Nat Tate

One of my favorite writers is William Boyd. He discusses his creation of his most realistic character, Nat Tate, for the Guardian.

From the piece...

I put together the details of Nat Tate's life fairly swiftly. Born in New Jersey in 1928, he had been orphaned as a young boy and adopted by a rich couple who lived in Long Island. Showing some aptitude for art, he went to art school and then – funded by his doting father – set himself up as an artist in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. New York was becoming the centre of all that was fashionable in modern painting and Nat began to enjoy some acclaim in the 1950s as a young painter, and was linked with the artists who formed part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. But as the decade ended Nat Tate was in a bad way. He was drinking too much and he had been profoundly shaken by two encounters with unequivocal artistic genius – namely Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Nat had met them both in France – the one trip he took abroad in his life.

Disturbed and made insecure by the meeting with these two contemporary giants of the art world, Nat had looked again at his own art and whatever talent it displayed and had found it seriously wanting. Depressed by this self-knowledge, he gathered together everything he could find of his paintings and drawings – some 99% of his output – and burned them in a fervid auto da fé over one weekend. He then committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry as it crossed the Hudson River from New York towards New Jersey. It was 12 January 1960. His body was never found.

Another member of the Modern Painters editorial board was David Bowie (we had joined the board at the same time). Bowie, with some collaborators, had set up a small publishing company called 21 Publishing and he suggested we publish the story I had written about Nat Tate as a small, beautifully produced, coffee-table art-monograph. I agreed, unhesitatingly.

Why Teens Should Read Adult Fiction

Salon states the case.

From the piece...

The argument about whether young-adult fiction has become too adult in its subject matter is a long-standing one. My concern is not this debate — in fact, I consider it to be moot. The YA category is a marketing distinction, not a moral one, however much parents would like it to be a synonym for “safe.”

But you are raising a child, possibly the least safe enterprise imaginable. And if this child is also a reader, there is a high probability that, closely preceding adolescence, his or her literary curiosity will hit an exponential curve — one that will be made apparent in a taste for books intended for the adult market. Let’s call this the V.C. Andrews Curve, after the author of “Flowers in the Attic.” It can be attributed more or less to two phenomena: first, with a simple increase in reading comprehension, adult genre fiction will be of considerable appeal owing to the accessibility of the prose and story lines. Second, irrespective of age, human beings have an innate attraction to the dramatization of issues around life’s central mysteries: its genesis and termination. Put another way, not only will your kids survive an exposure to violence and sexuality in books, but it is crucial to their moral development.

So the VCA Curve should not be resisted. It should be shouted from the rooftops: Your child is a human being! A cool one! Because this human being is building an infrastructure for critical reasoning in a frequently bizarre, paradoxical universe where fairly miraculous and fucked-up stuff happens on a regular basis. Of course adolescents have an irresistible attraction to adult themes; perverse and puritanical an instinct as there is in this culture to prolong childhood, there is a far stronger counter-instinct in children to analyze, simulate, and as soon as humanly possible participate in the challenges of adulthood. This is not to suggest that growing up is a process that should be unnaturally accelerated, or that it can be in the first place. These days, casual observation suggests that in a modern urban environment, childhood is a stage that lasts approximately 30 years. But we should be counted lucky when this fascination with the adult world manifests in wanting to read more books.

The Symphony and the Novel -a Harmonious Couple?

The symphony and the novel evolved in tandem for two centuries. Music moved on after modernism, but whatever happened to fiction?

From a piece by Will Self in the Guardian...

That both forms reach their apogee in the 19th century – and in very similar ways – seems to me a function of their sharing the same artistic aim: to simultaneously enact the most complete possible world-in-words (or world-in-notes), while also actualising the creative personality itself. For the 19th-century symphonist, the sonic cosmos he created needed to be internally consistent, while at the same time expressing his unique spirit – functions undertaken, respectively, by harmony and melody. In the great 19th-century realist novels similar aims find their outlet in the assumed equivalence of the writer with the impersonal narrative voice. This sleight-of-mind induces in the reader a conviction of the authenticity of the events described and the sincerity of the describer – harmony and melody again.

At the twin peaks of the 19th-century novel and symphony there is an overarching confidence about what the forms can do, a sense of their totalising capability. In the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, or the novels of Tolstoy and George Eliot, there is little insecurity about the potential of their form – no neuroticism, no insinuating irony. God remains relatively securely in his world, and the novelist or composer remains equally secure in his or her ability to interact with it in the service of producing aesthetic effects. Of course, there's trouble on the horizon – how could there not be? – but for now the enlightenment conception of progress stays in lockstep with the advance of both art forms.

Quixote, Colbert and the Reality of Fiction

Did Cervantes invent “truthiness”? A writer, for the New York Times, examines how the 17th-century master’s multilayered world mirrors the realities and absurdities of our modern age.

From the article...

As a literary theorist, I suppose I could take umbrage at the claim that my own discipline, while fun, doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge. But what I’d actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory (along with art criticism, sociology, and yes, non-naturalistic philosophy) produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Professor Rosenberg’s assertions, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.

