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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

Jonathan Lethem

I'm going to see him tonight, as the last of this season's Seattle Arts and Lecture series. As has been the theme all season, I have not read any of his books. Until this week I was almost completely ignorant about him, but I did go listen to an interview on Fresh Air and I've picked up his novel Fortress of Solitude with one of my credits at Audible.

Seattlest has an interview with Lethem today. This particular quote really spoke to me:

We just need to constantly understand how much we’re awash in our own subjective, fantastical consciousness. This is why people are so interested in stories, even if they distrust them. It’s why fiction and film…it’s how we understand ourselves. By the same token, we’re all storytelling at some time.

The context of the quote is about memory and how we recollect things, the idea that we're not remembering the event as much as we're remembering the last time we remembered the event and I'm very interested in that idea... but when I read that quote I immediately thought: blogs.

Lethem also has a really interesting view on inspiration, plagiarism, the impulse to make art and all that goes with it. His website has a really neat shared content experiment which he calls The Promiscuous Materials Project.

I'm looking forward to the lecture tonight very much. I'm going to try to make it to the pre-lecture for this one if I can but I'm so busy I won't know until just before if that will be possible.

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