Category Archives: Storytelling

Trish Salah Wanting in Arabic has a piece that opens with a fateful sentence. She awoke to an appetite for narrative. Notice she awoke “to” not “with”. Notice also “narrative” not “narration” (the story vs the telling). The appetite might … Continue reading →

Take the old Jesuit saying Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man. and make it intersect with Brenda Laurel’s finding, from interviews with over 1,000 children, that of the categories of play, … Continue reading →

John Stands in “Timber” in Cheyenne Memories concludes a tale about the seven stars of the big dipper thus It was a story supposed to make us go to sleep, but I would lie awake thinking about those seven brothers … Continue reading →

Somewhere I culled this anecdote because it reminded me of Jerome Bruner’s concept of “going meta”. In the 1980s Scientific American included some practical joke in the April issue. One went like this: The AI lab at MIT was working … Continue reading →

Alain Badiou in Deleuze: The Clamour of Being translated by Louise Burchill Who could maintain that the myth of Er the Pamphylian, at the end of the Republic, is a transparent narrative? It consists entirely of traps and bifurcations. I … Continue reading →

Tinder tender. Warren Tallman essaying on Creeley For if muttering is a way of counting, counting is a way of telling […] In the heat of the telling there is an expansion of the voice and that expansion leads to … Continue reading →

Metafiction impells verification. Fiction that incorporates truth value testing is like running an experiment. Such writing plays with the sometimes subtle difference between supposition and description. Ascriptions that are particular: The cat on the mat. “The cat on the mat” … Continue reading →