ah shit, the turning globe
Here’s a beautiful post about a sad, sad thing from Joshua Micah Marshall, whose mind I enjoy. Pointed to as a Crooked Timber comment by Uncle Kvetch, whose remarks so often make me feel quietly happy.
By way of consolation, here are some wonderful places, as located via Geisha Asobi Blog.
Bathing in the same scholastic glow, here’s an interview with a pair of medieval mystery writers, purloined with a flick of my wrist from Philobiblion.
“What I see — and there are others who don’t — is the difference between fictionalizing and distorting. If you write dialogue between, say, your main character and King Alfred the Great, and keep it within the boundaries of King Alfred’s time and place, that’s legitimate fiction. If you decide to compact eleven years of King Alfred’s reign into two for the sake of the story (it’s been done), then that is a degree of distortion that goes past historical fiction into fantasy. At least in that case, the author said in her Author’s Note what she had done. Other authors don’t explain what they’ve deliberately distorted, which is a cheat on the reader, I think. That, and giving characters modern perceptions and sensibilities, as if people in different times and places were just us in funny clothes. That’s fantasy, and to call it historical is a cheap cheat.”
My passion for documentary gives me a similar prickly desire to muck out the ditch between fact and fiction.
And an item to provoke rage -
“Today, the hard men and women of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs had intended to set a deadline for ‘removing’ Muhammad Faruquie from Australia. ‘Remove’ is the immigration department’s euphemism for deport. After 19 years in Australia he was to be ‘removed’ to Pakistan.”
Why are they bothering? There is no real personal information in this story. Maybe he has a family which has been busted up. Maybe he lives quietly by himself. Maybe he will have the last laugh, selling his once cheap house for a great deal of money and returning to a life of wealth and ease in Pakistan. But it seems so pointless to poke him with pins here.
September 7th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Joshua Micah Marshall’s piece made me cry. It wasn’t just, as Uncle Kvetch points out, that his father was not his biological father, it was also the comment “One of the great heartbreaks of my life is that my dad did not live to see his first grandson…”. That did it for me. I feel the same about my mother who died last year not knowing my first grandson, although I then pull myself together and realise that there are a million and one things that have happened or are going to happen that she didn’t know about either. Somehow that idea though is still a powerful one.
Thanks also for the consolation of the library pics. Don’t know why, but they are beuatiful to look at.