Pausing for Fiction

I've started a little tradition with new students the last few years.  I offer a door prize for the library orientation session I do after Convocation with the new crop of grad students. I pick a work of fiction that speaks to communication or media studies. The students won't be reading much fiction in the program, little if any, all the more reason for me to remind them tht literature, past and current, is pretty fertile ground for thinking about communication! I try to pick something fairly recent.  Last year's prize was Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, a May-December romance set in a dystopian New York in the near (as in next Tuesday) future that is dominated by media and brand-ridden consumption. 

This year's offering is a collection  (just out, with very good press) of short stories by Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages.

Reviewer Jesse Singal in The Boston Globe writes:

We still haven’t figured out what the Internet means for us, what it says about us. What does it mean that millions of us have begun obsessively documenting the minutiae of our lives, turning ourselves into abject exhibitionists? What does it mean that one ill-advised post, created by someone at a carefree and feckless age, can live on for decades, if not longer? If a whiff of triteness hangs around these questions, it is perhaps because they are asked so frequently and urgently by so many. So it’s a ripe time for talented literary voices to breathe some fresh life into them, and that’s what Joshua Cohen does in “Four New Messages,” his new book of short stories.

May CommQuote

This month's quote is a media-saturated passage from Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. The liminal quality of the saturation is what's interesting. The speaker recalls a phone conversation she had with one of the novels' mysterious poet-protagonists, Arturo Belano. While on the phone with him she watches a movie on TV (the sound is off). She also refers to a novel lying on the table that she plans to turn to once she gets tired of the movie (when, not if). The passage ends with car sounds that she believes are coming from the phone but she's not sure if he's hung up or not; the sounds could be coming from her window.

Susana Puig, Calle Josep Tarradellas, Calella de Mar, Catalonia, June 1994. He called me. It had been a long time since I talked to him. He said you have to go to such and such a beach, on such and such a day, at such and such a time. What are you talking about? I said. You have to be there, you have to, he said. Are you crazy? Are you drunk? I said. Please, I’ll expect you there, he said, and he repeated the name of the beach and the date and the time. Can’t you come to my apartment? I said. We can talk here if that’s what you want. I don’t want to talk, he said, I don’t want to talk anymore, everything’s over, it’s pointless to talk, he said. I felt like hanging up, but I didn’t. I’d just had dinner and I was watching a movie on TV, it was a French movie, I can’t remember what it was called or who the director or the actors were, all I remember is that it was a singer, a sort of hysterical girl, I think, and a pathetic guy she inexplicably falls in love with. I had the volume turned down low, as usual, and while I was talking to him I didn’t take my eyes off the TV: rooms, windows, the faces of people whose presence in the movie didn’t quite make sense. The table was cleared and there was a book on the sofa, a novel I was planning to start that night when I got tired of the movie and went to bed. Will you come? He said. What for? I said, but I was really thinking about something else, about the singer’s stubbornness, about her tears, tears that flowed uncontainably, tears of hatred, although I don’t know whether that makes sense. It’s hard to cry with hatred, hard to hate someone so much it makes you sob. So you can see me, he said. For the last time, the last time, he insisted. Are you still there? I said. For a moment I thought he’d hung up. It wouldn’t be the first time. I was sure he was calling me form a public phone, I could imagine it perfectly, a telephone on the Paseo Maritimo of the town where he lived, what was just twenty minutes from my town by train and fifteen by car, why I started to think about distances that night I don’t know, but he couldn’t have hung up, I could hear the sound of cars, unless I hadn’t closed all the window and what I was hearing was noise from my own street.
--Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives

January CommQuote

Mark Bowden writes about acclaimed HBO Series The Wire and its creator David Simon, former journalist at the Baltimore Sun, in this month's The Atlantic.

"Every reporter knows the sensation of having a story 'ruined' by some new and surprising piece of information. Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it's also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success--and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction...

The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least, not a complete one--because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes makes it feel more real than reality. As a film producer once told me, 'It's important not to let the facts get in the way of the truth.'

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case the The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside and entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair."
--Mark Bowden, "The Angriest Man in Television," The Atlantic, January/Februrary, 2008

October CommQuote

This month's quote comes from the Ian McEwan's novel Saturday.

"He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he's feeling the pull. Like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government's counsel - that an attack in a European or American city is an inevitability - isn't only a disclaimer of responsibility, it's a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know...With the idea of the news, inseparable from it, at least at weekends, is the lustrous prospect of a glass of red wine."

--Ian McEwan
Saturday (Anchor Books edition, 2005) p. 180

September CommQuote

This month's quote comes from Nick Hornby's debut novel High Fidelity (1995), a hilarious riff on the interplay between pop culture (especially pop music) and real life inextricably tangled in the mind of the novel's central character who has, in this passage, his own take on media effects.

"Some of my favorite songs: "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," by Neil Young; "Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me" by the Smiths; "Call Me" by Aretha Franklin; "I Don't Want to Talk About It" by anybody. And then there's "Love Hurts" and "When Love Breaks Down" and "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" and "The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness" and "She's Gone" and "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" and . . . some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
--Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, (Riverhead Essential Editions, 1995, pp. 24-25)