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I, like Kate, found Kakutani's interpretation of Shields to be overly harsh and certainly having missed his point. Kakutani ironically seems to dabble in some of the techniques she so vehemently critiques in Shields work. I did not find it to be "nihilistic," though I do think it was "deliberately provocative," and I'm not so sure what is so wrong with being deliberately provocative.

Perhaps one is supposed to provoke only in a subtle manner, but again, that would have completely gone against Shields' objective. I love that his the structure of his book underscores his ideas about the role that fact, fiction, and reality play in today's world. It is difficult to process and catalog all these quick sound bytes, for lack of a better non-technology-centric phrase. They come together to give you an impression, and a few may stick out, yet where they came from or what context in which they originally appeared is no longer important. We use facts in isolation to make and remake our own points. After they are launched into the cosmos, they are only recycled anyway. Why not publish them in a hard-cover form? Why should that change the form and the formality of our fact selection? And of course, as he chronicles, popular culture is becoming more and more based on sampling and reworking existing songs, art pieces, vintage fashion, etc. Just because someone decided there was more of an etiquette to borrowing ideas from each other (whats that academic honor code all about anyway?) means that 'Reality Hunger' can be labeled "deliberately provocative," and scoffed at.

I have to admit, it is difficult to process a book written in this way. I'm not used to it; it's not a comfortable, digestible medium--even if we are re-using and re-appropriating ideas as such.. I find it a challenge to synthesize this information easily, perhaps because Shields is intentionally leaving that up to us as the readers. We, the common (wo)man, are taking control of art and literary production. "Facebook and MySpace are crude personal essay machines," begins Shields section on "reality-based art by necessity," which is "dragged down to the lowest common denominator," and is the push behind countless media today (94, 95). We truly have no one to blame but ourselves, for whatever boredom we have at mashup music  tracks, or Warhol-eque pop art, or girls taking the same self-portrait shots for MySpace profile pictures. We are driving the rush of content and confusion to the art and literary worlds.

Shields points out that for most of us, "the illusion of facts will suffice," (86). I'm left wondering though if I have the energy or the motivation to counter-act that generalization. Perhaps it is just best to let the illusion stand, recognizing that the line is blurred, in all areas of our lives, between fiction and non-fiction. Yet at the same time, as we said on the first day of class, what would I be doing in a class on non-fiction, if reality or truth didn't matter to me?