Narrative Art Quotes

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.

All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.

If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.

This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.

Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.

Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be. DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Some years ago, I read an article about two people in the arts (alas, I can’t remember who they were) who’d been married for many, many years. Asked for the secret of their long partnership, they said: “We fell straight into conversation when we met, and we haven’t come to the end of that conversation yet.” I can’t think of a better model for marriage than that. Or of a narrative more romantic . . . .

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?

We frequently invent new information, often inaccurate, to fill in gaps in our memories so that the narrative feels more complete or pleasing.

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

Remember, someone that does something bad to you, will always try to control the narrative, and they generally get out there first and spin the story to anyone who will listen. I always like to watch the quiet one. You are not alone.

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

One particularly harmful idea carried by our cultural narrative is that you need to find someone who will love you. Imagine if we believed this about any other basic need: food, water, oxygen. If you needed another person to provide you with those, you’d be considered dependent—if not disabled. Yet we so willingly put ourselves in this state with love.

Balaam in his wrath hardly seems to notice the miraculous gift of speech but responds as though he were accustomed to having daily domestic wrangles with his asses

Every great narrative contains its end in its beginning and its beginning in its end,

The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest - The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life –and my mess of a mind –needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity.

For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film [The Hunt for Red October] should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom—or rather the movement towards it—that counts.

If you write then you are reborn because by writing about the moment, you can relive it for a second time.

But for now, if you are intentional and willing to appreciate the fact that you don’t see the whole narrative, you can enjoy more of the journey.

Man is free only when he is doing what the deepest self likes, and knowing what the deepest self likes, ah! that takes some diving.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.

We constantly rewrite the past to form a narrative which cuts out the non-critical points – and which replaces luck and random experimentation with conscious intent.

The poem weaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artful in its patterning and composition.

The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.

Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.

To have been anything at all is such a strange and astounding fate. From stardust to heartbeat, from infinity to a blink, we are brief miracles, narratives spun from the cosmos, living, breathing art formed from chaos and chance. What a peculiar honour, to be here, to wonder, to wander.

For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-Creative Art in itself, and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of 'unreality' (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the dominion of 'observed fact,' in short of the fantastic. I am thus not only aware but glad of the etymological and semantic connexions of fantasy with fantastic: with images of things that are not only 'not actually present,' but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there. But while admitting that, I do not assent to the depreciative tone. That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most Potent. Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being 'arrested.' They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control; with delusion and hallucination. But the error or malice, engendered by disquiet and consequent dislike, is not the only cause of this confusion. Fantasy has also an essential drawback: it is difficult to achieve. . . . Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough -- though it may already be a more potent thing than many a 'thumbnail sketch' or 'transcript of life' that receives literary praise. To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn’t matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I’ve ever met, revealed truths I’ve somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It’s filled me with awe, which is to say it’s made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art.

It is safe to assume that any individual or group you wish to influence has access to more wisdom than they currently use. It is also safe to assume that they also have considerably more facts than they can process effectively. Giving them even more facts adds to the wrong pile. They don't need more facts. They need help finding their wisdom. Contrary to popular belief, bad decisions are rarely made because people don't have all the facts.

But we have arrived at a glistening, smug day when nobody much sins, and those that do are prone to call it something else.

Application is what gets the Sermon off the Mount, and down in the valley where the toilers live out their days.

the audience will not remember the vast majority of what you say. But they will remember what they thought about what you said. And what they felt about what you said. So help them. Leave moments in your narrative for the audience’s reflection.

Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes.

Modern philosopher Nassim Taleb has warned of the “narrative fallacy”—the tendency to assemble unrelated events of the past into stories. These stories, however gratifying to create, are inherently misleading. They lead to a sense of cohesion and certainty that isn’t real.

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author’s condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped.

Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word.

IRVING: Flowery prose. Verbosity. Some folks think they’re Neil Gaiman, and have ambitions of their scripts being reprinted for their adoring fans to pore over, when in reality, scripts are working documents designed to provide the narrative framework for their collaborators to decorate and embellish with imagery.

Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how?

When I arrived home from Boston, I realized there were no pictures on my mantel. I set down my suitcase and walked into the living room and looked across to the fireplace, and it felt empty. Empty of real stories. I went to my bedroom where the bed was made, and on my desk there were no pictures in frames and on the end tables there were no pictures. There was a framed picture of Yankee Stadium above the toilet in the bathroom, and there was some art I’d picked up in my travels, but there was little evidence of an actual character living an actual life. My home felt like a stage on which props had been set for a face story rather than a place where a person lived an actual human narrative. It’s an odd feeling to be awakened from a life of fantasy. You stand there looking at a bare mantel and the house gets an eerie feel, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, an absence of something that could have been, an absence of people who could have been living here, interacting with me, forcing me out of my daydreams. I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn’t exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been.

A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.

One of the most magical things about photography happens when you place one picture next to another picture to create new meanings.

To eat Ugali is an art of adventure in itself. Forget cutlery because all you need is your lovely fingers.

But if stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the technology at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative.

In 1907 Edmund Gosse thought he had to leave his father to become himself; seventy years later Geoffrey Wolff knows he cannot leave his father because he has become his father.

Agnes Smedley also knows what the century knows: that we become what is done to us.

In any great narrative, there is a moment when a character must decide to become more than a bystander.

Crowds of nymphs, Soft voiced, and young, and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses and pinks and violets to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May.” Keats.

The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode.

Succumbing to the self-pity and “woe is me” narrative accomplishes nothing—nothing except sapping you of the energy and motivation you need to do something about your problem.

September. Warren University. The Narrative Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party.

Richard Alther's Bedside Matters offers readers an insightful and moving end-of-life narrative in the spirit of Paul Harding's Tinkers and William Gaddis's Agapē Agape. Challenged by physical decline and family intrigue, Walter transcends his corporeal prison to find larger meaning in art, philosophy, and literature. A work of depth, carefully wrought with nuance and delicately wrapped in wisdom and humor, Bedside Matters serves up a worthy exploration of and an antidote to the shortcomings of our material age. — Jacob M. Appel, author of Millard Salter's Last Day.

You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you’ll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.

Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that's what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other. What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go. Tell me about your drunk father and your friend who died.

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

In any great narrative, there is a moment when a character must decide to become more than a bystander. It’s an important moment that always seems to happen in the mind before it unfolds in real life.

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

Modern philosopher Nassim Taleb has warned of the “narrative fallacy”—the tendency to assemble unrelated events of the past into stories. These stories, however gratifying to create, are inherently misleading.

For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

So many books I keep meaning to read. I move the titles from one to-do list to another. I don’t bother listing Proust anymore. I’ve read the opening pages about the madeleine cookie soaked in linden flower tea so many times, I’ve come to think of In Search of Lost Time as a short lyric. I get the picture, if not the story. I have time for vignettes, but not for narrative arcs. I start a novel, but keep breaking off to check my iPhone. I-Phone indeed—the busyness of me myself and I.

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents, and leading to a painfully predictable dénouement. Adherents of the latter view tend to cite Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘People say that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ Candidates are advised not to use this quotation in their answers.

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind.

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.

