☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as... See more
I love speculative fiction like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin 's, which creates alternative versions of reality based on enormous documentary research and invents the foundations of another present, improbable and credible. I'm also constantly on the lookout for situations where reality is surreal, a kind of "magical realism". As a writer of... See more
Anthony Van Den Bossche • «Writing as pollinating», a conversation with Alice Bucknell
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as... See more
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
“What Borges is telling us is that any attempt to impose order on the universe results in the creation of fiction; it can be no more than a tragic game, futile though heroic.” -D.L Shaw
The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and
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