Gabriel García Márquez; Ursula K. Le Guin; AI; J. G. Ballard; Amazon; David Bowie

 An unpublished interview with Gabriel García Márquez: ‘Maybe the myths about me are more interesting than my life’ 

I do not imagine meeting Ernest Hemingway; that feels too strenuous without any benefit. William Faulkner? If we could talk about history, but nowadays, I do not know if Faulkner would be all that personable. John Does Passos? I think there would be much to talk about. Steinbeck would be a good time, I think. Marquez sounds like he could laugh, even at his most seriousness. That is what I think would be missing with Faulkner.

 

Writing advice – Word Choices – Celeste Ng: three levels for words: sonic, emotional, literal.

 

Ursula K. Le Guin on Writing Characters of Color -  

Another writer I overlooked and now think that was a grievous mistake on my part. Was it because I have always looked down on fantasy as a genre? Is it because she was a woman and obscured from my view? Or was this another victim of my turning away from good writing the further I kept not writing myself? I do not have answers to my own questions. I do have this suggestion for you, readers and would-be writers: read Le Guin. Follow the link to the video and learn why.

What I Wish I’d Known About: Working in Publishing 

The title says it all - Australian, but it might still be of help to those wanting to be publishers, or writers.

 

 J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, “Not Good” Writing 

Ballard’s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is glaring, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom’s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction”? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.

Nope, I have not read Ballard. I want to do so. Just wanting to show what is out there that may not be known in these parts.

 

AI and the Nature of Literary Creativity 

AI will unsettle received ideas. That is what wondrous and terrible technologies do. Yet when it comes to literature—to what fiction can teach us—much will stay the same. Or, if not, we’ll find fresh ways to understand ourselves. A new technology comes along, and we suffer an identity crisis. We worry about losing our humanity. But what’s new and alarming to one generation is old and ordinary to the next. We sort it out, we adapt. That, indeed, might be the most human trait of all.

 Why You Can’t Buy Lydia Davis’s New Book on Amazon

Read why I am torn between wanting published and not wishing to feed a monster.

 Always Crashing in the Same Car – Lance Olsen by Simon Lowe

For thirty years, as both practitioner and teacher, Olsen has been exploring the outer regions of post-genre culture, working with collage, hyper-text, poetry, and essay. In his 2012 manual on writing, Architectures of Possibility, Olsen proposes that the modern novel should function in a different space than what has come before. “Behind that proposal,” says Olsen, “lies the assumption that writers work in a post-genre culture. Here there is no longer a significant difference between prose and poetry, between fiction and non-fiction. Theory, it takes for granted, is a form of spiritual autobiography, while all writing is a kind of theorising.” Always Crashing the Same Car, with its fragmentary approach, each chapter a new mask, stays true to his word. The book doesn’t blur the lines between history and invention, fiction and nonfiction—it doesn’t recognize the existence of these lines in the first place.

A novel about David Bowie has to be interesting.

 

 sch 10/4