Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

Pittsburgh-based fiction writer
August 6, 2010

The Flushing Office

This has nothing to do with anything, but I have observed that the maintenance manager of the building where I work habitually takes and makes important-sounding work calls while seated in the toilet stall of the men’s room. What’s more, he seems to make no secret, for the benefit of those he’s speaking to, of occupying that space. Today he entered the men’s room already in conversation, went into the stall, apparently did not like what he saw, and gave the toilet a preliminary flush, all while keeping up a conversation about whatever thing had to be done to maintain the building.

It reminded me of this interview that the AV Club did with ex-Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, in which it turns out, right at the tail end of the interview, that he’d been speaking from the same general location as the office manager. And, moreover, he was kind of proud of it.

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August 6, 2010

Literary fictions not dead

Over at Robert Yune’s internet pad, Sal Pane rounds out the Robert-curated colloquium on the question of whether literary fiction is dead or not.

I was glad to see Sal pick up on the idea of entertainment in other media crowding fiction out. This was a point I felt strongly about, and maybe wanted to hit harder, but didn’t because it was really just an aside in the greater context of my entry in the series.

It’s made me remember a blog post I read not too long ago, arguing the issue of whether reading a book was inherently superior to playing a video game. (As these things go, I can’t pinpoint whose blog it was, much less find the link. I want to say it was the Atlantic blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writing I like a lot (but whose spelling makes my heart hurt), but I can’t be sure of that.)

The specific argument that sticks in my mind is this hypothetical: Imagine the criticisms of books if video games—the highly evolved, textured, complex and subtle ones that are coming out now; not Duck Hunt—were the dominant medium, and the book was an upstart form. The interface is incredibly passive. A book only stimulates one part of the child’s brain; there’s no visual stimulation. There’s zero motor-skill usage in the act of reading a book. And so on. The argument didn’t even touch on the Wii and the prospect of video games that are exercise, rather than keeping kids from exercising. Read the rest of this entry »

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