I began to write a different narrative: that my husband did indeed know me and love me, and was offering me the best he had to give. Then when I talked with him, I spoke from within the framework of the A, to someone I had defined as able and willing to hear me. As long as I practiced in this manner, I found that virtually all the conversations we had were productive in a way I had never before imagined they could be. A

The whole tradition of [oral] story telling is endangered by modern technology. Although telling stories is a very fundamental human attribute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats 'narrative loss' -- the inability to construct a story of one's own life -- as a loss of identity or 'personhood,' it is not natural but an art form -- you have to learn to tell stories. The well-meaning mother is constantly frustrated by the inability of her child to answer questions like 'What did you do today?' (to which the answer is usually a muttered 'nothing' -- but the 'nothing' is cover for 'I don't know how to tell a good story about it, how to impose a story shape on the events'). To tell stories, you have to hear stories and you have to have an audience to hear the stories you tell. Oral story telling is economically unproductive -- there is no marketable product; it is out with the laws of patents and copyright; it cannot easily be commodified; it is a skill without monetary value. And above all, it is an activity requiring leisure -- the oral tradition stands squarely against a modern work ethic....Traditional fairy stories, like all oral traditions, need the sort of time that isn't money. "The deep connect between the forests and the core stories has been lost; fairy stories and forests have been moved into different categories and, isolated, both are at risk of disappearing, misunderstood and culturally undervalued, 'useless' in the sense of 'financially unprofitable.

it is the narrator who is the “agent”: he himself is the unifying idea. Not through what he tells us about himself or even through what he sees as he travels, but through the way he sees what he sees. It is the character of the persona’s perspective that provides the narrative its striking inner life.

Amazing is the affair of the believer, verily all of his affairs are good, and this is not for anyone else except the believer. If something GOOD befalls him, he is GRATEFUL and that is good for him. If something BAD befalls him, he is PATIENT and that is good for him (too).”  [Narrated by Imam Muslim]

Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.

It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. On holidays, we would visit museums and libraries where the same point was made. As a young child, I looked at the glowing gold of the illuminated manuscripts and believed in a more metaphorical illumination in ages of intellectual darkness. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge. But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.

The most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator. The story begins with an inscrutable character and ends with a person the author and reader understand better than before, a series of events that yields, however quietly, a dramatic truth. One might call this kind of story a narrative of revelation.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

To get the job done preaching must be committed to two goals: first it should be passionate and second, fascinating.

Leadership is essentially a task of persuasion—of winning people's minds and hearts.

John Hines said, “Preaching is effective as long as the preacher expects something to happen—not because of the sermon, not even because of the preacher, but because of God.

Donald Coggan’s wisdom: “When true preaching takes place, the main actor is not the preacher, nor the congregation, but the Holy Spirit.”15

If anybody is left behind in a congregation of a thousand, the preacher has not preached well.

When it comes to adding authority to the sermon, the Bible is the most powerful way to comment on what the Bible has to say.

Long ago I learned that more than half of any pastor’s congregation come to church broken and in the grip of some life issue that is eating at their wellbeing.

Without application, preaching is at best a lecture and at worst entertainment.

No time was lost in useless wailing,

Dear, unclose thine eyes. Thou mayst look on me now. I go no more, But am thine own forever.’” Lewis Morris.

Axiom #3: When told how to apply sermons specifically, most people over-congratulate themselves on how biblically they already live while thinking of others who could really use the sermon.

In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality.

Passion is the soul of intensity. The speaker who truly loves God may or may not lead others to believe it, but the speaker who doesn’t is only a philosopher whose ideas are too bland to be important.

I’ve more or less finished with the world as narration – the world of novels and films, the world of music as well. I’m now only interested in the world as juxtaposition – that of poetry and painting.

When asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus in effect does not say, “Let me give you three Hebrew roots on the word neighbor.” What he does say is, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. . . .

I will also argue that metaphor and story is not only a legitimate form of exposition but is a preferred style of exposition mostly because it is so much more memorable than mere precepts-driven homiletics.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story- making in its primary and most potent mode.

If three men couldn’t see eye to eye on who among them was and was not the real Jesus, your chances of swaying someone on the Internet to trade in his belief system concerning religion, art, wedge issues, politics, or literally anything else at all are pretty grim. Personal narratives and private mythologies don’t flip in an instant; they don’t trade places in a single argument. If minds change at all, they change slowly.

The family historian must master the art of storytelling. What, after all, is truth without anecdote, history without events, explanation without narration--or yet life itself without a story? Stories are not just the wells from which we drink most deeply but at the same time the golden threads that hold and bind--Ariadne's precious string that leads us through the labyrinth that connects living present and the living past.

The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally “speculative writing,” neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little “morals” at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories.

The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.

There is no chef without a homeland. To be a chef today is to center yourself in the traditions of your roots and use them to define your art and speak to any human being about who you are; your plate is your flag. Many of our most pungent memories are carried through food, just as connections to our ancestors are reaffirmed by cooking the dishes handed down to us. For some chefs, this bond is as easy as pointing to a Tuscan village or a Korean neighborhood, while others adopt the foods of culinary kinfolk outside their own background and use them to express their personal identity. Many take for granted their fast and easy connections to a food narrative that grounds them in a tradition, gives them a broad palette to explore, and affords them a genuine taste of eudaemonia, all of which is the holistic feeling of flourishing in life; and of course it is often blissfully apolitical.

La narration interactive est l’art de raconter des histoires qui incorporent des formes d’interactions technologiques, sociales ou collaboratives pour proposer des contenus adaptés aux nouveaux modes de consommation du public.

We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

For him, art is the only possible way of understanding and knowing the world. Reality only becomes meaningful when it is re-created in art. Language possesses a sheer-magical power that allows the writer to create and to conquer time.

Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not... Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?

He is great and he is just, He is ever good, and must Be honored. Daffodillies, Roses, pinks, and loved lilies, Let us fling, while we sing, Ever Holy! Ever Holy! Ever honored! Ever young! The great Pan is ever sung!” Beaumont and Fletcher.

I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life. A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women's work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale. Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the treasury of stories prevents her wedding to any one of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day on her father-in-law's funeral garment. By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.

This is what cinema is all about. Images, sound, whatever, are what we use to construct a way which is cinema, which is supposed to produce effects, not only in our eyes and ears, but in our "mental" movie theater in which image and sound already are there. There is a kind of on-going movie all the time, in which the movie that we see comes in and mixes, and the perception of all these images and sound proposed to us in a typical film narration piles up in our memory with other images, other associations of images, other films, but other mental images we have, they pre-exist. So a new image in a film titillates or excites another mental image already there or emotions that we have so when you propose something to watch and hear, it goes, it works. It's like we have sleeping emotions in us all the time, half-sleeping, so one specific image or the combination of one image and sound, or the way of putting things together, like two images one after another, what we call montage, editing - these things ring a bell. These half-asleep feelings just wake up because of that - that is what it is about. This is not to make a film and say: "Okay, let's get a deal, let's tell the story, let's have a good actress, good-bye, not bad," and we go home and we eat. What I am dealing with is the effects, the perception, and the subsidiary effects of my work as proposals, as an open field, so that you can get there things you always wanted to feel and maybe didn't know how to express, imagine, watch, observe, whatever. This is so far away from the strong screenplay, the beautiful movie, etc., that sometimes I don't know what I should discuss. You understand, this is really fighting for that "Seventh Art" which is making films.

