Judith Kitchen
>Some Facts about Uncertainty
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| “Uncertain Harmonies, Series No. 8” by Kevin Laycock |
The other day, I was walking down the street in East London having a deep debate (“erudite” is how my companion Greg described it) about the nature of human nature that led to a discussion about the definition of “natural” and “reality” and whether perhaps these two words mean the same thing. Our debate went in circles as we walked from east to west, encountering the hum of accents and foreign words. It began to rain lightly. In London in August the rain was a certainty.
Judith Kitchen meditates on the nature of uncertainty in all its complicated fragments at the TriQuarterly Review: “Who knew words could fly in the face of their origins? Could confuse and obfuscate merely by using their science against you? I read and I read and still I cannot fathom what “oxidation” means that I should so want to resist it. I read and I read and fact becomes my enemy. Fact: I have always loved fact. Fact: I want to embrace fact. Fact: I want my own sense of reality here, and this is not learning to live with uncertainty, though it may be one step along the way.”
On the line between facts and imagination, Robert Birnbaum interviews novelist and journalist Jessica Egan at The Morning News: “Well, as a journalist I think it’s incredibly important, certainly for me, and I actually think for everyone, to be clear about whether you are actually trying to represent real things and real people, or whether you are making it up for story. To me, blurring those lines is a disservice to journalism—certainly research pieces. I don’t buy the idea that, “Well, I sort of created a compilation.” Or, “I kind of combined two scenes.” I don’t feel comfortable with that.”
The BBC has recently made available online its archive of author interviews from the past decades. I’ve never heard novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf’s voice before. Here she speaks about the “mysterious demands and duplicity of words.”
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| “Uncertain Harmonies, Series No. 10” by Kevin Laycock |
Tim Elhajj explores the heavy certainty of the phrase, “I am a homosexual” at Guernica where he recounts his discharge from the Navy: “The agent at the desk tugged out a sheaf of handwritten paper on a yellow legal pad and passed it over to me. When I asked what it was, he told me that Fear had written a statement. I saw the big loops of Fear’s penmanship, neat and precise. I knew the agents were watching me. I shuffled through the pages, but I didn’t bother to read the words. I wondered what I would tell the people back home. I felt a sort of sick awareness growing in my gut.”
Daniel Akst at The Wilson Quarterly reflects on the ethos of loneliness in U.S. culture: “The number of household pets has exploded throughout the Western world, suggesting that not just dogs but cats, rats, and parakeets are often people’s best friends. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who studies loneliness, says he’s convinced that more Americans are lonely—not because we have fewer social contacts, but because the ones we have are more harried and less meaningful.”
And, at The Millions, writer Dylan Hicks muses on the pleasures and perils of connecting with other readers and writers at the online network Goodreads: “I don’t have many writer friends, or many non-writer friends, my Facebook account notwithstanding, but I have a few, and the next time one of them publishes a book, I’d be inclined to give that book the maximum rating on Goodreads, even though none of my friends—I can just tell—are capable of writing a five-star book (which by my lights is a good thing), and no doubt some of them will write two-star books.”
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