/reading/ 3 min read 653 words 17 links

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#journalism #writing

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In his retirement, walking the streets of Bordeaux, Montaigne wore a pewter medallion inscribed with the words Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”)—thereby forming and backforming a tradition: Lucretius to La Rochefoucauld to Cioran. — location: 221 ^ref-7050

As recently as the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings were commonly thought of as a species of journalism. Real art meant pictures of allegorical or biblical subjects. A landscape was a mere record or report. As such, it couldn’t be judged for its imaginative vision, its capacity to create and embody a world of complex meanings; instead, it was measured on the rack of its “accuracy,” its dumb fidelity to the geography on which it was based. Which was ridiculous, as Turner proved, and as nineteenth-century French painting went on to vindicate: realist painting focused on landscapes and “real” people rather than royalty. — location: 251 ^ref-6932

Suddenly everyone’s tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone’s story turns out to be fascinating or well told. — location: 361 ^ref-13510

Biography and autobiography are the lifeblood of art right now. We have claimed them the way earlier generations claimed the novel, the well-made play, the language of abstraction. — location: 428 ^ref-26156

Truth, uncompromisingly told, will always have its ragged edges. — location: 438 ^ref-42262

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. — location: 465 ^ref-32190

Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library. — location: 478 ^ref-55879

Oh how we Americans gnash our teeth in bitter anger when we discover that the riveting truth that also played like a Sunday matinee was actually just a Sunday matinee. — location: 530 ^ref-13776

Don’t waste your time; get to the real thing. Sure, what’s “real”? Still, try to get to it. — location: 702 ^ref-26324

I’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you. — location: 717 ^ref-34199

All the best stories are true. — location: 790 ^ref-2818

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality. — location: 838 ^ref-58232

Fiction doesn’t require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief—something real life can’t do. Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: “What if this happened?” (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: “This may have happened.” — location: 894 ^ref-55076

Now you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth? It is as close as it can be. The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life—that one damn thing after another—is lost. — location: 957 ^ref-56050

Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. — location: 1607 ^ref-37396