Meaning as a matter of adjacent data

I recently bought a book of essays by E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of the perennial Elements of Style. It is, as of now, unread. White reportedly is a fabulous essayist – which these days may seem the equivalent of being first runnerup in the local hula hoop competition since, unnoticed by me, all the cool kids apparently have wandered off to read fiction.

But my preference for nonfiction over fiction finds a little vindication in this book review at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excerpt:

David Shields’s punchy manifesto in defense of documentary creativity—against what he sees as the novel’s anemic anachronism—takes in a wider sweep of contemporary reality genres, from the memoir and lyric essay to cinéma vérité, karaoke, hip-hop, and Project Runway … The novel of plot and character, by his lights, is an inherently nostalgic form, a Victorian holdover inadequate to the imaginative challenges our zeitgeist poses.

… Shields is a flamboyant aphorist. He has assembled a montage manifesto from 618 epigrams, assertions, and sound bites, ranging in length from three words to one paragraph … we live in an age of “continuous partial attention.” … Ours is an age of opinionated inattentiveness and, as such, an age for which the aphorism is ideal. That instinct underlies Reality Hunger‘s episodic design: The units of thought are so small that you can start the book anywhere. Yet, en masse, Shields’s aphoristic shards create a comprehensive argument against the novel’s superiority and in favor of nonfictional creativity …

…Crucially, Shields has the brio to create convincing bridges among his plunderings.

As in:

“The life span of the fact is shrinking: I don’t think there’s time to save it.”

“Memory: the past rewritten in the direction of feeling.”

“Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning ultimately is a matter of adjacent data.”

“Genre is a minimum-security prison.”

Meaning as “a matter of adjacent data.” I can relate to that. In a sense, it’s the motif of this blog.