Posts tagged the lifespan of a fact
Posts tagged the lifespan of a fact
6 notes &
Sample quote:
Frustratingly, this conversation is dominating how people are talking about the book—as if D’Agata’s intransigence or Fingal’s over-the-topness about factual accuracy (does the color of the brick surrounding the hotel the young man threw himself from really really matter?) ultimately has anything to do with the serious questions the book’s trying to get us to consider.
Yes, this is a great review.
5 notes &
I recently finished a forthcoming book (well, a sort of book. It’s bound like a book, anyway) called The Lifespan of a Fact.
If you haven’t heard of it yet, I suspect you will soon. It’s by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, and by “by”, I mean, it consists of an essay that D’Agata wrote, surrounded by Fingal’s fact-checking, D’Agata’s responses to the fact-checking, and Fingal’s responses to the responses. The essay is the one that many people know D’Agata from, I think: “What Happens There,” which was published last January in The Believer. You can read the opening to it here.
The book description is very polite. “An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction,” which I guess is true. I really liked it! I think it will lead to a lot of discussion, which I look forward to.
But: it’s one of those books that I have no interest in discussing with people who have not read the book, because it’s a book that is about a lot of things that people already have opinions about, and I want to have a discussion about the actual book and the actual words in it, not the opinions people are already bringing to the table. So I am canning the rest of this blog post in a glass jar and putting it up amongst the jams, where all my thoughts can look out and breathe against the glass and draw little smiley faces in the condensation until February.
That being said, many of my thoughts revolve around a news article I read earlier this year, one that is completely unrelated to the use of truth. It’s called A Brevard woman disappeared, but never left home, by Michael Kruse, and I’ve thought about it a lot since I read it. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. And then, read this annotation from blog The Story of a Story, in which the blogger and Kruse go through the story detail by detail, the blogger looking for moments for students to learn from, and Kruse providing answers to her questions about how he found certain details, and made particular choices.
I will not be able to talk about The Lifespan of a Fact without referring to these two things, so I’m sharing them now. And then we can meet back here in February. Are you free on the 20th? I don’t have anything planned that morning, we could get coffee or something.
