“63. How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it is fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there’s almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to be mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator. (25-26)”

“70. As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art — underprocessed, underproduced — splinters and explodes. (27)”

– Reality Hunger, David Shields

I picked up Reality Hunger: A Manifesto at the library yesterday, after noticing that it’s been on the top of the list at The Millions for a while. When I first read Shields’ catch phrase “the lure and blur of the real” it reminded me that I had tuned in for a live web broadcast of the roundtable discussion of the same name he moderated back in March.

The Philoctetes Center, named for that wounded guy with the bow, hosted the discussion with Shields. It’s a non-profit under the auspices of the NY Psychoanalytic Society that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue between artists and scientists. They have a library of conversations (YouTube channel) between smart, interesting people in many fields (including several professors I was acquainted with in the Psychology Department at NYU) on many topics, all available for free online.

Excited to discover that such an organization exists, I wrote a sappy fan email about my struggles with thinking I needed to choose a camp (art or science) since my teens, and stubbornly deciding to choose both. I also spoke to the manager of the place, actor Adam Ludwig, about getting more involved. Of course I enthusiastically promised to send in all sorts of brilliant ideas for new panels they could put together, etc, which I still haven’t gotten around to doing. In any case, they don’t have a lot of funding, and you should donate if you can, to help bring interesting minds together in conversation. Two of the other participants in “The Lure and Blur of the Real” discussion were author Rick Moody and John Cameron Mitchell, director of Shortbus, that film with the non-faked orgy.