Granite is hard!

I've sat at this granite table and eaten supper, done some writing, and now I'm typing too. Each of these things is a different experience when you do it on something as hard and flat as this. Even typing on the laptop feels more firm! And it has a ring to it. If you knock on it, it sings; it has a tone.

So yeah, it's pretty cool! And hard.

I read an interesting essay, Reality A and Reality B on the nature of fiction writing, and reading, post 9/11, by Haruki Murakami in the NYT. The most interesting (to me) observation he makes is this,

Let’s call the world we actually have now Reality A and the world that we might have had if 9/11 had never happened Reality B. Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be realer and more rational than the world of Reality A. To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not “chaos”?

Interesting. From this he goes on to notice what I've sensed too, especially among young readers. They tend to take things at face value, rather than as hypothetical. That is, in light of the fact of the otherworldy, Hollywood-action-film-esque chaos of two airliners hitting, and utterly destroying, two steel and glass towers, what can be fiction anymore? I don't know if Japanese has a phrase that works like "truth is stranger than fiction" but that's some of what he's getting at. So, in a real-life context where the unimaginable has become not only possible, but has been demonstrated for us, we might begin to read fiction in a different way. Incredulity is off the table, since everything is now potentially real. In this milieu, the reader simply tries to negotiate the fiction, as he would negotiate fact. He tries to take it all in, but not necessarily as a symbolic whole. That mode of reading has been trumped, or overrun, by a kind of hyper-literalism.

Similarly, William Gibson, in an interview at NY Magazine muses on terrorism as a brand, and our pre-occupation (and his) with physical stuff.

Just like our new table. Very hard. Nearly inconceivable. Yet, here it is before me.