The origins of Reality Hunger lie, believe it or not, in a course I’ve been teaching for many years — a graduate course in the lyric essay and self-reflexive documentary film. Over many years, I’ve been putting together a course packet full of scraps of material that I’ve read and loved. I didn’t really care/don’t really care who said what. None of the quotes had citations; I was just trying to get the class to respond to the provocative statements, especially since they were and are graduate students in fiction, and my course is kind of the Anabaptist at the Baptist convention. All this material started becoming a book when I realized I could slide some of the material intro thematized rubrics, otherwise known as chapters; each chapter could have a movement, an argument; and the book as a whole could go from A to Z, could unfold an ethos, an ars poetica. What drove the thing from the beginning was that I needed to explain to myself why I don’t write fiction per se anymore, and why with various few exceptions I can’t and don’t read it, and why a certain kind of philosophically inclined nonfiction thrills me to my toes, how exciting this work is, how exciting it always has been, going back millennia. I just wanted to understand this for myself and, in a way, my students and the culture at large, because I do think the shift is in no way only in me.

Can’t decide if David Shields is full of shit or brilliant. Probably both. Just ordered his new book, Reality Hunger.