Shawn Huelle

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-13

  • A lament for the bookshelf: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/a-lament-for-the-bookshelf/article1488426/ #fb #
  • "The rotation gets thick. The constraints get thin." (ultimately DJ Spooky) #rh #
  • "Facebook and MySpace are crude personal essay machines." Twitter has them both beat by having streamlines the process. #rh #
  • "In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the 'real thing')." #rh #
  • What's the difference between representing the real and re-presenting the real? #rh #
  • "Replication isn't reproduction." And he still hasn't given any credit to Baudrillard. #rh #
  • "actual arguments between genuine young people being authentically solipsistic" #rh #
  • "The urge to connect bits that don't seem to belong together has fascinated me all my life." (Sebald again) #rh #
  • "Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data." #rh #
  • "I'm drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking." This as opposed to "narrative." But narrative is its own form of thinking. #rh #
  • Chapter "m: in praise of brevity," is not witty. And neither, really, am I. #rh #
  • "In imaginative literature we're always constrained from considering alternative scenarios; there are none." And the end of Hopscotch? #rh #
  • "Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings." (Auden) And Guernica? And Mrs. Dalloway? And all of Rothko's work? #rh #
  • Aphorisms might be the shortest essays, but they rarely contain arguments within themselves, thus perhaps disqualifying them. #rh #
  • I continue my "live" tweeting of David Shields' new book Reality Hunger. #rh #
  • "I want a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation." he said as though there were any other kind. #rh #
  • "What's the difference between repetition and reprise?" Do you mean the normal "reprise" or the Sinatra "Reprise"? #rh #
  • "Fiction mimics interest in God's intelligent omnipotence" I wish he would admit he's talking about one kind of fiction, not all kinds. #rh #
  • "To what degree can solipsism gain access to the world?" Strike "gain," and replace with "grant." Ask the question again. #rh #
  • "The writers I love tend to have Schrödinger's Paradox tattooed on their forehead" I agree, but either way, the cat is dead. #rh #
  • "a part of living, of breathing, of surviving, is to exploit our human relationships in order to live." The heart of fiction? #rh #
  • Will I be able to resist including section 514 in my dissertation prospectus? Wholesale and possibly without firm attribution? #rh #
  • My dissertation director follows my tweets. #rh #
  • "I'm bored by out-and-out fabrication." There is no such thing. #rh #
  • "fiction . . . has never seemed less central to the culture's sense of itself" But all of our "reality" is fictionalized. #rh #
  • Shields is damning "fiction" with broad strokes and expecting the reader to see them as scalpel twitches. #rh #
  • "We are adrift, alone in the cosmos, wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain." (Woody Allen) #rh #
  • "Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being must efficiently misused." (Beckett) #rh #
  • Shields seems to be at his best when using someone else's voice. Me too. #rh #
  • "having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world" (Gass) #rh #
  • "I love your willingness to be wrong, dumb, blind, embarrassing." I wish Shields engaged in this willingness a little more. #rh #
  • Hmmm, is presenting contradictions a willingness to be wrong, dumb, blind, embarrassing? Have I spoken too soon? #rh #
  • "at the heart of 'literary culture' is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers" #rh #
  • "Novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia." No. The genre is defined by its elasticity. Explain nostalgia for the "open-ended present." #rh #
  • "The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels." They are, however, still novels, and still fiction. #rh #
  • "There are no facts, only art." (Emerson) Again: Fiction. #rh #
  • "What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters." Again: Fiction. #rh #
  • Shields allies the lyric essay with poetry, and while he's not wrong, he's forgetting that the lyric is also still prose fiction. #rh #
  • Reality Hunger ultimately interesting, but never explores why we keep fictionalizing our reality. We need fiction. #rh #
  • Thank you, David Shields. And thus ends my experiment in "live" tweeting a book. #rh #
  • This country appears to be abandoning art. This country appears to be abandoning education. #fb #
  • Conan the Destroyer is playing on cable right now. I'm pretty sure I saw it in the theater. Also: I love Grace Jones. She's super scary! #fb #

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