Herodotus tells a story of Histiaeus, who ruled Miletus in late sixth century BC and who, needing to communicate with Aristagoras, shaved a trusted slave’s head, tattooed the message on the slave’s scalp, and waited for the hair to grow back before sending him to Aristagoras. Aristagoras, in turn, shaved the slave’s head to reveal Histiaeus’s message encouraging him to revolt against the Persians, which, apparently, Aristagoras did. Steganography is the Greek word for the art of hiding messages—as opposed to, for instance, encrypting them. In Greek the word means ‘concealed writing’. Most messages are hidden within other, larger, benign-seeming chunks of text. The existence of the secret message is a secret. We don’t know to go looking. Perhaps telling and not-telling are not what we think they are. Perhaps experience could be placed in narrative for safekeeping, hidden in it, not to be buried, or rendered unknown, but to be preserved so as to be revealed in a different kind of story.

There are important moments that make up our life's narrative. We remember the defining moments in our lives, the moments that made us who we are, the moments where we became who we hoped we could be. As a happiness researcher, I have observed that happiness is often found when three views align: who we feel we are, who we want to be and how others see us. When our loved ones see us and love us for who we really are, and when we manage to become who we know we can be, that is where we find happiness.

If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.” III.

The economy functions strictly and instrumentally according to iron conventions, imposed unequally on nations by the great transnational economic bodies; it establishes hierarchies of wealth and power; it enforces on the vast majority of the world's inhabitants a timetabled and regulated working life, while consoling them with visions of cinematic lives given meaning through adventure and coherent narrative (in which heroes make their lives free precisely by breaking the rules), and with plaintive songs of rebellion or love.

Taymor’s brilliant cinematic recreation of Kahlo’s accident is a powerful example of how the art of film – with its use of motion, images, sounds, visual allusions and symbols – can palpably convey what words cannot. The chilling and devastating psychophysical experience of the fateful crash, imaginatively conceived in the film, invades the minds and bodies of the audience, transcending the narrative line. The aftermath of the accident is expressed in a surreal manner with skeletal puppets commissioned from the Brothers Quai.

Scheherazade may lack the mobility and appetites of male cultural heroes, but she transcends the narrow domestic space of the bedroom through her expansive narrative reach and embraces bold defiance as she sets about remaking the values of the culture she inhabits, using words alone. She not only arouses curiosity but also turns herself into a storytelling transvaluation machine, for she understands at the deepest level that words can change you. Behind her transformative art lurks the ruse of the disempowered, and Scheherazade, despite the physical constraints placed on her, uses language in ways that reveal what the philosopher J. L. Austin referred to as its “perlocutionary” power, its ability to persuade, teach, or inspire. Scheherazade operates at a level that is culturally productive and also biologically reproductive. Creative and procreative, she produces children with Shahriyar and also sets the stage in powerful ways for the literary progeny that spring from her story—the many female storytellers whom we will encounter in the chapters that follow.

We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it's like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.

The enemy of my soul didn't want me painting that day. To create meant that I would look a little bit like my Creator. To overcome the terrifying angst of the blank canvas meant I would forever have more compassion for other artists. You better believe as I placed the first blue and gray strokes onto the white emptiness before me, the "not good enough" statement was pulsing through my head in almost deafening tones... This parlaying lie is one of his favorite tactics to keep you disillusioned by disappointments. Walls go up, emotions run high, we get guarded, defensive, demotivated, and paralyzed by the endless ways we feel doomed to fail. This is when we quit. This is when we settle for the ease of facebook.... This is when we get a job to simply make money instead of pursuing our calling to make a difference. This is when we put the paintbrush down and don't even try. So there I was. Standing before my painted blue boat, making a choice of which voice to listen to. I'm convinced God was smiling. Pleased. Asking me to find delight in what is right. Wanting me to have compassion for myself by focusing on that part of my painting that expressed something beautiful. To just be eager to give that beauty to whoever dared to look at my boat. To create to love others. Not to beg them for validation. But the enemy was perverting all that. Perfection mocked my boat. The bow was too high, the details too elementary, the reflection on the water too abrupt, and the back of the boat too off-center. Disappointment demanded I hyper-focused on what didn't look quite right. It was my choice which narrative to hold on to: "Not good enough" or "Find delight in what is right." Each perspective swirled, begging me to declare it as truth. I was struggling to make peace with my painting creation, because I was struggling to make make peace with myself as God's creation. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress. We are imperfect because we are unfinished. So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. And that's when it hit me: I expect a perfection in me and in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can't I be? How many times have I let imperfections cause me to be too hard on myself and too harsh with others? I force myself to send a picture of my boat to at least 20 friends. I was determined to not not be held back by the enemy's accusations that my artwork wasn't good enough to be considered "real art". This wasn't for validation but rather confirmation that I could see the imperfections in my painting but not deem it worthless. I could see the imperfections in me and not deem myself worthless. It was an act of self-compassion. I now knew to stand before each painting with nothing but love, amazement, and delight. I refused to demand anything more from the artist. I just wanted to show up for every single piece she was so brave to put on display.. Might I just be courageous enough to stand before her work and require myself to find everything about it I love? Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my "live up" mentality for a "show up" one? It is so much more freeing to simply show up and be a finder of the good. Break from the secret disappointments. Let my brain venture down the tiny little opening of love.. And I realized what makes paintings so delightful. It's there imperfections. That's what makes it art. It's been touched by a human. It's been created by someone whose hands sweat and who can't possibly transfer divine perfection from what her eyes see to what her fingertips can create. It will be flawed.

RECONSTRUCTING OUR PAST The pathway of the A offers us a profound opportunity to transform our personal histories. It allows us to reevaluate the grades we assigned to others when we were children, grades that affect our lives now, as legends we live by. How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are but assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.

A biography of civilization does not consist exclusively of wars, politics, and acts of villainy, but also consist of the culture, art, religion, and communication methods of a society. The written word outlasts human life. We can understand how other civilizations lived by reviewing the account of great philosopher’s lives and ideas. We also acquire valuable knowledge of the cultural context of prior eras by reviewing the historical narrative left by ordinary people including their letters and journals describing everyday life and living conditions.

But then there are other cases… Cases in which the narrative of disease strays off the expected path, where the usual suspects all seem to have alibis, and the diagnosis is elusive. For these, the doctor must don her deerstalker cap and unravel the mystery. It is in these instances where medicine can rise once again to the level of an art and the doctor-detective must pick apart the tangled strands of illness, understand which questions to ask, recognize the subtle physical findings, and identify which tests might lead, finally, to the right diagnosis.

their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies? However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again, Our Lady of the Forest, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be grand mal writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away. I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—The Metamorphosis, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered. In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life. * * * Like

To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the wood, his own light-heartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced, is art.

Who told you that you were naked? Who have you been listening to?..' This is a tragic reminder that we humans have the strange capacity to live a soulless life. Our inner voice was never supposed to be simply an echo. Our inner voice was always to resonate with the voice of God. Every other voice will either make us less than we were intended to be or convince us that we are more than we really are. Neither self-loathing nor self-worship helps us find our authentic voice. It is only when our inner voice responds to the voice of God that we begin to truly find to find our own voice. As critical as it is for us to understand that art is always an extension of ourselves, the creative act is also an expression of our essence. It is equally important for us to realize that our guiding narrative determines the story we tell through our lives. Our inner voice not only informs us of who we are, but affects everything we touch. And in the end, becomes the driving force through which we strive to shape the world around us. The principal creative act described in Genesis chapter 1 begins with God speaking the universe into existence. God speaks out of who He is and everything in creation is a declaration of His glory.

