Science Versus Fiction, Per Margaret Atwood

 "...[S]cience,...is about knowledge. Fiction, on the other hand, is about feeling. Science as such is not a person, and does not have a system of morality built into it, any more than a toaster does. It is only a tool--a tool for actualizing what we desire and defending against what we fear--and like any other tool, it can be used for good or ill. You can build a house with a hammer, and you can use the same hammer to murder your neighbour."

"Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling--Heaven, Hell, monsters, angels, and all--out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime or even a duty, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we'll be able to do it.

"Or we'll be able to try it, at least."

--Margaret Atwood, from the essay, "Scientific Romancing," in her collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 (Doubleday/Penguin Random House, 2022.)

Finding A Book By Teju Cole

The short story "Modern Girls" is by the Nigerian writer Teju Cole and is set in a girls's school in Nigeria in the early 1970s.

After hearing it read on public radio's Selected Shorts in September 2015, I included his name among the writers I should read.

But it wasn't until a little more than six months ago, after leaving my ophthalmologist's office, that it was my good fortune to find, on top of a garbage bin, a copy of one of his books, Known and Strange Things (Random House, 2016). It was the first book of his that I have encountered.

I haven't read it yet. But I intend to. Perhaps I should put it on my summer or fall reading list.

Cole, it should be noted, was a recipient of a United States Artists grant. USA is a nonprofit organization that since 2006, reported Vogue magazine, in 2017, has given "unrestricted grants of $50,000 to individual artists who...use traditional methods and unexpected approaches to speak to a vast range of experience." Cole has also received several awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Known and Strange Things is described on the back cover as "[p]ersuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible...."

A New Black Gay Literary Voice

Yesterday (May 12), I heard a very interesting interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross (heard in the New York area on WNYC AM and FM). The interview was with a young African-American writer named Michael Arceneaux (pronounced Ar-sin-noh), who in 2018 published a best selling collection of personal essays, I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyonce.

Arceneaux, who is openly gay, has published a new collection of essays called I Don't Want to Die Poor, which he discussed for nearly an hour on Fresh Air.

A 2007 graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and now residing in West Harlem, Arceneaux's latest book is about his uphill battle to pay off his student loan of $100,000.

These two books by a new literary voice are ones I plan to look for.