The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 1” with E.M. Forster:

FORSTER: In no book have I got down more than the people I like, the person I think I am, and the people who irritate me. This puts me among the large body of authors who are not really novelists and have to get on as best they can with these three categories. We have not the power of observing the variety of life and describing it dispassionately. There are a few who have done this. Tolstoy was one, wasn’t he?

INTERVIEWER: Can you say anything about the process of turning a real person into a fictional one?

FORSTER: A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half-closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work. A likeness isn’t aimed at, and couldn’t be obtained, because a man’s only himself amid the particular circumstances of his life and not amid other circumstances. [emphasis mine, JH] So that to refer back to Dent when Philip was in difficulties with Gino, or to ask one and one-half Miss Dickinsons how Helen should comport herself with an illegitimate baby, would have ruined the atmosphere and the book. When all goes well, the original material soon disappears, and a character who belongs to the book and nowhere else emerges. [emphasis mine, JH].

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Paul Lewis writes:

The whistleblower Edward Snowden accused the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee of double standards on Tuesday, pointing out that her outrage at evidence her staff were spied on by the CIA was not matched by concern about widespread surveillance of ordinary citizens.

Snowden, the former contractor whose disclosures to journalists revealed widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency, was responding to an explosive statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein about the CIA’s attempts to undermine a congressional investigation into interrogation and detention.

We all saw this coming, right?

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Note: due to multiple levels of security, the video does not play perfectly. Please be patient, and make a donation to the ACLU (see comments below).

Via Mano Singham…

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 3” with Graham Green:

INTERVIEWER: Do you see much of your fellow authors?

GREENE: Not much, they are not one’s material. A few of them are very dear friends of mine but for a writer to spend much of his time in the company of authors is, you know, a form of masturbation.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Reading this bit from Greene (an author I’ve never read) has given me pause and I must think and consider my own question.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The answer to the headline’s question is ANYTHING THEY CAN GET.

And then some.

The greed of all major league sports teams knows no bounds.

And they have escaped real scrutiny by the entire nation’s media – from the New York Times to Sports Illustrated and everything in between.

I have been trying to tell that story of this grasping greed for many years here in Cleveland where we spend more time worrying about sports that we do our children, our elderly, our ill, our poor or anyone else.

It’s a moral calamity. All in plain view.

One community sickness not even considered by all our religious leaders and their followers.

It’s time we put an end to it. Cleveland voters can show the way on May 6.

I have over months laid out the great cost, especially for Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland citizens. And especially for the children Continue Reading »

[Update–11 March @ 0835: Why the GOP cares about poverty now: poor people are looking more white]

That’s the solution for the likes of former Nixon commerce secretary and billionaire co-founder of the Blackstone private equity group Peter G. Peterson for cutting the federal budget and saving his cronies billions.

Mano Singham notes:

For most people, work is soul-killing drudgery, while those glibly arguing for raising the retirement age tend to have nice, comfortable, white-collar, interesting jobs. As a result, what we are seeing is that the very people who should be retiring because they have spent their lives in hard jobs are the ones are being forced to continue working longer because they cannot afford to retire As Edward Siedle writes, the Social Security ‘crisis’ we face is not ballooning expenditures but that we are approaching a time when large numbers of old people will be too frail to work but too poor to retire.

Mano turns to Voltaire:

Why is there such a strong desire among the wealthy to cut Social Security? It is part of a package with cutting welfare benefits, food stamps, unemployment benefits, and other government programs. We may see them as mechanisms to stave off some of the worst effects of poverty. But that is not how the so-called deficit hawks see them. They see those programs as helping to keep people out of the workforce. The rich need more and more of the poor to keep working so that they can live off them since the more workers there are, the lower the wages. As Voltaire pointedly put it many years ago, “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 1” with E.M. Forster:

INTERVIEWER: Now, can we ask you a few questions about the immediate business of writing? Do you keep a notebook?

FORSTER: No, I should feel it improper.

INTERVIEWER: But you would refer to diaries and letters?

FORSTER: Yes, that’s different.

INTERVIEWER: When you go, say, to the circus, would you ever feel, How nice it would be to put that in a novel?

FORSTER: No, I should feel it improper. I never say, That might be useful. I don’t think it is right for an author to do so. However, I have been inspired on the spot. “The Story of a Panic” is the simplest example; “The Road from Colonus” is another. Sense of a place also inspired me to write a short story called “The Rock,” but the inspiration was poor in quality, and the editors wouldn’t take the story. But I have talked about this in the introduction to my short stories.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

From my dad, of course…

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 1” with E.M. Forster:

“That is not all of Arctic Summer—there is almost half as much of it again—but that’s all I want to read because now it goes off, or at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking. It will be more interesting to consider what the problems before me were, and why I was unlikely to solve them. I should like to do this, though it may involve us a little in fiction technicalities . . .”

So said E. M. Forster, addressing an audience at the Aldeburgh Festival of 1951. He had been reading part of an unfinished novel called Arctic Summer. At the end of the reading, he went on to explain why he had not finished the novel, which led him to mention what he called “fiction technicalities.”

Found in my electronic chapbook…

The third aspect of Right Diligence is to invite the beneficial seeds to come up. p. 93

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Dear Zelda,

Here’s the scenario: when the boss sees co-workers having a quiet conversation, he wants to know what is being said (it’s mostly work related). He has his designated “snitches” and expects them to keep him apprised of all the office gossip – even calling them at home and expecting a run-down! This puts the “designees” in a really awkward position; plus, we’re all afraid any offhand comment or anything said in confidence might be either repeated or misrepresented.

