David Shields

Mr. Shields work consists of 617 numbered epigrams, or epigram-like entries, organized in 26 chapters, titled “a” through “z”, with subtitles like “genre”, “now”, “blur”, and “let me tell you what this book is about” (which is the 23rd chapter -- there's a good chance you won't know by then what the book is about and will welcome the help).

Some of the entries he wrote himself, some he appropriated from other writers. He doesn't tell us which is which until the very show more end in an appendix included grudgingly and at the insistence of the publisher's lawyers. Mixing others' words with your own, without attribution, is called “collage” and is how you should write, according to the manifesto.

The book demands that writers take up the task of “reconcoct[ing] meaning from the bombardments of experience” by embracing the “lyric essay” and it's values of concision, collage and the abandonment of narrative and any distinction between fiction and non-fiction. You do that so you can “say in a few sentences what everyone else says in a whole book – what everyone else does not say in a whole book” and it's OK to make stuff up because you can't help but do that anyway.

The book may be interesting, even important, to Students of Literature – academics and writer's workshops participants – but a manifesto containing “it amazes me that people still want to read a 400 page 'page turner'”, if it addresses anyone at all, addresses a group that has either left the rest of us behind or gone way off on a tangent.

To summarize, let me quote from #456 (page 150): “...could be brilliant, could be bullshit.” I'm going with the latter. If, like me, you're troubled by the trend for non-fiction pieces to include fabricated events, revised quotations, and outright lies, you might want to read this as a possible source for some of what troubles you. show less

Gerçeklik Açlığı insanı düşünmeye itmekten fazlasını yapıyor. Uzun zamandır okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan biri.” JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Gerçeklik Açlığı, Nietzsche’den Beckett’a, Godard’dan von Trier’e birçok önemli figürü ve Eminem, Larry David, Beastie Boys gibi popüler kültür ikonlarını, tam da artık onu deneyimleyemediği için “gerçeklik” konusunda takıntılı hale gelmiş Facebook ve Google nesliyle buluşturuyor.
David Shields hararetli show more tartışmalara yol açan kitabında, çağdaş sanat ve edebiyatın merkezindeki meselelere çığır açan bir bakış açısıyla yaklaşarak, kurgu-dışı ile kurgu, anlatı ile deneme arasındaki sınırlardan kurtulmayı öneriyor. Shields’a göre, başka şarkılardan alınmış parçalardan oluşan şarkılar, kolajlar, serbestçe alıntılanan metinler ve dijital teknolojiyle üretilmiş sonsuz kopyalar çağında artık bir yapıtın ya da fikrin sahibi olmanın tanımı; gerçekliğin, özgünlüğün anlamı değişiyor, telif hakkı talebi neredeyse bir kutsal kitap ya da efsane üzerinde hak iddia etmeye dönüşüyor. Devir paylaşımların, kendine mal etmenin, hatta “aşırma”nın devri.
Gerçeklik Açlığı, sınırlara meydan okuyarak başka yazarlara ait alıntılardan, aforizmalardan, anekdotlardan serbestçe “faydalanan”, okurları hakikilik, özgünlük ve yaratıcılığa dair geleneksel fikirler üzerine yeniden düşünmeleri için kışkırtan çarpıcı bir manifesto, kendi gerçekliğine sahip yeni bir çağa özgü yeni edebiyat ve sanat formları icat etmek için açık bir davet.
“Gerçeklik Açlığı’nı yeni bitirdim ve beni şaşırttı, mest etti, bozguna uğrattı. Kısacası, aydınlandım. Gerçekten de, önemli ve ileriyi gören bir kitap: Kendi kendini yaratan bir sanat eseri, görkemli, heyecan verici ve acımasız.” show less

Really interesting collection of thoughts (some lifted, some his own) on non-fiction, but I was far more interested in the brief forays into the topics of appropriation and stealing as artistic tools. For some, perhaps, provocative. But in both format and content I found it to be an excellent summary and wealth of quotational and anecdotal support for ideas I already share. For that reason, it was a relatively quick read. Because I wasn't in need of persuasion, I also found it perhaps a bit show more redundant, but can easily imagine a reader more hostile to the claims non-fiction (especially memoir) makes about truth vs. fact, and to the idea of appropriation as a legitimate (and necessary) artistic mode really needing a lot of repetition in order to get to where this book starts from. show less

There is a kind of portentous playfulness that is in vogue these days. It is not the disingenuous false modesty of the calculatedly ironic. It is not the light-hearted comic jape, satisfied perhaps to be merely play. It is not the tangential take, the oblique angle that reveals much. It is not the one or two-fingered salute to the powers that be. No. It is full of regard, if only self regard. It is grand in its ambitions, or at least its statement of its ambitions. It is deathly serious, show more though burdened by a great fear of seriousness. And it loves more than anything to appropriate, unearned, the portentous pronouncements of others, bouncing from one to another like a log driver delicately stepping across his charges safe so long as he moves on before the log rolls.

Autobiography is all, in the new vogue. Criticism, we’re told, is a form of autobiography. Fiction is really just autobiography. Biography? Right again, it’s also autobiography. And non-fiction – that vast bloomy everything that isn’t just a chronicle of one damn fictional thing after another – non-fiction is autobiography too. Presumably so is this brief review. It’s all about me. Or so, I suppose, David Shields might say.

Undoubtedly there is a spirited freshness about such writing. It can seem electric, if not electrifying. But its energy feels chemical, like the buzz after a short hit of some illicit drug, rather than grounded and substantial. And it quickly, for me at least, becomes tired, and all too quickly tiresome. It is, in the end, a perfect form for the Internet. But its pleasures may not extend to even a book as brief as this one.

That said, there were bits of this book that I enjoyed – a clever phrase, a wry observation here or there. Just not enough to sustain my interest, and certainly not enough either to save my life or end it. show less