I have found a church in art, a form of work that is also a form of worship—it is a means of understanding myself, all my past selves, and all of you as beloved. This is why I will never stop doing it, even if no publisher ever again wants to share the results. Ironically, this kind of investment in the process is a boon to those who seek publication. Tenacity is often cited as the most common characteristic of successful authors. Of the many talented people I’ve met—classmates, students, friends—many of them no longer write.18 The ones who have kept doing so have made it central to their lives both external and internal. Writing is hard. It is not the most apparently useful kind of work to do in the world. Most of us are not out here saving any lives but our own, though its power to do that (at least in my case) is uncontestable. The older I get, the less convinced I am about most things, but this is one of the great facts of my life.

However, medieval Islam did not display interest in all aspects of Greco-Roman civilization: Islam remained inimical to classical art, drama, and narrative. Moreover, as we saw in chapter 1, during the early Muslim conquests there was a conscious destruction of the monuments of the pre-Islamic past. And in Spain, historian al-Andalusi tells us that such rulers as the Umayyad Abd Allah (888–912) and the dictator Muhammad Ibn Abu Amir al-Mansur (c. 938–1002, known to Christians as Almanzor) had precious books of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, lexicography, history, philosophy and law burned for their presumably impious content.

How to we hold ourselves accountable -- the root of the word accountable meaning: how do we let the story of ourselves be told? How do we hold ourselves accountable to the things we've received and internalize: the knowledges and the unknowledges, the narratives, silences, and silences, that particularities? To hold ourselves accountable -- to truly hold ourselves, within the depth and vastness of our stories, and remain there, in their thrumming inconsolability-meaning that in our art, we bring to bear not our most powerful, authoritative, intelligent selves, but our most particular, our most precarious, our most dependent selves.

So do you want to be a passenger in someone else’s narrative? “No?” “You want to be empowered.” “You want creative agency.” “You want agency, period. Control.” “Over your art.” “Over your life, Bunny.” “All aspects of your life- physical, emotional, mental, spiritual… even-“ “You want to fuck, not be fucked.” Victoria says.

Ever since I first read Midori Snyder’s essay, ‘The Armless Maiden and the Hero’s Journey’ in The Journal of Mythic Arts, I couldn’t stop thinking about that particular strand of folklore and the application of its powerful themes to the lives of young women. There are many different versions of the tale from around the world, and the ‘Armless Maiden’ or ‘Handless Maiden’ are just two of the more familiar. But whatever the title, we are essentially talking about a narrative that speaks of the power of transformation – and, perhaps more significantly when writing young adult fantasy, the power of the female to transform herself. It’s a rite of passage; something that mirrors the traditional journey from adolescence to adulthood. Common motifs of the stories include – and I am simplifying pretty drastically here – the violent loss of hands or arms for the girl of the title, and their eventual re-growth as she slowly regains her autonomy and independence. In many accounts there is a halfway point in the story where a magician builds a temporary replacement pair of hands for the girl, magical hands and arms that are usually made entirely of silver. What I find interesting is that this isn’t where the story ends; the gaining of silver hands simply marks the beginning of a whole new test for our heroine.

De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” The narrator of the story, a teacher at a correspondence-based art school, writes a letter to his one talented pupil, urging her to invest in good oils and brushes, to commit to the life of the artist. “The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.

Judah and Jacob-Israel are not simple eponymous counters in an etiological tale (this is the flattening effect of some historical scholarship) but are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections as well as in their strengths. A histrionic Jacob blinded by excessive love and perhaps loving the excess; an impetuous, sometimes callous Judah, who is yet capable of candor when confronted with hard facts; a fiercely resolved, steel-nerved Tamar—all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature.

Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.

I think true freedom has nothing to do with choosing tasks that make us happy. I think true freedom has everything to do with choosing tasks that allow us to live into a vast and enormous Narrative. We craft our days and our nights to partner with God in our telling of His Story. Real freedom is the ability to tell God’s story with your unique voice. And here’s

Most of these super-sovereigns feel that God can comment if he wants to, but God must avoid getting loud. While God is welcome to his opinions, he is only one voice, and he doesn’t get extra points just for being God. The unstudied opinionated are prone to say, even to God, “Yes, but here’s what I think.” In such a world, classic apologetics has lost much of its force.

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars. But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all. To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want to get ahead. The truth is, you don’t. If you love and want to make movies about issues of social import, get your hands on Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network. Read it. Then watch the movie. Then read it again. If you love and want to make big blockbusters that also have great artistic merit, do the same thing with Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark screenplay and the movie made from it. Think about how the screenplays made you feel. And how the movies built from these screenplays did or didn’t hit you the same way. […] This sounds basic, right? That’s because it is basic. And it’s true. All the information you need is the movies and screenplays you love. And in the books you’ve read and the relationships you’ve had and your ability to use those things.

There is a beautiful dialogue called “Icaromenippus, an Aerial Expedition” by the poet Lucian in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and sees the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people, the biggest estates, and entire empires look from above. All their battles and concerns were made petty in perspective.

The common cultural narratives would tell me that I somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser, that I just didn’t “have it,” that I gave up on my dream and that maybe I let myself succumb to the pressures of society. But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

THE NARRATOR: Regan believes there are two ways to manipulate a man: either to let him pursue you or to let him pursue you in a way that makes him feel he’s the pursuit. Marc is the latter, and he loves her the same way she loves art, which Regan considers a pleasing form of irony. Because even when you know everything about how a piece is made, you’re still only seeing the surface.

Life is one never-ending edit... In writing about my life, editing is time travel, collapsing, folding, expanding time. Gathering disparate wispy threads into neat chapters and sections. Memories rearranged, pulled apart, de-emphasized. Secrets and fears erased in between drafts only to emerge again as tangents to be deleted or set aside. Invisible track changes that reframe a narrative only to be solidified, trashed, and reborn. Filtering truths until the most essential elements remain. Em dashes that link; ellipses that prolong. A constant telling and retelling until the act itself threatens to weaken the blood and guts of a piece. Editing is a dialogue with demons, ancestors, and the future; a witchy dark art that summons the forces of the universe into legibility.

Corvallis sometimes thought back on the day, three decades ago, when Richard Forthrast had reached down and plucked him out of his programming job at Corporation 9592 and given him a new position, reporting directly to Richard. Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard had answered, simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people,” was “weird stuff.” It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff.” As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. About then, he’d been interrupted by a spate of urgent text messages from one of the company’s novelists, who had run aground on some desolate narrative shore and needed moral support, and so the discussion had gone no further. Someone had intervened and written a sufficiently vague job description for Corvallis and made up a job title that would make it possible for him to get the level of compensation he was expecting. So it had all worked out fine. And it made for a fun story to tell on the increasingly rare occasions when people were reminiscing about Dodge back in the old days. But the story was inconclusive in the sense that Dodge had been interrupted before he could really get to the essence of what “weird stuff” actually was and why it was so important. As time went on, however, Corvallis understood that this very inconclusiveness was really a fitting and proper part of the story.

Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn, as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show.

