One of the problems with telling other people’s stories is that you bear the responsibility for the telling. Technology invites each of us to tell our story in many mediums. When is it stealing? When is it exploitation? When is it empathy? When is it giving the gift of meaning–the only gift writers have to give? Language, that puckish knave, can sometimes express meaning well outside of the writer’s good intentions. That is why to write is both brave and foolish. For me, the act of empathizing with another human, of becoming them in my imagination, of wresting meaning from brash reality, that is the payoff.
Still, times change. We must listen to others and take heed. Here: http://nyti.ms/1XRvsz8
The literary arts seem more today than ever before wracked with anxiety. By anxiety, I mean in a state of terror without object. A fear that there is something to fear. Everywhere the future of literature seems uncertain, its coming death all but declared. The writer, the devoted reader, the publisher, the journalist, the teacher, the professor, in a vague, generalized way feel that something is happening to literary culture. Though should one try to pinpoint the source or find definitive proof of this anxiety, one will most surely find competing evidence that will immediately disprove whatever was once proven.
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