{"id":108158,"date":"2017-02-27T08:56:01","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T13:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108158"},"modified":"2017-02-27T09:58:38","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T14:58:38","slug":"walden-the-video-game-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/27\/walden-the-video-game-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Walden: The Video Game, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_108159\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/walden_thoreau.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-108159\" class=\"wp-image-108159\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/walden_thoreau.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"701\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/walden_thoreau.jpg 1360w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/walden_thoreau-300x210.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/walden_thoreau-768x539.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/walden_thoreau-1024x718.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-108159\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Finally, a chance to experience the magic of <em>Walden<\/em> firsthand!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I like <em>Walden <\/em>as much as the next guy. My problem with it\u2014my problem with all books\u2014is that it\u2019s just such a <em>passive <\/em>experience for the reader. Thoreau does all the talking; I\u2019m just supposed to listen. Thoreau does all the fishing; I\u2019m just supposed to watch. Thoreau plants all the beans; he never asks, Hey, reader, would you like to come out here and give me a hand with the beans sometime? But all that\u2019s about to change with Walden, a Game, the new video-game adaptation of Thoreau\u2019s treatise on solitude that puts <em>you <\/em>in control of your spiritual self-discovery. Its designers, Robin Pogrebin writes, hope to fuse the thrills of gaming to the joys of quiet contemplation: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/24\/arts\/henry-david-thoreau-video-game.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">The new video game, based on Thoreau\u2019s nineteenth-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal<\/a>\u2014all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author\u2019s meditations \u2026 Should you not leave sufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, the game cautions: \u2018Your inspiration has become low, but can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human\u2019 \u2026 The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Nell Zink, who tends to greet realist novels with a very formidable eye roll, writes in praise of Doris Lessing\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Golden Notebook<\/em>, which gave her \u201csome rigorous realist fiction to love\u201d: \u201c\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/nplusonemag.com\/online-only\/online-only\/writing-for-rejection\/\" target=\"_blank\">\u2018Realistic\u2019 novels \u2026 generally don\u2019t even try. They want to \u2018work,\u2019 to be \u2018good reads,\u2019 by manipulating emblems of meaning smoothly in a framework of familiar myth<\/a>. Many work contemptibly, steering sentimental nodules of canned subjectivity into the cheesiest myths imaginable. Authors hope to inhibit readers\u2019 critical urges entirely for as long as a given book lasts; in essays, interviews, and formats like \u2018My Writing Day,\u2019 we hint at the tricks we use to facilitate total audience immersion in our shared dream. Where we do intend readers to exercise critical faculties, those should be directed at something other than the work. They want a trance state, and we want to give it to them. But in that transaction, something vital is lost. That could be the reason so many admirable people read nonfiction instead: You can\u2019t communicate with people you\u2019re trying to hypnotize!\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ren Hang, a queer Chinese photographer, has committed suicide at twenty-nine. Stephanie H. Hung describes his defiant work: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/aperture.org\/blog\/remembering-ren-hang\/\" target=\"_blank\">Using a\u00a0small Minolta point-and-shoot camera, Ren Hang acts as director, moving hands and legs, lifting girls on top of girls, and arranging flowers on top of men<\/a>. The subjects are all close friends or models he interviews beforehand who trust and respond well to the photographer\u2019s demands. The resulting photographs\u2014untitled and dated only for convenience\u2014do not consciously attempt to address queer identity in China but rather function as a form\u00a0of play or performance in a place where any explicit declaration of same-sex orientation is still considered risky and nude photographs are routinely labeled pornographic \u2026 He develops and scans his film at private studios to avoid obscenity charges\u00a0and has become keenly aware of the potential for censorship. Still, he is\u00a0often harassed online, and his works, when on public view, have been spit upon or taken down, leaving only empty frames.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Instead of plunking down for a faceless Airbnb rental on some beach, book a trip to Guge, the medieval kingdom nestled in the Himalayas, at least ten hours from the nearest airport. David Shulman offers a primer: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/02\/24\/submerged-in-the-cosmic-kingdom-guge-peter-van-ham\/\" target=\"_blank\">Guge was once home to a major inner-Asian dynasty whose artists and craftsmen produced a plethora of masterpieces over some five centuries<\/a>. Although many of these works did not survive the Chinese Cultural Revolution, those that did\u2014including some large-scale murals and exquisitely carved and painted sculptures depicting Buddhist visions of the cosmos and its deities\u2014give us a tantalizing sense of the lost world that imagined them into being \u2026 The monumental paintings that have survived in the Guge caves and temple-monasteries guide the meditating monk, also the casual visitor, through overlapping universes. They follow an iconographic program set out in detail in Sanskrit texts known as the\u00a0<em>Tantras of Practice<\/em>. At the center of many of the artistic sequences (in Guge as in the famous monastery of Tabo in the Spiti Valley in the Indian Himalayas) is the Buddha of Intense Light, Vairocana, one of a series of three, or five, or thirty-seven, or even a thousand Buddhas and other divine beings who, worshiped together, can release the disciplined seeker from all sorrow.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Jonathan Guyer tells the story of Ahmed Naji, the Egyptian novelist sentenced to prison on obscenity charges: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/culture\/features\/cairo-novelist-imprisoned-for-obscenity-in-egypt-tells-story-w468084\" target=\"_blank\">On February 20th, 2016, an appeals court sentenced Naji to the maximum sentence: two years<\/a>. It was the first time that a writer had landed in prison\u00a0<em>for fiction\u2014<\/em>not activism or reportage, but fiction\u2014in recent memory \u2026 Hani Saleh Tawfik, the lawyer who began Naji\u2019s imbroglio, claimed to have experienced a fluttering heart and lowered blood pressure after reading Naji&#8217;s fiction, which, according to the police report, included \u2018pussy licking, dick sucking, and other such words that should not be written in a newspaper like <em>Akhbar Al-Adab<\/em>.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: Thoreau\u2019s masterpiece becomes a video game, Nell Zink lobbies for the Golden Notebook, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[27524,1785,2968,1815,12071,1773,27525,71,3232,27523,8641,15487,100,5872,27522,6258,15467,6049,494,3639],"class_list":["post-108158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-ahmed-naji","tag-buddhism","tag-censorship","tag-china","tag-doris-lessing","tag-egypt","tag-egyptian-novelists","tag-fiction","tag-gaming","tag-guge","tag-henry-david-thoreau","tag-nell-zink","tag-photography","tag-realism","tag-ren-hang","tag-the-golden-notebook","tag-the-himalayas","tag-tibet","tag-video-games","tag-walden"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>They\u2019re Finally Making a 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