Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 79

Does the Internet belong in fiction?

Does the Internet belong in fiction? Of course. But the question is how–and who will do it. http://ow.ly/3ENmC

Filed under: Miscellany

How novels came to terms with the internet

How novels came to terms with the internet | Books | The Guardian http://ow.ly/3ENjw

Filed under: Miscellany

The crunch of snow, 4 pm sky faded blue

The crunch of snow, 4 pm sky faded blue like my jeans. On my way for milk. A store full of food and means for what we need. Blessed. #aros

Filed under: Miscellany

*Cure For Exam Anxiety

If you're anxious, it helps to think about something else. Right? Apparently not.

A new study found that writing for 10 minutes about how anxious you feel before an exam improves how well you do on the exam. The more anxious you are and the more negative statements you express, the greater the improvement.

Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock tested students in the lab and in the classroom, comparing writing about their anxieties to writing about another topic and just sitting quietly. In all situations, the results confirmed that just writing for 10 minutes about their feelings helped tremendously.

This goes along with the study that found that writing about personal values closes the gender gap and the gap between black and white high school students. It amazes me how effective something so seemingly small and simple can be.

Just being true to oneself–whether that is in affirming one's priorities or in expressing one's feelings.

Full story here.

Filed under: Nature & Science Tagged: exam anxiety, the power of writing

*Spiral Galaxy

spiral galaxy NGC 3521, NASA

This galaxy is in the direction of the constellation Leo, which is my sign. And it's considered relatively close. If I travelled for 35 million years at the speed of light, I'd reach it. I like to think of this. It gives me perspective.

Filed under: Nature & Science Tagged: astronomical time, spiral galaxy NGC 3521

*A Taste for Russian

All lives are interesting, and one of the jobs of fiction is to prove it. Still, that task is easier if they are Russian – which helps to explain why, as well as spewing out renegade oligarchs and rogue spooks, Russia has recently inspired an abundance of novels. I mean, specifically, novels set there by English-speaking authors, from thrillers such as Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko mysteries, to Helen Dunmore's Leningrad books

So said AD Miller in The Observer. I found this especially interesting because the novel I started 8 years ago, and subsequently dropped in favour of another, was to have taken place in the Soviet Union.

My first experience of researching Russia was quite some time ago when I was reading about 19th century gangs in Eastern Europe for my first novel. In Russia, in the 1890′s, villagers were still accusing each other of witchcraft, and trial by water was still determining the matter. (If an accused witch drowns, then the person is exonerated) It struck me then how isolated Russia was, how non-European.

Russia has for centuries been a distorting, fairground mirror for the west. It is both like and unlike the tamer nations. Throughout the cold war, it was alien, unknowable, the other, enemy world, and an easy setting for thrillers.

When I do research, I start out with a wide net, catching everything in it, politics, economics, fashion, culture, recreation, architecture, social structure, manners. At first I feel ignorant and overwhelmed by the strangeness and incomprehensibility of another time and place. Gradually, though, I get the feel for it, the sense of it. New material I come across fits into what I already know. The puzzle has a picture.

I spent a year researching the Soviet Union as it was from 1925 to 1945 and another year trying to assimilate and put into writing everything I'd read: first person accounts, a PhD dissertation (quite marvelous by Anna Shternshis), fiction, detailed military histories, training manuals, social histories, silent films that were impressive in their artistry, biographies. I listened to the Leningrad Symphony (# 7, Shostakovich) while I took notes. But in the end, it felt as alien as in the beginning.

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WWII Poster

It defeated me, as General Winter was said to have defeated the German army.

Instead I set my last novel in my own time and my own neighbourhood. It doesn't have the sweep or the grandeur of Russia. But it is what I came home to–my present place, my present time, my belief that drama is in the ordinary as much as dharma, that evil happens here, and miracles happen here, and heroism is all around us.

Filed under: Literature, My Life Tagged: choosing a setting for a novel, Russian novels

*Online and Offline

In preparation for a publisher's meeting later this month, I've been going over my blogs, website, goodreads page, facebook and so on–my web presence. It's a funny term, that, for something that is ephemeral and yet remains forever in the virtual world. How many times have you ended up at that 404 page when a link leads to nothing or at a blog that hasn't been posted to for years?

I've played around with the themes. You may have noticed that this one was blue for a while. On Saturday, A hesitantly mentioned to me that he liked the old theme better and I agreed, so it's back. I discovered that I wasn't seeing the themes quite the way everyone else did because I had Firefox set to over-ride page fonts with the defaults I'd set. When I changed that option, I discovered that the blue theme used an Impact font for the title. It had an impact all right. Yikes.

However, re-setting the themes came late in my webly endeavours over the past week. First I joined Twitter, which I've resisted for several years. Guess what? True confession. I like it! Here's the reason. By subscribing to the NYT, NYRB and the Guardian, more to come as I explore this, I get headlines and links from a variety of sources in one place. I scan them and click on the links to read the articles and essays that interest me. Then I can easily pass them on–blogging if I have something to contribute, tweeting if I just want to share it. So don't forget to have a quick glance at the sidebar to pick up the latest fascinating link.

Then I faced a dilemma which is a common one for anyone who uses more than one forum to communicate on the internet. I'm blogging, and tweeting, fb-ing, goodreading, and, you know, I've got a life too! The solution is to get these platforms to send information back and forth so that I wouldn't have to repeat myself. But apparently fb and twitter don't like each other, which creates a problem and an opportunity for yet more software and 3rd party sites.

There are a lot of social media aggregators (I learned that's the term for putting it all together). I spent a week experimenting with various solutions and I'll tell you the result of my explorations, but first I want to mention an interesting thingy I came across that you might not know about.