Needless to say, this creates a certain amount of tension between team members who normally would get along well, and adds stress in an already stressful atmosphere. There is also an unspoken belief that he will move people to different desks to break up what he perceives as people becoming too “chummy.” (It’s been done under the guise of “creating teams.”)

We used to be able to joke around a little or talk about our favorite “Idol” contestant to break the tension, but now we’re getting more and more skittish about even the most mundane general conversations (“Did you have a good weekend?”). This was once a very open, cooperative group who worked well together. Now we’re more suspicious of each other and teamwork is becoming harder. Do you think this was the goal?

Silenced in SID

Dear Silenced,

Wow, that takes “intelligence collection” in a whole new – and inappropriate – direction…. We work in an Agency of secrets, but this kind of secrecy begets more secrecy and it becomes a downward spiral that destroys teamwork. What if you put an end to all the secrecy by bringing it out in the open?

You and your co-workers could ask [the supervisor] for a team meeting and lay out the issue as you see it: “We feel like you don’t trust us and we aren’t comfortable making small talk anymore for fear of having our desks moved if we’re seen as being too chummy.” (Leave out the part about the snitches.) Tell him how this is hampering collaboration and affecting the work, ask him if he has a problem with the team’s behavior, and see what he says. …. Stick to the facts and how you feel, rather than making it about him (“We’re uncomfortable” vs “You’re spying on us.”).

If you are bothered by snitches in your office, whether of the unwilling or voluntary variety, the best solution is to keep your behavior above reproach. Be a good performer, watch what you say and do, lock your screen when you step away from your workstation, and keep fodder for wagging tongues (your Viagra stash, photos of your wild-and-crazy girls’ weekend in Atlantic City) at home or out of sight. If you are put in the “unwilling snitch” position, I would advise telling your boss that you’re not comfortable with the role and to please not ask that of you.

One of these Zeldas is fictional, the other isn’t.

Plebeianism (p. 55) It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old Gentility. Plebian, a common person. Favoring the common person over the aristocratic gentility. (1533)

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House Of Seven Gables.

Previously…

Gabriel García Marquez told the Paris Review:

[I]f you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. That’s exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it.

In the comments, Edward wrote:

I don’t know if you have watched How I met your mother, but this reminded me of 18th episode, season 4.

Marshall: I was thinking, we’re paying Ted’s firm for two more months, can’t we just let him keep working? He’s had a rough year, he should be happy for once.

Barney: Marshall, what you’re suggesting is a lie that requires a long term commitment. A nice guy like you can’t pull that off.

Marshall: I could too.

Barney: Lie to me right now.

Marshall: I have a spaceship.

Barney: What kind of fuel powers your spaceship?

Marshall: Okay, I don’t have a spaceship.

Barney: See, that’s your mistake! When telling a lie, distract from the original lie with more lies! Like this, I have a pony. Ask me a question.

Marshall: What color is your pony?

Barney: Well when I first got Dandelion she was a lovely chestnut brown but her stable is located next to a chemical plant and she’s turned a sickly grayish/off white. The vet says there’s nothing he can do to fix her.

Marshall: Oh my god, is Dandelion gonna be okay? (Barney gives him a knowing look) Nice! Dandelion’s not even sick, is she?

Max and Kitty…

Alison Flood writes:

John le Carré has warned that the intelligence services could “become as much of a peril to our democracy as their supposed enemies” if they are not subjected to rigorous examination. The novelist was defending himself against the accusation that his former colleague John Bingham, upon whom he based his most famous creation, the spy George Smiley, “deplore[d]” how his novels revealed the “secret world” of the intelligence services.

Writing under his real name David Cornwell in a letter in Wednesday’s Telegraph, the author and former MI5 and MI6 agent acknowledged the debt he owed his mentor Bingham, a man for whom he “shall always have unqualified admiration”. But the novelist also gave a robust defence to the claim in Tuesday’s Telegraph from Lord Lexden that Bingham “was not treated as respectfully as he deserved by his protégé, John le Carré”, that Bingham was “hurt by the portrayal of his secret world in the novels”, and that Bingham once said that le Carré “was my friend, but I deplore and hate everything he has done and said against the intelligence services”.
John le Carré John le Carré believes ‘our secret services could in certain circumstances become as much of a peril to our democracy as their supposed enemies’.

Le Carré, however, said that “where Bingham believed that uncritical love of the intelligence services was synonymous with love of country, I came to believe that such love should be examined. And that, without such vigilance, our secret services could in certain circumstances become as much of a peril to our democracy as their supposed enemies”.

The Bush-Obama Security Scheme even pisses off fiction writers.

As Gibbs and Bishop make a left turn down the corridor towards the conference room at timemark 18:58 in Dressed To Kill (episode 16, season 11, aired last evening, 4 March 2014) a painting of my old ship–albeit in her earlier incarnation as DLGN 25–appears on the wall behind them. If you mouse over the photo above you can see my own print of that painting as it hangs to the left of my writing desk.

I wonder if the painting is random or if someone on the show has a connection to the Gray Ghost of the Pacific.

Dan Froomkin writes:

In the wake of an explosive new allegation that the CIA spied on Senate intelligence committee staffers, one senator felt this morning that he needed to make something clear.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) said in a press release.

In normal circumstances, that would have been a statement of the obvious. Today, it was more a cry for help.

McClatchy News Service on Tuesday reported that the CIA’s inspector general has asked for a criminal investigation into CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides who were investigating the agency’s prominent role in the Bush-era torture of detainees.

Specifically, McClatchy reported: “The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.”

In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) referred to what he called “unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review,” and described it as “incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy.”

Clearly, concerns over invasion of privacy have an elitist spin, but the Bush-Obama Security Scheme couldn’t care less.