Archive for June, 2009

A meditation upon ‘Infinite Jest’

June 28, 2009 | No Comments

This is a guest post by my son, Tom Gilbert, a college sophomore majoring in philosophy. David Foster Wallace expressed dissatisfaction with the reviews for his ambitious  Infinite Jest. The 1,104-page book is so expansive that any attempt at a plot synopsis is useless; any sweeping thematic summation seems to feel reductive.  However, the novel’s polyphonic structure and character voices are illuminating in its discussion. The novel bears numerous similarities to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in its character relationships.  Instead …

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“A Dry Year” in Chautauqua

June 22, 2009 | 5 Comments

My essay “A Dry Year,” about reconstructing a pond on our land with a legendary local contractor, during a season of drought, flood, heat, and locusts, appears in the new issue of the literary annual Chautauqua. The man, whom I call William, had killed a woman in an accident when he was young and wild. An excerpt: He knew our land. As a boy, he’d dragged raccoons pelts in a burlap sack behind his pony all around our farm, leaving …

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Narrative’s evolutionary roots

June 18, 2009 | No Comments

from Origins of Human Communication, Chaper Six, “The Grammatical Dimension,” by Michael Tomasello “Why do people in all cultures tell stories in the first place? . . . Basically, such sharing is a way of expanding our common ground with others and so expanding our communicative opportunities, and, in the end, making us more like them and enhancing our chances of social acceptance (with conformity to the group playing a critical role in processes of cultural group selection). Telling narratives …

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Narrative Newsweek?

June 13, 2009 | 7 Comments

The newsmagazines’ having-it-both-ways blend of newspaper-style objective conventions and jarring rabbit-punch opinions in their news columns always made me queasy. As a friend said, “I feel like I need to take a shower after reading Time or Newsweek.” But I was a Newsweek man, and hung in there through frequent redesigns. Alarmed at first , I soon accepted the new layout and features because I valued the in-depth and reflective coverage, the trend stories, and some of the columnists. Now …

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Digging deeper

June 7, 2009 | No Comments

from the website of Sandra Scofield a novelist and author of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir “[I]n memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig …

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Review: ‘The Inner Circle’

June 1, 2009 | One Comment

The Inner Circle, a novel by T.C. Boyle. Penguin. 432 pages. T.C. Boyle has a gift for bringing to life historical figures in his fiction. He did it to John Harvey Kellogg in his comedic novel The Road to Wellville, made into a movie by the same name, and he does it more movingly in The Inner Circle, also turned into a film, about Alfred Kinsey, whose sex research at Indiana University transformed scientific inquiry and helped change Americans’ sexual …

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