Category: words

“We writers have often spent time—much of it in the late twentieth century—questioning the ability of words to reflect facts, and the existence of objective facts themselves. There are those who have, whether with glee or with shame, observed a sort of relationship between those postmodern exercises and Trump’s post-truth, post-language ways. I think this reflects a basic misunderstanding, or perhaps a willing conflation of intentions. When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public sphere, to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was yesterday. To focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed. Our ability to do this depends on a shared language.”

“At this late stage — Murakami is 68 — critical reception has ceased to matter to Murakami’s international audience. In Japan his books are greeted with Harry Potter–like rabidity, and in the U.S. initial print runs are in the hundreds of thousands. Cribbing a remark John Irving once made to him in an interview, Murakami has compared his readers to heroin addicts, and that may be one reason why he’s consistently delivered an ever-purer-grade product. A Nobel Prize has long been thought to be looming, especially by British bookies. Few of his skeptics would deny that his early work, his self-declared project of importing Western tropes and styles to treat life in Japan and his reckoning with Japan’s history, put him in that hazily defined league. A cynic might say: After Dylan, all is permitted.”

“For any student of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, no event was isolated. Each murder or set of murders seemed to have been inspired by a previous one, each atrocity appeared to be in retaliation for something that had occurred the week before.”

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow: “The fact that a story captures the public imagination doesn’t mean that it will come true in the future, but it tells you something about the present. You learn something about the world when a vision of the future becomes a subject of controversy or delight.”

It’s a big question, especially because “The magazine’s high-profile editor-in-chief, Jonathan Kay – under social-media fire after coming to the defence of another magazine editor who had lost his job over an editorial advocating cultural appropriation – resigned .”

“At the beginning of each session the leader gives a prompt, and, after the requisite grumbling and staring into the middle-distance, the whole group, leader included, spend 15 or 20 minutes in silence, scribbling in their notebooks. Then those who feel like it read what they’ve just written.” And feedback has to be positive, or it can’t happen at all.

Part of the problem, award-winning screenwriters say? Directors. “The generally held view is that the director is all-powerful. You never hear a writer mentioned. Hardly ever. They don’t say ‘this is a marvellous film written by’ but ‘this is a wonderful film directed by.’ … There’s nothing you can do to change it, but that’s how the industry is. The director has taken over the whole film world.”

The kids love the story hour, which started in San Francisco and spread via social media to New York. “As is the case with all readers, library staff members taught Ms. Sunbeam how to engage the children, with questions (‘Who likes rainbows?’) and to manage crowds of often restless youngsters. However, the differences between a rowdy drag show audience and a group of kindergartners are not as pronounced as one might imagine. ‘Little kids can be crazy,’ Ms. Shapiro said. ‘We like to joke that they’re kind of like drunk adults.’ When asked to pinpoint the main difference between story hour and an evening drag show, Ms. Sunbeam said jokingly, ‘I’m sober.'”

By September, 2015, online first-person writing was so abundant that Laura Bennett, at Slate, could refer to a “first-person industrial complex” in a takedown of the genre. “Every site seems to have a first person vertical and a first-person editor,” Bennett, who also cited Gould’s Times story as a turning point, wrote. The market, in Bennett’s view, had overinflated. She was right: a year and a half later, it barely exists.