Richard Powers on How To Write Nowadays

Interview with Richard Powers

RP: That's just it; the economics of higher education now prevent the kind of interdisciplinary vision that I'm describing. I think that a literary critic's work would only be enhanced by a more sophisticated sense of, say, evolutionary paleontology, or molecular biology, or cognitive science, or cosmology. We want to be able to ask answerable questions, but we also want to be able to situate those answers in a broader geography, an engagement of the larger human questions. And that's how my books work; they work by saying you cannot understand a person minimally, you cannot understand a person simply as a function of his inability to get along with his wife, you cannot even understand a person through his supposedly causal psychological profile. You can't understand a person completely in any sense, unless that sense takes into consideration all of the contexts that that person inhabits. And a person at the end of the second millennium inhabits more contexts than any specialized discipline can easily name. We are shaped by runaway technology, by the apotheosis of business and markets, by sciences that occasionally seem on the verge of completing themselves or collapsing under its own runaway success. This is the world we live in. If you think of the novel as a supreme connection machine -- the most complex artifact of networking that we've ever developed -- then you have to ask how a novelist would dare leave out 95% of the picture.

The Original Soundtrack on Eno and cooking

George Saunders on becoming a prude

There are two ways of writing stories, one in chapters, lines and words, and that we call 'literature,' or alternatively by a succession of illustrations, and that we call the 'picture story.' [...] The picture story to which the criticism of art pays no attention and which rarely worries the learned has always exercised a great appeal. More, indeed, than literature itself, for besides the fact that there are more people who look than who can read, it appeals particularly to children and to the masses, the sections of the public which are particularly easily perverted and which it would be particularly desirable to raise. With its dual advantages of greater conciseness and greater relative clarity, the picture story, all things being equal, should squeeze out the other because it would address itself with greater liveliness to a greater number of minds, and also because in any contest he who uses such a direct method will have the advantage over those who talk in chapter.

-Rudolphe Topffer, Essay du physiognomie, 1845(?)
Quote taken from The Experiment of Caricature, Chapter 10,
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)

Comic about an imaginary Brian Eno

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"The Of And a To"

See also The 500 Most Commonly
Used Words in English

Becky Carter Digital Photography

Anthony Braxton's Liner Notes
for "For Alto"

The Eater of Meaning

Meteor crashes through guy's ceiling in Park Forest, Ill., then bounces
off the wall.
(via-Astronomy Pic of the Day)

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This is a really nice drawing by Christophe Blain
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