Diary

Because we are having porcelain floor tiles placed in the sunroom, the house has been noisy all week, and we currently have to climb a ladder to a landing in order to reach the second floor without stepping on recently-set tiles. This has reduced my reading considerably. The spring has been unusually cold, but has not curtailed progress in the garden, and now, thanks to climate change, it will suddenly become extremely hot for a few days, and I'm installing a window air conditioner.

I didn't say anything about short fiction in my last post, and will do so briefly now. Much of the literary fiction that currently appears in the U.S. consists of short stories. It has become a separate form of fiction, in which techniques that differentiate it from novels are employed. I attempted to read it for several years, generally gave up, and recently read one collection that I didn't like much. My thinking on the kind of literary short fiction that is being written now is that the form exists primarily in order to fit within single issues of literary journals or magazines such as the New Yorker. I am no longer going to read it, because the form does not generate the kind of narrative density that I believe makes fiction worthwhile. It also lacks the distinctive virtues of poetry, which if nothing else permits the distillation of sentiments. Short stories, I think, are a kind of fudge, because they lack the space for the development of pointed realism. As I've said, characters become stick figures and the authors cannot be held accountable for shoddy work because the medium asks so little of them. The rise of the literary short story is probably also an example of the intrusion of market forces into the production and dissemination of fiction. In the nineteenth century, novels were often serialized in magazines, but they take up more space than contemporary publishers can tolerate, for economic reasons. A dud short story may have no effect on the circulation of a magazine, whereas as a serialized dud novel might substantially reduce it. On the academic side, there are probably advantages to emphasizing short stories over novels due to the relatively shorter time span necessary for their composition. I think that a good novel is much harder to produce than a passable short story, and this favors the short story in both literary publishing and writing programs. In some circumstances a long short story may possess the virtues of a good short novel – this was sometimes the case in the nineteenth century – but based on my recent reading experience, I don't think the contemporary literary short story is a form worth bothering with. There is promise in some short fiction that is produced elsewhere, such as that of Julio Ramón Ribeyro, but I'm not making a point of finding it.

The Trump drama drags on at a tedious pace. I was not impressed by James Comey's testimony, because there was nothing factually new in it. However, he has been the first major public figure in office during the Trump administration to openly express his concern about Trump's sleaziness, and if this catches on it may accelerate Trump's departure. The only benefit that I can find to Trump's presidency is a much-needed improvement in late-night TV comedy. Trump also seems to have invigorated the news media for the first time in several years, and it has almost come as a shock to me to read meaningful editorials again.

In other news, I have been closely following the conviction of Steven Avery since the airing of the Netflix "Making a Murderer" series in 2015-2016. Ordinarily, criminal proceedings don't interest me much, but this case is unusual, because Avery apparently was innocent and was framed, is still in prison, and his current attorney, Kathleen Zellner, has done an astounding job defending him, as is evident in this document. The forensics behind his case demonstrate how difficult and costly it can be to conduct a proper investigation and how hard it can be to overturn wrongful convictions in criminal cases.

I've rounded up some books on cognitive psychology and will be commenting on them next.