Recently, my husband received an email from a very casual acquaintance and wondered where this person lived. He Googled them, found their address and was presented, by Google Street view, with a picture of their house, and all within the space of 2 minutes. This exercise caused me to comment to him, “it must be really different dating these days” – we've been together 15 years – “it's so much harder for anyone to lie anymore.” I think about the tall tales I was told during my dating years, and that doesn't include the stories I didn't come to realize were exaggerations, at the very least. But now, you can Google someone and find out where they work, their political affiliation, see photos of their house, maybe their wife and kids! And that's before you follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook.

It is true that human beings will always manage to adapt their behavior somewhat to the new technological circumstances, and I imagine that this new potential transparency doesn’t mean that men and women no longer lie about aspects of their lives on dates (or at any other time). However, I think it’s also true that the next generation will grow up in a world that is a radically different social experience. Whether its dating, working, college acceptance or friendship, the internet and social media are changing everything. It is now almost a given that part of a job interview process (and in some cases a college interview process) will include a review of an applicant’s digital profile. This raises the issue of digital memory; the web forgets nothing, no matter how much you want it to. The New York Times ran a piece recently about this very issue and nascent attempts to address this using, amongst other tools, an expiration date for certain digital content. Even if some of these methods are implemented, there is no doubt that our children are growing up in a world where it is increasingly difficult to run from a checkered past and remake a less than desirable reputation.

Will our children understand loneliness in the sense that previous generations did? In the world of texting, Facebook, Foursquare, etc., continuous connectivity to many other people is now the norm, however superficial these relationships may or may not be. If this kind of connectivity isn’t sufficient, there are various services, both paid and free, that are connecting people with new potential “friends”, or at least acquaintances: www.rentafriend.com, a relatively new service, allows users to do just that, rent a friend for an hour or so. Craigslist, long a means for people to connect for casual hookups, or to advertise a yard sale, also has a section called Strictly Platonic, which enables users to find someone to connect with for everything from phone chats regarding, “jobs, men, losing weight, goals we hope to accomplish”, to finding someone to go to the theater with.

Read more »

A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

Edward Wilson: Fire away, and I’ll try to get back answers of decent interest, brevity, and so on.

Sam Kean: I’ve heard you say you have a policy of never taking any vacations. Was writing this book sort of a vacation for you?

EW: I would say in one sense I never take a vacation. I never go on a fishing trip. I never go to the beach except to study the ants who live in the sand. So in that sense I’ve never taken a vacation in my life. But I consider that most of the work I’ve done in my life is one continuous vacation. I don’t know how I’ve managed to get away with being paid for what I do. Because to me it’s a constant adventure and thrill.

And I have the advantage as a scientist, especially when working on ants, to do a search wherever I go. Even when I took my family on vacations—for them—and of course, I had to have leisure time with them!—I could do research wherever we went, because ants are ubiquitous. Even if you went to the beach somewhere, there are ant species. After all, they make up more than half the biomass of all insects. And ants are found form the arctic almost to the ends of the southern continents…

But here I am, nattering on about ants. We were talking about the book. Go ahead.

SK: So did you consider the book a vacation from science or a continuation of it?

EW: All three! That is, it combined all three of my key interests. One is science. Second is conservation of biodiversity. Third, is an exciting new experience: to plunge into a different mode of thinking and writing. Although maybe I should say that the mode of thinking is really not that different.

SK: Not that different from…?

EW: Science. Because the ideal scientist, I’ve always thought, is a person who thinks like a poet (or, if you wish, a novelist), who works like a bookkeeper, and—if he’s fortunate to be able to do so—who writes like a good journalist in explaining what has been found. But the difference between the creative process and writing science is that you don’t have the bookkeeper period.

On the other hand, if you have a science base, which this book certainly does, with the ant part, you can accomplish certain things. It’s the first time anyone has written of the cycles of the ant colonies as the ants themselves experience it—as best we can understand it from the science. And I think this is the first novel—it’s certainly the first southern novel—but it’s one of the very few American novels to pay close attention to the environment. Particularly the diversity of life in the environment.

Most novelists deal with the environment in phrases like, Went through the dark woods, looking for a dark path, you know, or, Found peace in a meadow filled with beautiful blooming flowers. That’s about as far as most novelists go. What I’ve done is to make the environment—and particularly that treasured habitat that a young Raphael Semmes Cody, the hero, spends the entire book designing and scheming and fighting to save—I made it virtually a character in the novel. Treated it as an entity, the ecosystem, almost as a character. So that in a sense it comes full circle to your question: The book has a lot of science in it.
Read more »

Verizon's street poster for Inception

Ben Walters (BW) & J. M. Tyree (JMT) have been talking about movies together since 1995, often amicably. They co-wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics book series. They shared notes – via email, chat, and document sharing – on Christopher Nolan's Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a corporate spy who retrieves secrets by invading targets' dreams. JMT watched it in San Francisco and BW saw it in London.

Bath of Dreamings

JMT: Here's a mainstream picture we both looked forward to watching, Inception, Christopher Nolan’s summer hit. It's a trap to worry overly about a Hollywood blockbuster being a Hollywood blockbuster, but I feel baffled by the critical reaction. The people next to me at the multiplex were loudly oohing and ahhing over the film as though it were a display of fireworks. And since then I’ve talked to several very smart people who enjoyed the film. What did I miss?

BW: I've got to admit I'm not quite sure. Maybe people like having their legs pulled? With sumptuous production design?