Flavors.me is a platform that feeds all of your online activity into one place. I have a tab at the top of my blog, "All in One," that links to that page, which feeds my blog, goodreads, twitter and flickr streams to one place, neatly laid out by source. Have a look and tell me what you think!

For the purpose of streamlining my outgoing communications, it came down to HootSuite and Tweetdeck. I chose HootSuite because it's a web application and so it isn't using up computer resources. It's easy to use and easy to get going. You just register and sign in, add your applications–Facebook and Twitter for me. You can organize your streams of information, so I have news media in one tab and people in another. When I find an interesting article, I can send it to both FB and Twitter at the same time. HootSuite creates the short link for Twitter and at the same time creates the appropriate type of link, showing a thumbnail and a few lines of the article for FB.

However, having done all that, I realize that what matters, in the end, is content. Without content, the internet is just so much gossip, which is why texting has overtaken email among teenagers. But I'm online for more. I want information, insight, discovery, amazement, echoes of truth, intellectual and emotional. I hope that I can contribute to that by what I write, too.

That has to continue offline–the internet is just the surface. To go deeper, I need books, reading them and writing them. I don't hand write my books, but I do hand write notes and thoughts. My last notebook is nearly full. Here is my new one–which shares a theme with HootSuite, though I bought the notebook before I ever heard of an ow.ly url.

Wishing everyone good reading and good writing in 2011!

Filed under: My Life, Technology Tagged: social media aggregators, web presence for writers

*Monday Jan 10/10

Waxwing, originally uploaded by Rob.C.2010.

I was going to write about something else, but when I came across this photo I had to post it.

Filed under: A Monday Moment, Art & Photography Tagged: waxwing in air

*The Good Soldier

I would like to write a book as deeply investigated and hotly debated as The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford. Written during the outbreak of the first World War, this is a novel about two enmeshed couples, marital affairs, passion and the forbidden object of passion. One of the marriages is between a tart and an asexual man (the narrator). The other marriage is between an uptight woman and a man who is generous of spirit and body (courtly knight or lech, depending on your view). But the beauty of this book, for me, isn't as much in what it's about as in how the story is told.

Using quite different techniques, Ford does the same thing I did in The River Midnight, ie as the book goes along, he provides the reader with information that sheds new light on a previously revealed fact or incident that makes it seem entirely different than on the first encounter.

Continued here.

Filed under: Literature Tagged: criticism of The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford, Impressionist literature, point of view in modern literature, reading gutenberg books on kobo, unreliable narrator

The Good Soldier

"The Good Soldier is a novel which extorts admiration" The New York Times

"For all the author's clever manipulation of words, he has given his story nothing to compensate for its artistic feebleness." Boston Transcript

"His avowed method is to tell it all as if he were on one side of the fireplace…and a listener opposite him…But frankly Mr. Hueffer is so terribly long-winded…[that] the longing to go and do something else would be too strong… long before the tale was well afoot…" Times Literary Supplement

"The infinitely artistic development of events, their slow growth and inevitability, the turning inside out of characters to show amazing linings, have no hint of tediousness…" Observer

As a writer, I find it heartening to read these contradictory reviews of The Good Solder by Ford Maddox Ford (aka Hueffer).

I read the novel on my new kobo, but then I turned to a physical book (see the link) because it included these reviews and a number of critical essays as well. Let me first quickly summarize what I got out of the essays. The Good Soldier is a comedy. It's a tragedy. It's a social novel. It's a Freudian novel. The narrator is an idiot. The narrator is insightul. The narrator can't be trusted as far as you can throw him. The soldier of the title is a tragic hero. He is an idiot. Love is ridiculous. Love is epic. Passion is admirable. Ha!

I would like to write a book as deeply investigated and hotly debated as this one. Written during the outbreak of the first World War, this is a novel about two enmeshed couples, marital affairs, passion and the forbidden object of passion. One of the marriages is between a tart and an asexual man (the narrator). The other marriage is between an uptight woman and a man who is generous of spirit and body (courtly knight or lech, depending on your view). But the beauty of this book, for me, isn't as much in what it's about as in how the story is told.

Using quite different techniques, Ford does the same thing I did in The River Midnight, ie as the book goes along, he provides the reader with information that sheds new light on a previously revealed fact or incident that makes it seem entirely different than on the first encounter.

Ford does this through an unreliable first person narrator who shifts back and forth in his telling, commenting on his own reactions then and now, in the sort of rambling, random way that people actually tell stories. The writing is careful, subtle, and very funny. The narrator does seem like an idiot at first, but as the novel goes along, I found him to be clever and insightful. The story moves from comedy to tragedy, from the farce of incompatible marriage to the sad torment of people who could be good in other circumstances treating each other with merciless cruelty because they ought not to be together and are helplessly trapped with each other.

And yet, even there, when tragedy is at its peak, there is a note of comedy in the obvious hyperbole of the tragic outcome. I don't want to say too much here and reveal the end, but if you do or have read this, tell me what you think of the pen knife and the madness of "shuttlecock."

Ford

The Good Soldier is an Impressionist novel, and I gather from the essays in the Norton Critical Edition, that Impressionism as a literary movement followed painting by about 20 years. Ford himself says (p 263)

Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass–through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

He does it brilliantly. According to Wikipedia:

The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the past century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's '100 Greatest Novels of All Time', and The Guardian's '1000 novels everyone must read'.

I would agree with that.

Filed under: Literature Tagged: Ford Maddox Ford, Impressionist literature, The Good Solider