skandalon

art story storytelling narrative novel author science_fiction vonnegut humor kafka reblog

✖ Via

Lapham’s Quarterly: Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard, New York City, 2005

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively]. This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis]. Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. Read on

• Aug 16, 2010 link notes reblogged from leugenio [via] tagged: art story storytelling narrative novel author science-fiction Vonnegut humor Kafka

We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

✖ Via The New Yorker: “Iphigenia in Forest Hill” by Janet Malcolm, May 3rd, 2010, p. 38

An excerpt taken from the fascinating (really) account of Mazoltuv Borukhova’s Trial. The way Malcolm’s puts it could be used, I think, to illustrate the existential implication of “cognitive dissonance”.

Janet Malcolm :

“(born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).” (wikipedia)

• May 10, 2010 link notes tagged: art technology communication life existence order chaos narrative representation lost loser trial law cognition cognitive dissonance journalism