Someone might ask, if the dynamic of innovation consists of schema and revision, where does true originality come from? Is there no single work we can point to as the ultimate source of this or that new storrytelling strategy? I'm inclined to say there is no such source. Artists working in mass art forms find originality by revising schemas in circulation, or by revising ones that have fallen into disuse.

Gervex's painting had a lurid and well-known literary source: it was based on Alfred de Musset's poem "Rolla," published in 1833 and 1840. The poem, a paradigm of July Monarchy romanticism, chronicles the disgrace that befalls Jacques Rolla, a son of the bourgeoisie, in the big city. The narrative of his decline — he squandered his fortune and committed suicide — is interleaved with lamentations over the moral and spiritual decadence of contemporary life. Thenineteen-year-old Rolla becomes the "most debauched man" in Paris, "where vice is the cheapest, the oldest and the most fertile in the world." The poem tells a second story as well, that of Marie (or Maria or Marion), a pure young girl who becomes a degraded urban prostitute. Her story amplifies the poet's theme — a world in moral disarray - and provides the instrument of, and a sympathetic companion for, Rolla's climactic self-destruction. Musset is clear about his young prostitute's status: she was forced into a prostitution de la misère by economic circumstances ("what had debased her was, alas, poverty /And not love of gold"), and he frequently distinguishes her situation from that of the venal women of the courtesan rank ("Your loves are golden, lively and poetic; . . . you are not for sale at all"). He is also insistent about the tawdry circumstances in which the young woman had to practice her miserable profession ("the shameful curtains of that foul retreat," "in a hovel," "the walls of this gloomy and ramshackle room"). The segments of the poem from which Gervex drew his story — and which were published in press reviews of the painting — are these: With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed; In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror Made him tremble to the bone. Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night He had spent his last coins. His friends knew it. And he, on arriving, Had taken their hand and given his word that In the morning no one would see him alive. When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs, He went and leaned out the window. Rolla turned to look at Marie. She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep. And thus both fled the cruelties of fate, The child in sleep, and the man in death! It was a moment of inaction, then, that Gervex chose to paint - that of weary repose for her and melancholic contemplation for Rolla, following the night of paid sex and just prior to his suicide.

There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world.

The notion of "the Bible as literature," though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of "Dante as literature," given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or "religious," than most of the Bible.)

In the campaign of 1876, Robert G. Ingersoll came to Madison to speak. I had heard of him for years; when I was a boy on the farm a relative of ours had testified in a case in which Ingersoll had appeared as an attorney and he had told the glowing stories of the plea that Ingersoll had made. Then, in the spring of 1876, Ingersoll delivered the Memorial Day address at Indianapolis. It was widely published shortly after it was delivered and it startled and enthralled the whole country. I remember that it was printed on a poster as large as a door and hung in the post-office at Madison. I can scarcely convey now, or even understand, the emotional effect the reading of it produced upon me. Oblivious of my surroundings, I read it with tears streaming down my face. It began, I remember: "The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life.We hear the sounds of preparation--the music of boisterous drums--the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see the pale cheeks of women and the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers..." I was fairly entranced. he pictured the recruiting of the troops, the husbands and fathers with their families on the last evening, the lover under the trees and the stars; then the beat of drums, the waving flags, the marching away; the wife at the turn of the lane holds her baby aloft in her arms--a wave of the hand and he has gone; then you see him again in the heat of the charge. It was wonderful how it seized upon my youthful imagination. When he came to Madison I crowded myself into the assembly chamber to hear him: I would not have missed it for every worldly thing I possessed. And he did not disappoint me. A large handsome man of perfect build, with a face as round as a child's and a compelling smile--all the arts of the old-time oratory were his in high degree. He was witty, he was droll, he was eloquent: he was as full of sentiment as an old violin. Often, while speaking, he would pause, break into a smile, and the audience, in anticipation of what was to come, would follow him in irresistible peals of laughter. I cannot remember much that he said, but the impression he made upon me was indelible. After that I got Ingersoll's books and never afterward lost an opportunity to hear him speak. He was the greatest orater, I think, that I have ever heard; and the greatest of his lectures, I have always thought, was the one on Shakespeare. Ingersoll had a tremendous influence upon me, as indeed he had upon many young men of that time. It was not that he changed my beliefs, but that he liberated my mind. Freedom was what he preached: he wanted the shackles off everywhere. He wanted men to think boldly about all things: he demanded intellectual and moral courage. He wanted men to follow wherever truth might lead them. He was a rare, bold, heroic figure.

It is the exceptional novelist today who would say of himself, as Henry James did, that he ‘loved the story as story’, by which James meant the story apart from any overt ideational intention it might have, simply as, like any primitive tale, it brings into play what he called ‘the blessed faculty of wonder’. Already in James’s day, narration as a means by which the reader was held spellbound, as the old phrase put it, had come under suspicion. And the dubiety grew to the point where Walter Benjamin could say some three decades ago that the art of story-telling was moribund. T. S. Eliot’s famous earlier statement, that the novel had reached its end with Flaubert and James, would seem to be not literally true; the novel does seem to persist in some sort of life. But we cannot fail to see how uneasy it is with the narrative mode, which once made its vital principle, and how its practitioners seek by one device or another to evade or obscure or palliate the act of telling.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by — has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster. [...] Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but — demanding nothing of comparable value in return — perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader — titillates, repulses, excites, transports him — without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." - from "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

Memory—uncorrected, uncorroborated, and (by its very nature) unreliable—is what allows us to retroactively create the blueprints of our lives, because it is often impossible to make sense of our lives when we’re inside them, when the narratives are still unfolding: This can’t be happening. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now? Only by looking backward are we able answer those questions, only through the assist of memory. And who knows how memory will answer? Who will it blame? Who will it forgive?

What is a novel, anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definitive answer to that, beyond stating the more or less obvious facts that it is a literary narrative of some length which purports, on the reverse of the title page, not to be true, but seeks nevertheless to convince its readers that it is. It's typical of the cynicism of our age that, if you write a novel, everyone assumes it's about real people, thinly disguised; but if you write an autobiography everyone assumes you're lying your head off. Part of this is right, because every artist is, among other things, a con-artist. We con-artists do tell the truth, in a way; but, as Emily Dickenson said, we tell it slant. By indirection we find direction out -- so here, for easy reference, is an elimination-dance list of what novels are not. -- Novels are not sociological textbooks, although they may contain social comment and criticism. -- Novels are not political tracts, although "politics" -- in the sense of human power structures -- is inevitably one of their subjects. But if the author's main design on us is to convert us to something -- - whether that something be Christianity, capitalism, a belief in marriage as the only answer to a maiden's prayer, or feminism, we are likely to sniff it out, and to rebel. As Andre Gide once remarked, "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written." -- Novels are not how-to books; they will not show you how to conduct a successful life, although some of them may be read this way. Is Pride and Prejudice about how a sensible middle-class nineteenth-century woman can snare an appropriate man with a good income, which is the best she can hope for out of life, given the limitations of her situation? Partly. But not completely. -- Novels are not, primarily, moral tracts. Their characters are not all models of good behaviour -- or, if they are, we probably won't read them. But they are linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings and human beings divide behaviour into good and bad. The characters judge each other, and the reader judges the characters. However, the success of a novel does not depend on a Not Guilty verdict from the reader. As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago -- that arch-villain -- as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I'd bet you're more likely to know which play Iago is in. -- But although a novel is not a political tract, a how-to-book, a sociology textbook or a pattern of correct morality, it is also not merely a piece of Art for Art's Sake, divorced from real life. It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials. -- In short, novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted, not because they're perverse, but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the human condition, and they do so using a medium which is notoriously slippery -- namely, language itself.

