Dead-ness -- :::english298forum:::

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Date Posted: 19:36:18 02/27/03 Thu
Author: Mona
Subject: Dead-ness

So the website is dead. We all know it. The class is almost over. Dead, dead. However, perhaps some of you still check this out, force of habit, see which fool decides to revive it. Ok, we all know its me. All year I have been promoting McSweeneys (don't know what it is? Pay more attention!) And Dave Eggers, a young average guy who teaches highschool and pumps out some books and short stories every now and then. His new book is called: You Shall Know Our Velocity. He is also being hailed by some as the new Keroac...do we need another?

I'm waiting for his private publishing house to order Iceland to print out a few more copies. Oh, and send some up to Canada. Anyways, Eggers writes for The NewYorker and said this in an interview about his new book, which p.s. is about two guys, Will and Hand, who go around the world in one week and decide to unload lots of cash on those they feel are deserving.

New Yorker: In fiction, you can do anything. Does that freedom ever make it more difficult to decide what to write about?

Eggers:
I was trying to teach my high-school class about this the other day�that much of the best fiction has some heavy research behind it. I feel more comfortable writing about trying to tape money to a Senegalese donkey, for example, if I've actually tried to do it, because you learn so much when you actually try it. Your imagination can rarely match how weird things get when you actually do them, and the rendering of real time benefits from firsthand experience. When I was studying painting as a kid, I learned that if you want to render something with strict representational accuracy, you can't come anywhere close unless you're drawing from life. So I took a lot of classes at an academy in Chicago to learn the most technical aspects of drawing�measuring, the math behind perspective, spent twelve hours on one pose, etc. In the end, the hand you draw from memory is garbage compared to the hand you draw if that hand is resting in front of you. But that's just if you're interested in realism, which, of course, is just one way to go. This particular book had to be realistic, and needed a lot of fact behind it.

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Its a discussion we like bringing up in class often. I find that some writers are very successful at showing things they have never done while other can't seem to describe their own noses if we asked for it (assignment 6 maybe?) But, as up and coming brilliant writers for our generation, I think its an interesting topic. Especially, because this guy's first work, was a memoir.

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Replies:

Re: Dead-ness -- slacking sarah, 14:09:38 03/02/03 Sun