Frodo update

Frodo the koala continues to recover well.

(no subject)

160 240 words of Croc City, for 2400/4000. Lost a little time today to editing yesterday's stuff - in my sleep-deprived brain-fog I'd used the wrong name for a character through a whole scene, and written it in the wrong tense to boot.

Hysterical Realism

"It is now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful. Which is why one never wants to re-read a book such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, while Madame Bovary is faded by our repressings. This is partly because some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist's quarries any more. Information has become the new character. It is this, and the use made of Dickens, that connects DeLillo and the reportorial Tom Wolfe, despite the literary distinction of the former and the cinematic vulgarity of the latter."

I dunno if I agree with what this 2001 review says (I'm not even sure I'm qualified to completely understand it, having read only one of the novels mentioned, White Teeth) ie, essentially, that a novel can't be both silly and moving. Nonetheless it's kind of exploding my mind: "language and the representation of consciousness"! "information"! (Is he describing the shift from modern to post-modern there?)

ETA: "It seems only a step from here to exploding condoms and the like."

ETA ETA: Zadie Smith's response. "When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life." ETA ETA ETA: "these image-led, speechless times".