Stories like Bukowski’s are the bread and butter of our cultural narrative. Bukowski’s life embodies the American Dream: a man fights for what he wants, never gives up, and eventually achieves his wildest dreams. It’s practically a movie waiting to happen. We all look at stories like Bukowski’s and say, “See? He never gave up. He never stopped trying. He always believed in himself. He persisted against all the odds and made something of himself!” It is then strange that on Bukowski’s tombstone, the epitaph reads: “Don’t try.

Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art. Call them vignettes, these things we finger and drop again into their shoeboxes.

The fiction reader is a nonconformist, a rebel, and the reason for his rebellion and nonconformity is the unbearable straitjacket of human life: the fact that we have only one life -- meaning, there is no other after death -- and also that we have only one life -- meaning, we cannot be more than one person at the same time. "I read fiction," says Philip Roth ... "to be free from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own." Reading fiction is an experience of guided imagination, or perhaps an experience in which another's imagination (an imagination of greater richness, greater penetration, greater associative capacity than ours) leads us by the hand to places where we have not been. We read to leave our attention and our conscience in the hands of someone who will take them to good places, we read to be possessed by that way of knowing the world that is only available through the language of fiction. --from "The Licentiate's Children," translated from the Spanish by Phil Klay.

What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness—intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more; resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard; stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge; fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived; outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more?

There is no point, to be sure, in pretending that all the contradictions among different sources in biblical texts can be happily harmonized by the perception of some artful design. It seems reasonable enough, however, to suggest that we may still not fully understand what would have been perceived as a real contradiction by an intelligent Hebrew writer of the early Iron Age, so that apparently conflicting versions of the same event set side by side, far from troubling their original audience, may have sometimes been perfectly justified in a kind of logic we no longer apprehend.

In one of the notebooks he carried with him, Nietzsche wrote, "We have art lest we perish from the truth." For those leading afterlives, the unadorned facts of what's happened to them can be brutish to bear on their own terms. Contextualizing that hardship through our intellects and imaginations is a critical salve, an act of transforming our perception that can guide and color how we experience our lives. We can knead our experiences into a larger arc, providing the cohesion that helps us form new narrative identities. Or we can look deeper into our afterlives until we ferret out a way of construing them that rouses our spirits or points them toward salvation. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion delivered a pronouncement that was a natural descendants to Nietzsche's line, an admission of how desperately we rely on the subjective fictions we construct: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those stories--whether they take the form of redemption narratives, personal parables, or the pearlescent beliefs we kneel before each day like shrines offering eternal grace--can elevate our lives and serve as the vessels of private deliverance.

That spring everyone in Judy Chicago’s class collaborated on a 24 hour performance called Route 126. The curator Moira Roth recalls: “the group created a sequence of events throughout the day along the highway. The day began with Suzanne Lacy’s Car Renovation in which the group decorated an abandoned car…and ended with the women standing on a beach watching Nancy Youdelman, wrapped in yards of gossamer silk, slowly wade out to sea until she drowned, apparently…” There’s a fabulous photo taken by Faith Wilding of the car—a Kotex-pink jalopy washed up on desert rocks. The trunk’s flung open and underneath it’s painted cuntblood red. Strands of desert grass spill from the crumpled hood like Rapunzel’s fucked-up hair. According to Performance Anthology—Source Book For A Decade Of California Art, this remarkable event received no critical coverage at the time though contemporaneous work by Baldessari, Burden, Terry Fox boasts bibliographies several pages long. Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the ’70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.” The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.

It’s important to remember that most television is not just entertainment: it’s also narrative. And it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing. In the C.Y. writers today, the narrative patterns to which literate Americans are most regularly exposed are televised. And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient — not necessarily even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end — openly acknowledged — is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art." - from"Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.

When one completely denies oneself, there are no words to speak. What can one say? Praise and blame are the same to one; there is nothing to be said. And how is this to be attained? It is to be attained, not only by prayer or by worship or by believing in God. It is to be attained by forgetting oneself in God. The belief in God is the first step. By the belief in God, is attained the losing oneself in God. If one is able to do it, one has attained a power which is beyond human comprehension. The process of attaining this is called Fana by the Sufis. Fana is not necessarily a destruction in God. Fana results in what may be called a resurrection in God, which is symbolized by the picture of Christ. The Christ on the cross is narrative of Fana; it means 'I am not.' And the idea of resurrection explains the next stage, which is Baqa, which means 'Thou art.' and this means rising towards All-might. The divine spirit is to be recognized in that rising towards All-might. Fana is not attained by torturing oneself, by tormenting oneself, by giving oneself a great many troubles, as many ascetics do. For even after torturing themselves, they will not come to that realization if they were not meant to. It is by denying one's little self, the false self, which covers one's real self, in which the essence of divine Being is to be found.

Reviewers of every ilk like to feel they are above a work of art. If it puzzles them or if they are intimidated, they are more than likely to trash it. Many artists are not intellectuals, but Burden was, and her work reflected her wide learning. Her references spanned many fields and were often impossible to track. There was also a literary, narrative quality to her art that many resisted. I am convinced that her knowledge alone acted as an irritant to some reviewers. I once had a conversation with a man who had excoriated her first one-woman show. When I brought up his review and offered a defense of her work, he was hostile. He was not a stupid man and had written well on some artists I admired. He had attacked Burden’s work as confused and naïve, the very opposite, in fact, of what it was. I realized that he had been incapable of a fair-minded appraisal because, although he prided himself on his sophistication, the multiple meanings of her carefully orchestrated texts had eluded him, and he had projected his own disorientation onto the work. His last words to me were “I hated it, okay? I just hated it. I don’t give a damn about what she was referring to.” That conversation has stayed with me, not as a story about Harriet Burden so much as a lesson for myself: Beware of the violent response and the sophisms you may use to explain it.

What is it, then, that makes the work of Giotto in Padua and Assisi a landmark in the history of art? It is the rhythmic composition, drawing the eye from every angle to the center of interest; the dignity of quiet motion, the soft and luminous coloring, the majestic flow of the narrative, the restraint of expression even in deep feeling, the grandeur of the calm that bathes these troubled scenes; and, now and then, the naturalistic portraiture of men, women, and children not as studied in past art but as seen and felt in the movement of life. These were the components of Giotto’s triumph over Byzantine rigidity and gloom, these were the secrets of his enduring influence. For

The beauty of theatre was that it was a moving, changing art form—only those who watch the same performance night in after night out see the real naturalistic drama at work—the small changes, adjustments, changes in articulation or intonation, the addition of a cough or hiccup, a longer pause rife with more (or less) meaning, the character’s movement across the stage a step slower, a step closer to the audience, the change of a word here and there, an overall change in mood and tone, the actors becoming (or not) the characters more fully, blending in with them, losing themselves in the lines, in the characterizations, in a drama that is simultaneously unfolding and becoming more and more verisimilitudinous as time marches on. This is the real narrative—while the character changes on stage in an instant, the play changes slowly, unnoticeably (unnoticeable to those closest to it perhaps), like the face of a man in his thirties, like his beliefs about life, his motives, all slowly as if duplicating itself day by day, filling itself and becoming more and more itself, the rehearsal of Self, the dress rehearsal of Self, the performance of Self, the extended performance of Self, the encore…—it appears to be the same show, played over and over again with the same details to different crowds, and yet something happens. Something changes. It is not the same show.

Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus following our spiritually-forming text. Liturgy keeps us in touch with all the action that has been and is being generated by the Spirit as given witness in the biblical text. Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption. Understood this way, 'liturgical' has little to do with choreography in the chancel or an aesthetics of the sublime. It is obedient, participatory, listening to Holy Scripture in the company of the holy community through time (our two-thousand years of responding to this text) and in space (our friends in christ all over the world). High-church Anglicans, revivalistic Baptists, hands-in-the-air praising charismatics, and Quakers sitting in a bare room in silence are all required to read and live this text liturgically, participating in the holy community's reading of Holy Scripture. there is nothing 'churchy' or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic 'story-ing,' making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions.

The story of The Rape of the Lock, sylphs and all, could have been told, though not so effectively, in prose. The Odyssey and the Comedy have something to say that could have been said well, though not equally well, without verse. Most of the qualities Aristotle demands of a tragedy could occur in a prose play. Poetry and prose, however different in language, overlapped, almost coincided, in content. But modern poetry, if it ‘says’ anything at all, if it aspires to ‘mean’ as well as to ‘be’, says what prose could not say in any fashion. To read the old poetry involved learning a slightly different language; to read the new involves the unmaking of your mind, the abandonment of all the logical and narrative connections which you use in reading prose or in conversation. You must achieve a trance-like condition in which images, associations, and sounds operate without these. Thus the common ground between poetry and any other use of words is reduced almost to zero. In that way poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; ‘purer’ in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can’t do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do. Unfortunately, but inevitably, this process is accompanied by a steady diminution in the number of its readers. Some have blamed the poets for this, and some the people. I am not sure that there need be any question of blame. The more any instrument is refined and perfected for some particular function, the fewer those who have the skill, or the occasion, to handle it must of course become. Many use ordinary knives and few use surgeons’ scalpels. The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. The explication of poetry is already well entrenched as a scholastic and academic exercise. The intention to keep it there, to make proficiency in it the indispensable qualification for white-collared jobs, and thus to secure for poets and their explicators a large and permanent (because a conscript) audience, is avowed. It may possibly succeed. Without coming home any more than it now does to the ‘business and bosoms’ of most men, poetry may, in this fashion, reign for a millennium; providing material for the explication which teachers will praise as an incomparable discipline and pupils will accept as a necessary moyen de parvenir. But this is speculation.

I don’t think we can separate the art from the artist, nor should we need to. I think we can look at a piece of art as the transformed or redeemed aspect of an artist, and marvel at the miraculous journey that the work of art has taken to arrive at the better part of the artist’s nature. Perhaps beauty can be measured by the distance it has travelled to come into being. That bad people make good art is a cause for hope. To be human is to transgress, of that we can be sure, yet we all have the opportunity for redemption, to rise above the more lamentable parts of our nature, to do good in spite of ourselves, to make beauty from the unbeautiful, and to have the courage to present our better selves to the world. The moon is high and yellow in the sky outside my window. It is a display of sublime beauty. It is also a cry for mercy — that this world is worth saving. Mostly, though, it is a defiant articulation of hope that, despite the state of the world, the moon continues to shine. Hope too resides in a gesture of kindness from one broken individual to another or, indeed, we can find it in a work of art that comes from the hand of a wrongdoer. These expressions of transcendence, of betterment, remind us that there is good in most things, rarely only evil. Once we awaken to this fact, we begin to see goodness everywhere, and this can go some way in setting right the current narrative that humans are shit and the world is fucked.

Artistic license, also known poetic license, narrative license, and licentiate poetical, is a colloquial term (employed occasionally as a euphemism), which denotes a license to distort the facts, alter the conventions of grammar or language, or reword pre-existing text by an artist in the name of art. Liberal usage of an artistic license to restructure basic facts can result because of conscious or unconscious acts. Artistic embellishment or misrepresentation of the facts and distortion or alteration of the compositional text frequently is the by-product of both intentional and unintentional additions and omissions. An artistic license, employed at an artist’s discretion to fill in details or gloss over factual and historical gaps, raises some ethical issues. Many stories retold verbatim would bore an audience or require inordinate time and resources to reenact, describe, and view. A dramatic license eliminates mundane details and tedious facts, spruces up the picturesque background, and glamorizes the characters’ temperament and action scenes. Is it wrong to be inventive with the facts? What degree of embroidery of a series of events and the characters’ mannerisms and attributes is acceptable? How can anyone paste together a set of facts into an interesting or compelling narrative that has literary value without engaging in some creative organization to enhance the theatrical retelling and to create juxtaposition of ideas and values?

These narratives are interesting in and of themselves, but Nelson isn’t just airing her feelings out. She’s bent on using these experiences as ways of prying the culture open, of investigating what it is that’s being so avidly defended and policed. Binaries, mostly: the overwhelming need, to which the left is no more immune than the right, for categories to remain pure and unpolluted. Gay people marrying or becoming pregnant, individuals migrating from one gender to another, let alone refusing to commit to either, occasions immense turbulence in thought systems that depend upon orderly separation and partition, which is part of the reason that the trans-rights movement has proved so depressingly threatening to certain quarters of feminist thought.

Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.

The ability to perceive and feel, along with the intricacies of family relations unites us as a species. Poets collect succulent physical sense impressions and heartfelt feelings with equal enthusiasm. Poets have the alacrity to see and feel what most of us fail to perceive or otherwise ignore, take for granted, or attempt to forget. Similar to the art of Ukiyo-e (a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings depicting traditional Japanese scenes), poets make the nothingness of our lives come alive. Poets design their sun-filled salvations out of the minutia of nature and the seemingly ordinary happenings of life. Although essayist can also explore the liminal spaces of daily life by probing the avenues of common experiences, essayists are more interested in testing ideas and principles than in invoking memories, sharing feelings, or eliciting emotions.

Such was my understanding of the history of art – its ‘narrative’, I ought to call it – until I met my wife. It is barely more sophisticated now, though I’ve picked up a few things along the way, enough to get by, so that my art appreciation is almost on a par with my French. In the early days of our relationship Connie was quite evangelical and bought me several books, second-hand editions because we were in our happy-but-poor phase. Gombrich’s The Story of Art was one, The Shock of the New another, given specifically to stop me tutting at modern art. Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it, and they’re terrific books, both of them, though I’ve retained almost nothing of their contents. Perhaps I should have given Connie a basic primer in organic chemistry in return, but she never expressed an interest.

Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore. Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator; he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise. For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft carries the other to cities where people speak a different language, or look at him differently, while the sun rises from the other direction with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey is motionless; as the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand knows it returns to the port from which it must start. Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you, why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you: to circle yourself and your island with this art.