We especially revere the genius of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I’d like to focus on the genius of another writer, a Spanish one, Miguel de Cervantes, who shaped our world as well, and did so in ways that may not be apparent even to those aware of his enormous literary influence. With the two parts of “Don Quixote,” published in 1605 and 1615 respectively, Cervantes created the world’s first bestseller, a novel that, in the words of the great critic Harold Bloom, “contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”

As if that were not enough, in writing those volumes Cervantes did something even more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. What he passed down to those who would write in his wake, then, was not merely a new genre but an implicit worldview that would infiltrate every aspect of social life: fiction.

After the Unthinkable

The Economist looks at how fiction changed after 9/11.

From the piece...

There are three important reasons why it is hard to write a good 9/11 novel. The first is that the attack on the World Trade Centre was such a huge and overpowering event that it often overshadows and dominates the fictional elements of a novel: literary novelists normally shy away from choosing such a big and unbelievable event as the backdrop to a story. Mr McInerney’s book is the poorer, I think, because his characters seem so paper-thin beside the burning towers and anguished souls the television footage depicted. For this reason non-fiction has often been the better medium to convey the most moving and poignant record of the day.

The second is that all fiction of every genre hinges around some kind of crisis, internal or external, that a book has to see its way through. This can take many forms. But 9/11 is in a sense a bigger crisis than many novels can contain or capture: it’s a situation where truth is both bigger and stranger than fiction.

That is probably why many authors have taken 9/11 as a jumping-off point to look at a group or type of person they had not thought to before. Martin Amis wrote a short story in the voice of one of the 9/11 hijackers. John Updike’s “Terrorist” traced the world of a would-be suicide bomber, for example. The setting for that book, like Updike’s other work, was suburban middle-America, and many of the characters were also recognisable from earlier books, but his central figure, a teenager who becomes radicalised, sits uneasily in this context—uneasy both for the character and sadly the novel too.

The third thing that makes it hard to write a successful novel about 9/11 is simply that it’s too soon.

Fiction Changes Personalities

There's scientific proof.



From a story in Quill & Quire...



To test this hypothesis, Oatley and his colleagues developed experiments to measure empathy, and examine what Oatley calls the “big five personality traits” – extroversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. In one such experiment, the researchers randomly assigned readers one of two versions of Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Lady With the Little Dog”– a translation of the original and another comprising only basic plot points. Beforehand, researchers measured the readers’ personality traits and their emotions at the time of the experiment.



“We found the people who read the [whole] story changed a bit in their personality,” Oatley says. “What we found interesting was that they all changed in somewhat different ways.”



The observations of the researchers are significant because they differ from the psychology of persuasion, which assumes that media affects everyone in the same way. “In literary art, what you’re asking people is, ‘Alright, how does this affect you? How do you feel about this? How do you think about it?’”

The Best Year to Read Fiction Was In...

1958.

The End of the White Outsider

Sixty years ago, Holden Caulfield defined what it meant to be outside the system. Demographic changes mean that a new generation is looking for a non-white hero. Author Ned Vizzini is on the hunt to make him relevant again.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

The Catcher in the Rye turns 60 this month. That puts Holden Caulfield in his mid-70s, near the end of his natural lifespan, but in many ways he continues to dominate American culture as he did in the 20th century. He is the White Outsider—a Caucasian kid who despite his advantages feels misunderstood—and he has been everywhere from 1951 on, in Rebel Without a Cause, Spider-Man, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Nirvana, and Wes Anderson, to name a few. He is still the fountainhead of young-adult literature. He is still a handle for anyone wishing to comment on white privilege. He still pops up in press on everyone from Woody Allen to Osama bin Laden. Demographically, though, he has become an endangered species.
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The population shift to the South and West that dominated last year's U.S. Census coverage hid a profound truth: In 12 years, when today's bouncing babies are ready for Holden, more than half of American children will be non-white. The long-predicted shift of America from a majority-white nation to a majority-minority nation will not happen in the general populace for decades (because older whites are living so long), but among the youth it is already taking place. Teachers and writers who venerate Catcher have to ask themselves: How relevant is Holden in a world where he is an actual minority?

Answering this question requires a dip into “post-racial” America that gets uncomfortable.

Fiction Takes You Places That Life Can't

So says a new piece in the Independent.

From the article...

What's it like to die? There's no answer to this cheerful question, or there shouldn't be.

People have told us what it's like nearly to die, to come back from the brink. The external process of death has been gone over in great detail. But no one has definitively returned from the other side, to tell us what it's like to feel the last breath leaving your body. We don't know anything about it.

Or rather, we shouldn't know anything about it. In 1886, Tolstoy published a short story called "The Death of Ivan Ilych", which follows a fairly unremarkable man to the complete extinction of life. After reading that, you feel you know what death will be like: "Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction." How could Tolstoy possibly know that? You will read any number of academic studies of the processes of death without coming near the novelist's instinctive understanding.

A wonderful Canadian academic and psychologist, Keith Oatley, has carried out some research on readers and non-readers of fiction, and has questioned this widespread assumption. Speaking to the Today programme this week, he shared his conclusion that habitual readers of novels were much better at coping with social situations and with a wide range of human beings. The usual image of the thick-lensed bookworm who can't cope with people – Philip Larkin's character who says "when getting my nose in a book/cured most things short of school" – is far from reality.