Picked up from The Guardian.
Fleur Adcock saying in The Ex-Poet, ‘Here is the world: there is no need to describe it.’
At the same time, in the same newspaper, the advertisement for a joint gallery/newspaper promotion celebrates a new exhibition of British art: Intelligence, a title that ‘refers to the way these artists act like detectives or intelligence agents – gathering, sifting and transforming the raw data of everyday life, examining our environment, the way we live and our relations with each other.’ Visual artists – novelists – film makers…..
Same newspaper, (slogan Free Thinkers Welcome – attempting to counteract the loss of readers to the Independent, one time slogan - It Is. Are You?), same weekend. Julian Barnes, in a profile by Nicholas Wroe, prelude to the publication of Love Etc: ‘Fiction is telling truth by telling lies, as opposed to telling less of the truth by telling facts….Even if you write something close to yourself, what you’re aiming for is an objective construction artistically shaped. I admit that my early fiction was pretty close to my life but then I learned to lie.
‘You step off the land on to the ice and it doesn’t give way….When you read the great and beautiful liars of fiction you feel that this is what life is. This is true, even though it is all made up.’
Guardian 29.7.00