The pursuit of the past makes you aware, whether you are novelist or historian, of the dangers of your own fallibility and inbuilt bias. The writer of history is a walking anachronism, a displaced person, using today’s techniques to try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself. He must try to work authentically, hearing the words of the past, but communicating in a language the present understands. The historian, the biographer, the writer of fiction work within different constraints, but in a way that is complementary, not opposite. The novelist’s trade is never just about making things up. The historian’s trade is never simply about stockpiling facts. Even the driest, most data-driven research involves an element of interpretation. Deep research in the archives can be reported in tabular form and lists, by historians talking to each other. But to talk to their public, they use the same devices as all storytellers – selection, elision, artful arrangement.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

When she started with the first empty canvas, she didn’t know what she was going to paint, she just let her paint brushes glide and they religiously followed the trajectory of her angst; the choice of colours and the strokes, they were all a reflection of what was going through her mind. The reds were the embers within her that refused to die. The blues were the rare instances when she was spent by her grief. The blacks were her moments of absolute weakness, the colour of the bottomless pit within her that she had plunged into, falling through and through. The brush strokes moved around blank canvases like snakes with fangs of elixir that filled her scars with a deluge of hope and a gale of faith in herself. The colours spoke to her in whispers, narrating their own tale while she poured out hers to them. They allowed her to channel her life through them. They listened. They cared. They laughed. They cried. They reassured her that there was life waiting ahead, staring at her past, urging her forward with eager arms. And Preeti rushed into them with her brush in hand that rose along with her and fell along with her.

As unconventional as I need to be. An absolute freedom exists on the blank page, so let’s use it. I have from the start been wary of the fake, the automatic. I tried not to force my sense of life as many-layered and ambiguous, while keeping in mind some sense of transaction, of a bargain struck, between me and the ideal reader. Domestic fierceness within the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind of evolution—these are some of the themes. I have tried to achieve objectivity in the form of narrative. My work is meditation, not pontification, so that interviews like this one feel like a forcing of the growth, a posing. I think of my books not as sermons or directives in a war of ideas but as objects, with different shapes and textures and the mysteriousness of anything that exists. My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

Some arts move in time, like music; others are presented in space, like painting. In both cases the organizing principle is recurrence, which is called rhythm when it is temporal and pattern when it is spatial. Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pattern of music. In other words, all arts may be conceived both temporally and spatially. The score of a musical composition may be studied all at once; a picture may be seen as the track of an intricate dance of the eye. Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundaries and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic or pictorial image atthe other. The attempts to get as near to these boundaries as possible form the main body of what is called experimental writing. We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means.

Female sensibility is layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, lifestories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, ink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon, roots skins, walls, yellow, flowers, streams, puzzles, questions, stuffing, sewing, fluffing, satin, hearts, tearing, tearing, tearing, tying, decorating, baking, feeding, holding, listening, seeing thru the layers, oil, varnish, shellac, jell, paste, glue, seeds, thread, more, not less, repetition, women critics, women, writers, women artists, either nourishing us or eating us up alive, tokenism, curators, universities, tokenism, fear of other women to acknowledge female sensibility, hostile boy artists, accepting men artists, separating the men from the boys, dividing women, piece of pie-ism, money, art, sex, beasts, layers, symphonies, multi-roled, multi-part, stories, narrative, paint/flesh, serious, overwhelming, soft, hard, women working, working women, hanging, dangling, breaking, being fruity, angry, naïve, born again and trying to describe hot white flesh ties.

STARLIGHT and THUNDER The Limits of Art is an anthological collection for the ages...for a lifetime. A veritable ark containing excerpts from the sound and fury representative of the finest literary scriveners the world has yet produced. Unequivocally, intellectual nourishment breeds a fire in the mind...a conflagration of ideas and incendiary thoughts that furnish the spirit with conviction and courage to confront the ballet and ballistics of life with passion, wit, tenderness, reason, resolve, humor, imagination and unconditional curiosity. Amidst the clamor brought forth by the alarums and excursions of modern day pontifications, nevertheless, conform and commit your mind to the abolition of ignorance! Accede your sensibilities to the rapture of beauty and her ineffable grace. For beauty is enchantment, a romantic allegiance to the rhapsodic seduction celebratory of the ephemeral, the eternal and the esoteric nature and narratives of fictive splendor, which valorously emanate from this voluptuous volume. This magisterial tome is a figurative brocade of both starlight and thunder transcribed into an insatiable verbal delirium groping toward an unbridled exposition on life’s wonders and mysteries. Drink mightily from its gilded chalice.

This week we'll be learning about key elements of high quality picture books. Using the award winner lists in our course materials, select one picture book and share why it received its award. For example, Abuela is listed in the 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know. According to Publishers Weekly, this is why it's so good: "In this tasty trip, Rosalba is "always going places" with her grandmother--abuela . During one of their bird-feeding outings to the park, Rosalba wonders aloud, "What if I could fly?" Thus begins an excursion through the girl's imagination as she soars high above the tall buildings and buses of Manhattan, over the docks and around the Statue of Liberty with Abuela in tow. Each stop of the glorious journey evokes a vivid memory for Rosalba's grandmother and reveals a new glimpse of the woman's colorful ethnic origins. Dorros's text seamlessly weaves Spanish words and phrases into the English narrative, retaining a dramatic quality rarely found in bilingual picture books. Rosalba's language is simple and melodic, suggesting the graceful images of flight found on each page. Kleven's ( Ernst ) mixed-media collages are vibrantly hued and intricately detailed, the various blended textures reminiscent of folk art forms. Those searching for solid multicultural material would be well advised to embark.

But maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all paintings, are actually sitting there hating. Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it. Maybe it’s not a shadow climbing the wall behind her, but smoke from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred. I’m struck by the naive notion of taking the girl home, painting clothes on her, black clothes maybe, painting her into a new framework, as the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk does to Anna Karenina in Places Far from Ellesmere. In this book, van Herk wants to save Anna from being another woman character in literary history who’s crushed by a train, and she plucks Anna from Tolstoy’s novel and gives her a new frame, a new text. She demonstrates how literature and art can tamper with their own past, create new bonds. As far as I know, no one has tried this witchcraft on Munch and his Puberty (she doesn’t even have a name), but now I want to paint or rewrite the girl in the painting, save her, save us. Because it’s definitely just as much about me, about saving myself from the position of a contemporary subject passively accepting the narratives offered it by past art, past stories about gender, expression, hierarchy. I want to save myself from nodding in acknowledgement to Munch, to 1890, from the outside, with insight, and accepting that Puberty is the mirror art has installed for me.

My best friend growing up was a boy named Barry,” Buzan recalled, sitting outside on his patio with his pink shirt unbuttoned and a pair of large, wraparound geriatric sunglasses protecting his eyes. “He was always in the 1-D classes, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like ‘Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.’ There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces’ class, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew—much more than I knew—in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one. “And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn’t know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn’t, and they called him the worst, when he was the best. I mean, there could be no more antipodal environment. So I began to question: What is intelligence? Who says? Who says you’re smart? Who says you’re not smart? And what do they mean by that?” Those questions, at least according to Buzan’s tidy personal narrative, dogged him until he got to college. Buzan’s introduction

unexpected and inexplicable that emerged along with the generated responses had to do with the differences between happiness and sadness, children and adults, not being all they’re cracked up to be, much to our scientific chagrin: a change in the rules. Intensity is the unassimilable. For present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect. There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered. Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect.2 Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism. Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion.3 But one of the clearest lessons of this first story is that emotion and affect—if affect is intensity—follow different logics and pertain to different orders. An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits,

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease. This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.