JMT: The new Film Quarterly (Summer, 2010) has a thoughtful book review by Martin Fradley about the state of the contemporary film industry. It talks about Hollywood's “new auteurs” – deal-makers, producers, agents, and distributors. Maybe that's Christopher Nolan at this point, a corporate auteur, the total bundle – which is intriguing given how weird his films are.

BW: In a way I think that's the most interesting aspect of Inception – he has the clout and the industrial nous to mount a massive shaggy dog story like this. And it's certainly another exploration of his pet themes – the ways memory, identity and narrative shape our lived reality.

JMT: He doesn’t really “do” joyful moments of intimacy. Or humor.

Undone Minds

BW: No one comes to Nolan for hugs or chuckles. His films are meant to be conventionally satisfying riddle movies, by and large, within which frame he can explore more genuinely upsetting ideas of identity. When it works, it makes you question whether you actually have any right to your opinion about yourself. When it doesn't, it comes off as dull, pretentious, over-designed guff.

JMT: My frustration watching Inception was that it barely explores the fascinating pathways opened by its own premise.

BW: Yes, I had a similar feeling…

Read more »

Steven Moore is an author, a critic, and a former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History, Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

It's a remark people have made about the book, and that I believe you've also made yourself: it is called The Novel: An Alternative History, but it could also be called A History of the Alternative Novel. How true is that?

In my mind, I was doing two things at once. First of all, it's an alternative to the conventional history of the novel, which begins in 18th-century England and goes up to about 1920 and then James Joyce comes along and throws a monkey wrench into everything and invents the avant-garde novel. The problem with that is, the novel actually started way back in ancient Greece, and the avant-garde novel that Joyce allegedly invented has always been a property. There's crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning. I'm writing about these ancient works, but all along I'm defending modern, innovative fiction, which often gets a bad rap. I want to point out that these modern avant-garde things are not deviations from the norm, but have always been part of the novel.

This opens up a big issue of just how it's come to be that a traditional history of the novel has become so narrow. This book of yours, the first part ends well before the traditional history begins. How much do you have to modify the “normal” definition of the novel to go back as far as you do.

It depends on what you mean by normal. The dictionary, and E.M. Forster in his famous Aspects of the Novel, says that a novel is any work of fiction longer than 50,000 words, or any book-length work of fiction. If you take that as your definition, you can go back as far as I do. However, you're right, some modern critics want to narrow that down to: a novel has to be realistic, it has to have a certain amount of psychological depth, it has to be set against a recognizable social or economic background, et cetera, et cetera. Why they want to do that, I don't know. I gues they wanted to distinguish the novel written by Flaubert or Henry James from something written in the Middle Ages, so they've come up with all these notions. If you just go by a basic definition, which most would agree, that a novel is just a book-length work of fiction, that opens all sorts of possibilities.

Someone who isn't familiar with this talk about what defines a novel, I'm sure they'll be surprised when they read your book, especially the introduction. They'll find out that, indeed, there has been some argument over what constitutes a proper novel. How closely were you following that before you set into this enormous project, the history of the novel?

I wasn't so much following arguments about the novel as I was simply noticing, throughout my life, that I kept stumbling across these older works of fiction that looked like novels to me, even though that's not what I learned in college. In college, the novel started in the 18th century. In bookstores, I would come across The Tale of Genji, an ancient Japanese novel, or Petronius' Satyricon, which comes from the very first century, or an Icelandic saga like Nial's Saga. I would look at them and say, well, this is fiction, book-length. They certainly looked like novels. I was responding to that, rather than following the academic debates that have been going on for the last century or two.

Starting this project, at what point in your research were you able to find a beginning for works that look like novels, to your own mind?

I knew there were ancient Greek novels. I'd seen a big fat book published by the University of California press called The Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Then I realized Nietzsche once compared Plato's dialogues to early novels, and I thought that was interesting. I came across a book of ancient Egyptian tales, and there's some ancient Egyptian scholars who say these are pretty much novels in everything but name; they have all the properties of novels. It was just looking at ancient fiction, which I've always had a slight interest in, and realizing a lot of those early writings had a lot of properties of the novel. Of course, there was no such thing as the novel per se then, so they were never labeled as such, but if you treat them as the fictional adventures of some character going through a set of dramatic sequences, which is what most novels are, you can look at something like Gilgamesh and say, “Yeah, this resembles a novel,” even though that's not what the author may have set out to do.

What about the earliest fictions you include in the book fascinate you the most?

The daring of them. This goes back to your first question about alternative fiction. These early fictions, especially Egyptian and Assyrian stuff, they're almost like avant-garde magical realist novels. They're more like García Marquez than John Updike, say. The freedom I saw there really interests me. This is the same freedom avant-garde writers adopt. As soon as literature started becoming written, critics came up with rules for poetry and drama. Anyone who was writing tales or longer fictions were pretty much free to do whatever they wanted. There was this real spirit of experimentalism, to use a modern term, in that early fiction, that fit in perfectly with my whole thesis: the avant-garde novel is not a modern aberration, but goes all the way back to the beginning. If anything, the conventional novel is the aberration. That's a very late development.

Could you say that we have it backwards, that what we see as normal is one current of many in terms of the way the novel has gone? We've focused so much on one subset, that has seemed to us to be the only thing?

Exactly. Without question, it's the most popular form of fiction, the conventional novel, the beginning, middle, end, and all that. It's the easiest to read, has the largest appeal, blah, blah, blah. But when you step back and look at the whole stream from ancient Egypt to what's being written now, it's just a tributary that goes off to the side. I wouldn't push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.

Read more »