Comments on: Letters To No One In Particular, #1

By: RJ March

RJ March — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:05:40 +0000

I’ve always liked the idea of (re)creating life’s time lines, though I’ve never felt up to what I perceive is the leviathan task of the Novel. I did that to myself early on, I’m afraid.

It’s hard to turn off, isn’t it?

By: koreanish

koreanish — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:52:43 +0000

DB: Thanks. I’d love to know why you come with a parental advisory sticker. Just, whenever you have a moment.

Meredith: Thanks. We’ve discussed our need to check out of the linkedin life and for some reason the other night this all came together for me. This is a preliminary take on these things.

Sam: Great quote. And thanks.

By: RJ March

RJ March — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:41:20 +0000

I think of you and your mother, David and his mother, and me and my mother who is scheduled for a triple by-pass (I just learned next Tuesday). I hate this shit. I missed her– Susan– at Skidmore and got the son instead and wasn’t particularly impressed, though this was years ago.

I guess I am going to have to fly. It’s not what I want to do, but what is my duty.

I feel useless.

By: Sam J Miller

Sam J Miller — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:07:18 +0000

Great sh*t. For fiction writers who are stressed out by the magnitude of how fucked up this world is, and have to grapple with the difficulty of addressing those issues in fiction without sounding trite/propagandistic, I think Susan Sontag is so important. “On Photography” is an endlessly challenging text to me as a writer, because so much of her critique of the photographer’s role is also applicable to the role of the writer in Western(ish) economies. There’s probably a really brilliant essay/investigation to be mounted, into her relevance to writers and the way we write now…

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetise the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrialized society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.”
–Susan Sontag, On Photography

By: Meredith

Meredith — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:46:50 +0000

Limitless, non-stopped stories. . . . you and Sontag are onto something, Alex. It would be worthwhile, I think, to account for their allure as well as to decry their interruption or violation of the novel’s ethical commitment to finitude. . . . I love how your post captures new media’s disruption of both reading and writing. And how one has to undo media convergence sometimes just to get work done. Though I must say I’m happy to have the opportunity to read this post this morning, over coffee. . . .

By: originalthinker

originalthinker — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:25:06 +0000

Nice.