Archive for September, 2009

Nonfiction’s intimate appeal

September 25, 2009 | No Comments

MFA student John Silvestro, studying structuralism for his English 600 class at Northern Kentucky University, sent me some of literary theorist Jonathan Culler’s musings on how readers respond to texts. Culler, quoted here in Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, may help explain the appeal that literary nonfiction has for some readers and why memoir is so stunningly popular: “As soon as we know we’re reading a piece of fiction or poetry . . . we read it …

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Unsure? Tell a story . . .

September 20, 2009 | 7 Comments

I read my first criticism of PowerPoint  before I’d consciously seen many presentations. It probably flowed from Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, whose essays “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” and “PowerPoint is Evil” damn it as cognitive novacaine. Citing Tufte, the board that investigated the space shuttle Columbia disaster implicated the software, used during the crisis, for what was allegedly a flawed response to the ship’s danger. (See “PowerPoint, Killer App” by Ruth Marcus in …

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Daydreaming, attitude & audience

September 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

Charles Allen Smart (1904–1967), author of eleven books of fiction, memoir, philosophy, and biography, was best known for RFD, his 1938 bestseller about returning to the land on his family’s ancestral farm. After his service in WW II, depicted in his memoir The Long Watch, he became writer in residence at Ohio University, the press of which returned RFD to print in 1998 under its Swallow imprint and with a new Foreword by Gene Logsdon. Smart’s thoughts, below, on the …

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Honesty and chronology, part two

September 11, 2009 | No Comments

William Zinsser addresses the issue of fidelity to chronology in his On Writing Well, and I was surprised by his answer. Perusing the thirtieth anniversary edition of this sober classic on nonfiction, I expected Zinsser to be very conservative in all matters regarding literal truth, but after a long career of successful freelance magazine and book writing he’s practical about quotes and timelines. He approves of legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s composite quotes and blended timelines in his profiles. …

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Honesty and chronology, part one

September 6, 2009 | 2 Comments

Truth is a disputatious concept in memoir. I’ve said that nonfiction shouldn’t involve invented characters or scenes, unless the author cues the reader to such imaginings, because readers understand the implicit promise in the genre to abjure sleight of hand. But “memory has its own story to tell,” Tobias Wolff argues in introducing This Boy’s Life, meaning that the subjective memories of which memoir is made are the truth. And memories are tumbled in our minds into creative reconstructions to …

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A nifty concise essay

September 4, 2009 | 2 Comments

David Bailey—magazine journalist, restaurant critic and worker, foodie and barista, knockabout North Carolina writer, and my friend—has posted a delightful concise essay, “Daddy Needs a New Pair of Shoes,” on his blog, My Pie Hole. It’s a ramble, with visuals, voice, and flow. A taste: “I’ll admit that the kitchen dress code was easy to comply with: t-shirts, white sox, black pants and black shoes. The shoes were a trifle irksome, though. One pair admittedly looked a little worse for …

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