serviceable analogs

you learn to explain things in terms that the people you want to understand will understand. It doesn't exactly match what you think and feel, but that doesn't matter...they get the general idea, and it's a way of talking about the actual thing, where the actual thing defies expression.

divided attention

I like having my attention fractured. I'm not a great believer in the idea that you can only be really productive by giving one task your full attention.

immersion and transportation

I was reading some old lists of publications and reviews from around a hundred years ago, and what really stood out to me was how, generally, reviews were a lot more restrained back then.

But then, when I looked more closely, I saw that the enthusiasm was there, at least to some extent, it was just in a different place. The reviewers back then were more enthusiastic about poetry. Their praise of even the best novels was kind of stilted and subdued, as if to say, well, yes, it's good but, after all, it's only prose fiction, not poetry.

Here are some example quotes about novels: ‘A story of exceptional interest that seems to us to be better than anything he has written of late.’, ‘Can be heartily recommended to all who care for cleanly, energetic, and interesting fiction.’, ‘The swing of the narrative is splendid.’.....they're positive assessments but not exactly rapturous.

Now, the novel is regarded as the work of literary art par excellence and reviewers have made an art form out of writing reviews. It's interesting to reflect on the reality that we probably value the great novels of the 19th century more now than they were valued in their own time.

The genre that I think is the most interesting now is the hybrid one formed by the combination of fiction and non-fiction. It's not an official thing, it's just something that's happening. There's been a realisation that everything is storytelling. Even non-fiction texts tell stories.

I really enjoyed The Witches (2015) by Stacy Schiff, and one of the things she did in that book was to tell parts of the story by recounting events which, to the modern mind are impossible but which people at the time believed happened - like witches flying on a broomstick. At times in her book, she recounts things like that as if they actually happened. The effect is to really immerse you in that world. That's something that I had never seen before in a non-fiction book.