Reading the reviews of David Shield’s much touted and discussed new book ‘Reality Hunger’ I’m sadly reminded that now that Duthie’s is gone and my rare priviledged life of free and current books over, I will have to ‘buy’ it in book form or download it or wait for the library to get it.
Checking out prices in the enemy camps, it’s new at Chapters - $19.10, ebook $17.39, at Amazon $16.47 US kindle edition $11.99 US and even used for $14.37 I go to David Shield's home page (http://www.davidshields.com) and read all the reviews and free excepts and watch the you tubes of his talks. I want the book even more now. I read that he likes my favourite author of the moment, Geoff Dyer, and a past favourite - Roland Barthes. He writes in snappy aphorisms - a manifesto for a new artistic movement , a manifesto for movement, meaning and affirmation in art. I really want to read this book!
“An artistic movement, albeit an organic and-as-yet unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real." from Reality Hunger by David Shields, published by Knopf, 2010
I consider writing to him at the contact page of his website to request a review copy. I assure him I will by all the means of media at my disposal promote his book, his ideas, his impressive far-ranging refernce bank and his clear and articulate style. This may be the theory that liberates us from deconstruction. Or is it just another but much more readable deconstruction? I will have to read it to find out. I might just have to buy it.
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Sounds terrific and in a way backs up what I did for a year with a poem cycle all cut and pasted from the web every day a new poem which relies a lot on the reader making all the connections and spurring the poetic connectivity on.
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