. Gass