Day: September 1, 2007

Jonathan Lethem and Janna Levin:

Lethem: People take it as a given that the world is presented “as is” on film. When in fact, optically, it’s very unlike what our eyes, and our experiences, present us with. You might be interested in reading the essays of Stan Brakhage, a highly experimental filmmaker who tried to start at the beginning again and not take the narrative construction, the editing assumptions, and the camera-placement assumptions of traditional film for granted, but begin again at optics and ask how we can make film more like what it’s like to look around. His films have this constant movement. They’re almost —

Levin: Oh, interesting. Unbearable.

Lethem: — almost unbearable at times, but they’re abstract art. They’re like a Kandinsky painting. And in that sense, they seem to derive a connection to —

Levin: Actual experience. But there’s that irony again: The closer you try to get to the actual experience, the sort of more abstract and removed it becomes at the same time. [via]

Michael Chabon:

AVC: Do you use research to submerge yourself into the outlook of a particular place?

MC: Research is part of it. I do a lot of research, reading, investigating, and talking to people, if that seems appropriate. But ultimately, it boils down to imagination. I’m afraid that sounds evasive or flip or insufficient or something. I always think of that famous story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman working on Marathon Man. To prepare for the drilling scene, Dustin Hoffman starved himself for three days, didn’t shave, slept in his clothes, and arrived on set looking like a total wreck. Laurence Olivier said, “What on earth are you doing?” Dustin Hoffman said, “I’m preparing for the scene.” Olivier said, “Have you ever considered acting?” [Laughs.] All the preparation in the world doesn’t avail you if you can’t make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you’ve created, to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.

I also like his admonition that “it’s never your defense as a novelist to say, ‘But it’s true.'” It ties in nicely with some of what Lethem and Levin talk about, how art creates truth not simply by reproducing reality. The “but it really happened this way!” argument is something I heard more than once in my college writing workshops. Fine, but that doesn’t make it interesting or believable or real.

It seems like William Gibson agrees:

TVP: Do you think that from your perspective, reality caught up to science fiction in certain ways? Just by creating so surreal a contemporary landscape that it parallels Sci-Fi?

WG: Well, in a sense, although I think when I started, one of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940’s is the 1940’s. George Orwell’s 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can’t be about the future. It’s about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can’t envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.

I also started with the assumption that all fiction is speculative. That all fiction is an attempt to make a model of reality and any model of reality is necessarily speculative because it’s generated by an individual writer. It can’t be absolute. Fiction is never reality. [via]

Let’s forget about the fact that there is something bizarreal — most comical — about Texas prison authorities believing that a sports history could lead to “the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots.”

Let’s forget that they are denying a man reading material in the last hours of his life.

There is something repugnant about the fact that they think a book — any book — would be the source of resistance, but not the basic reality that Gov. Rick Perry has executed 159 people since he took office in 2001. Or not the fact that the people on the row have no civil rights, no access to radio or television, or even arts and crafts. It reminds me of the words of Carl Oglesby from Students for a Democratic Society, who said, “It isn’t the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it’s the troubles that cause the rebels.”

I do like the idea of the contest quite a lot — a “72-hour exile of writer’s block” — but I’m having a real tough time putting it into practice.

But zombies. Oh man, zombies. Zombies are the anti-vampires. They are decay, and numbness, and perfect, consuming conformity. They are an inevitable slow threat, something that happens gradually and then suddenly. They look manageable at first, and by the time the situation is out of control, the situation is so out of control that there’s nothing you can do. And part of the horror of the “other” — part of what makes them so incomprehensible and appalling — is that zombies don’t want anything. You can’t negotiate with them, and you can’t appease them. They are coming for you, and you have to get out of the way — but you can’t stay out of the way, because they’re going to follow you, and they won’t stop until they get you.

Okay, she’s convinced me; I’m adding The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z to my reading list.