There’s never been more humor available on the internet. But it’s unclear whether the business of making people laugh online will ever be profitable on a mass scale, rather than merely a pit stop on the way to a television gig. Though their jokes are ostensibly crafted for people, online comedy writers of all stripes now find themselves performing for social media algorithms.
The lines were drawn. On one side were those who viewed cooking an egg over a fire as the embodiment of food elitism and all that is annoying about the Slow Food movement. Only people who are very rich or very poor have fireplaces in their kitchens, critics said. Where is a working parent supposed to find the time?
In the opposing camp were people happy to discover a slow, delicious way to make those farm eggs that they had worked so hard to find. Even if the egg spoon was merely aspirational, it set the bar for a simpler way of cooking and eating — one in which a fire-roasted egg slipped onto levain toast seemed the antidote to an unthinking, tech-dominated culture fueled by unhealthy, overly processed food.
According to Gavron: ‘Omission is a form of creation. Limit, constraint and the compulsions of the unknown – the excluded – are the true foundation of narrative art. A place for the reader to enter more fully into the book.’ Gavron is talking specifically about experimental fiction; works that wilfully stutter, or are deliberately disjointed. But I believe that it is also possible for readers of conventional fiction to actively participate with the text. Conventional novels that employ unreliable narrators, magical realism, polyphonic techniques, direct address or opt for ambiguous endings, for example, will create a space for the reader. Readers who embrace such novels will be rewarded with a more intense experience, and a more emotionally rich connection. Who wouldn’t want that from the book they’re reading?
That morning, I had set out a typewriter on our lower level for anyone to use. It was a community-building experiment: What if people could walk into a bookstore and type anything they wanted?
Would they write haikus, confessions, or declarations of love?
Would they contemplate the meaning of life? Would they make fart jokes? Would people even know how to use a typewriter?
The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács called the novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Other forces played more obviously into the form’s rise to literary preeminence—the consolidation of a middle class; advances in printing technology—but the link between the emergence of the novel and the decline of religiosity is strong. Three hundred years ago, reading novels (as opposed to the classics, or Shakespeare) was widely seen as vulgar, indicative of a deficient mind. So was not believing in a divine creator. Today, at least among the sort of people who tend to read literary magazines, both these thing are more likely to be regarded as signs of intellectual and moral refinement. For the critic James Wood, this is no coincidence: the novel is “the slayer of religions,” a form that swept away Biblical certitudes and replaced them with fictional narratives that move “in the shadow of doubt,” asking readers for a belief that is fundamentally and irreligiously metaphorical.
One author who would agree wholeheartedly with Wood is England’s Ian McEwan, who asserted in 2013 that the novel is a product of the Enlightenment that “has always been a secular and skeptical form.” McEwan is a committed nonbeliever, so committed that he qualifies as a junior member of the intellectual movement-cum-publishing-ploy known as New Atheism, which emerged in the wake of 9/11. Christopher Hitchens dedicated his God Is Not Great to McEwan, and McEwan blurbed Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, calling it “lucid and wise, truly magisterial.” The critics Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, in their 2010 study The New Atheist Novel, write of McEwan “it is tempting to say that—if his fiction did not exist—Dawkins and company would have had to invent it, so completely does it vindicate their worldview.” McEwan’s protagonists are universally, as Edward says in On Chesil Beach, “grateful to live in a time when religion has generally faded into insignificance.” Ostensibly, this view is never seriously challenged, the gratitude never corroded.
Jack London started drinking at age five, plunging his face into a bucket of beer he was carrying to his father and lapping it up; he spent the afternoon lying sick under a tree. As a teen-ager, he drank prodigiously, got into fights, and suffered epic hangovers. At least once, he combined all three activities, downing whiskey “like so much medicine” somewhere south of Oakland (“I think the place was Haywards. It may have been San Leandro or Niles”), brawling on the train back to the city, and ending up . . . well, it’s not entirely clear, but he came to, the next night, in a strange boarding house, after seventeen hours in a “comatose condition.”
By the time London wrote down these recollections, in “John Barleycorn,” published in 1913, he was both a famous writer and an every-day drinker, although he generally held off from booze until he’d met his thousand-word daily quota. But he was not, he tells us again and again, an alcoholic. “I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed,” he writes in the last chapter. Because he lacked any “organic, chemical predisposition to alcohol,” he was always able to “drink when I wanted, refrain when I wanted,” and remained “thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn.” With one fateful exception: a period, shortly after he returned from a failed attempt to sail around the world, when he found himself “in the heart and deeps of me, desirous of alcohol.” After twenty-five years of drinking, “I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me.” The loss of control was only temporary, he claims, but it so unnerved him that he became a suffragist—not out of a concern for equal rights, but because he figured women would sway the country to Prohibition, which he favored on the ground that if a man with his “gorgeous constitution” could be rendered a slave to John Barleycorn, merely by repeated exposure, then no one was safe.
I lost my fingertip in January while carrying a wooden boat across icy ground. When I slipped, the gunwale came down on my hands. About a half inch of my middle finger lay in the dead grass, which might not sound like a lot until you look at the geography of a hand—the cut went to the white crescent setting in the cuticle. I wish I could accurately describe the feeling of picking up the fingertip—how immediately protective I was, holding it in my palm, cupping it like I’d found a songbird egg; how I felt it was both numb and not numb because it was then an object, not part of my body anymore. It was of my left hand—my writing and painting hand.
“We have to go,” I said to my friend carrying the other side of the boat.
In her introduction, Moore stresses that the title of this book should not be read as a boast. When writing teachers pass this book to their students, the title “See What Can Be Done” will be read as a simple command.