We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.
From David Shields
Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.
In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.
Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form.
I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
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