In Defense of Facts
The essay is a flexible, accommodating form of writing based in fact. Writer William Deresiewicz takes writer John D’Agata to task for what he believes is D’Agata’s misleading account of the essay’s history, its form and its modern incarnation, and he skillfully dismantles the vague but inaccurate concept of the essay that D’Agata’s three large essay anthologies promote. This is no literary feud. In times like ours, where the media and science are under attack, the President-elect lies without concern for fact-checking, and many Americans discount truth itself, this debate concerns those of us outside academia.
‘I Was There’: On Kurt Vonnegut
Reexamining Vonnegut’s body of work as an adult:
“Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five taught me two things about the novel: how great it really is, and what it’s really about. It’s not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD. Vonnegut never explicitly negates the former possibility, but the evidence for the latter is overwhelming once you start to notice it. Billy Pilgrim, whose wartime experience closely parallels Vonnegut’s own, does not announce his abduction to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo and mated with the Earthling porn star Montana Wildhack—with the strong suggestion that he doesn’t imagine it, either—until after the plane crash that replays, in several respects, his wartime trauma. Despite the way we flesh them out in our minds into the semblance of a real story—as Vonnegut surely knew we would—the scenes on Tralfamadore add up to no more than a handful of discontinuous fragments: a moment in the flying saucer, a moment in the zoo and a few moments with Montana Wildhack, amounting altogether to scarcely ten pages. The whole scenario turns out to derive from a Kilgore Trout novel that Billy had read years before (as well as sharing plot points with The Sirens of Titan). And the compensatory nature of the wisdom Billy claims to learn up there is all too clear. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth one being time. ‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.'”
Faux Friendship
William Deresiewicz discusses the shaky future of friendship.
Solitude and Leadership: On Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts
You will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution.