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+.fancyquote > p {
+    /* citation */
+    text-indent: -1.5rem;
+    margin-left: 2rem;
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diff --git a/content/garden/fiction.html b/content/garden/fiction.html
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+<section id="an-unoriginal-thought-about-fiction" class="level1">
+<h1>An unoriginal thought about fiction</h1>
+<p><span id="date">Jan 14, 2025</span>
+<!-- provenance: local 25.01.15-03.10.md -> garden/fiction.html --></p>
+<p>Why are we surprised that <em>Nosferatu</em> is funny?</p>
+<p><em>The Odyssey</em> is funny. <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> is funny.
+<em>Don Quixote</em> is well-known to be funny. And more from the
+Western canon: Dante’s <em>Divine Comedy</em>, Borges’s
+<em>Ficciones</em> (title tells you everything), Shakespeare’s plays,
+Plato’s <em>Symposium</em>. These are, to varying degrees, all satire,
+all lampooning the society in which they were written! Keep searching;
+you’ll only find more to support my observation.</p>
+<p>Rana asks: how come, in our education on classical literature, we
+seem to only read satire like Cervantes and Austen?</p>
+<p><em>There is nothing else</em>.</p>
+<p>All great literature is satire. Irony is a prerequisite. Nothing
+important can be said without a current of humor. Telling a story is,
+inherently, satire of life! <a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref"
+id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
+<p>Every writer knows, deep down, that to sit down and write is,
+necessarily, to adopt an ironic disposition—to make fun at the expense
+of something else. (You can, of course, set out to tell a joke and then
+tell a bad joke.)</p>
+<p>But do not mistake irony for disgust.</p>
+<div class="fancyquote">
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>Don Quixote</em> could only have been written by someone who
+really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them
+more closely, and understood just what it would cost.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>– Elif Batuman, <em>The Possessed</em></p>
+</div>
+<p>It is weird to compose fiction. The moment you acknowledge that what
+you are doing is fiction, you have admitted to telling a lie. The gap
+between reality and the story hangs over the work as a wellspring of
+irony and humor. The artfulness of storytelling lies in the interplay
+between that awareness and the suspension of disbelief.</p>
+<p>If we admit that to tell a story is to weave a lie, where does that
+leave the audience, apparently gullible fools eating up this nonsense?
+In fact they are in on it. Part of fiction’s inherent humor is the basic
+dramatic irony that the audience knows it is a lie!</p>
+<div class="fancyquote">
+<blockquote>
+<p>[When I write,] I am describing certain aspects of pyschological
+reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately
+circumstantial lies.</p>
+<p>In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that
+the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word
+of it.</p>
+<p>[…] All fiction is metaphor.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>– Ursula K. Le Guin, Author’s Note to <em>The Left Hand of
+Darkness</em> <a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"
+role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
+</div>
+<p>We know when we are being lied to. We choose to believe it, because
+we can learn just as much from well-constructed lies as we might from
+well-constructed truths.</p>
+<p>Everyone involved in this delusion knows exactly what is going on.
+Watch blooper reels from film and television; when actors break, in the
+most serious scenes, the veil is pierced, they burst out laughing.</p>
+<p>Paraphrasing Lee Maracle: I learned storytelling from my grandfather.
+I was a child, and I told him a lie. He said, “That’s a good story. Tell
+it again, differently.”</p>
+<p>Thus fiction emerges from collaborative lying.</p>
+<div class="fancyquote">
+<blockquote>
+<p>Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony,
+number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look
+straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with
+Dionysios, every now and then.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>– Le Guin, <em>ibid</em></p>
+</div>
+</section>
+<section class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document"
+role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr />
+<ol>
+<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I might as well disclaim that my
+criterion that a story be “humorous” or “ironic” or “satirical” must not
+be taken so strictly that we count as fiction only those stories which
+get generically categorized under “Comedy.” Putting aside the fact that
+this genre is a relatively recent invention, let me just observe that my
+idea of humor includes such a simple thing as portraying characters who,
+when placed in an unbelievably melodramatic scenario, react with a
+reasonable degree of realism. It also includes the opposite: unexpected
+reactions to mundane scenarios. Each implicitly satirizes real life.
+Finally, even the most serious drama toes the line of absurdity; the
+film ends and the curtain closes, and I grin, because of how
+embarrassing it is to find I have been, once again, willingly
+deceived!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back"
+role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
+<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>This author’s note is rich and
+informative. I recommend you find it and read it in full.<a
+href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
+</ol>
+</section>
diff --git a/docs/css/article.css b/docs/css/article.css
@@ -239,6 +239,12 @@ blockquote.dark-mode {
     all: revert;
 }
 
+.fancyquote > p {
+    /* citation */
+    text-indent: -1.5rem;
+    margin-left: 2rem;
+}
+
 hr {
     max-width: 35em;
     border: 1px solid;

diff --git a/docs/garden/fiction.html b/docs/garden/fiction.html
@@ -0,0 +1,142 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><meta charset="utf-8"><meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"><meta name="twitter:site" content="@ggschare"><meta name="twitter:title" content="An unoriginal thought about fiction"><meta name="twitter:description" content="Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."><meta name="twitter:image:src" content="https://schare.space/assets/img/nessie.jpg"><meta property="og:title" content="An unoriginal thought about fiction"><meta property="og:type" content="website"><meta property="og:description" content="Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."><meta property="og:image" content="https://schare.space/assets/img/nessie.jpg"><meta property="og:site_name" content="schare.space"><link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"><title>An unoriginal thought about fiction</title><script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-chtml-full.js" type="text/javascript"></script><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/default.css"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/article.css"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/garden.css"><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com" rel="preconnect"><link href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" rel="preconnect" crossorigin="crossorigin"><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400..600;1,400..600" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><link href="/css/pandoc-highlighting.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"></head><body><header>
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+<main><div id="modal" class="modal"><div id="modal-content" class="modal-content"><img id="modal-image" class="modal-image" src=""></div></div><script src="/js/modal.js"></script><article class="article"><section id="an-unoriginal-thought-about-fiction" class="level1">
+<h1>An unoriginal thought about fiction</h1>
+<p><span id="date">Jan 14, 2025</span>
+<!--  provenance: local 25.01.15-03.10.md -> garden/fiction.html  --></p>
+<p>Why are we surprised that <em>Nosferatu</em> is funny?</p>
+<p><em>The Odyssey</em> is funny. <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> is funny.
+<em>Don Quixote</em> is well-known to be funny. And more from the
+Western canon: Dante’s <em>Divine Comedy</em>, Borges’s
+<em>Ficciones</em> (title tells you everything), Shakespeare’s plays,
+Plato’s <em>Symposium</em>. These are, to varying degrees, all satire,
+all lampooning the society in which they were written! Keep searching;
+you’ll only find more to support my observation.</p>
+<p>Rana asks: how come, in our education on classical literature, we
+seem to only read satire like Cervantes and Austen?</p>
+<p><em>There is nothing else</em>.</p>
+<p>All great literature is satire. Irony is a prerequisite. Nothing
+important can be said without a current of humor. Telling a story is,
+inherently, satire of life! <a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
+<p>Every writer knows, deep down, that to sit down and write is,
+necessarily, to adopt an ironic disposition—to make fun at the expense
+of something else. (You can, of course, set out to tell a joke and then
+tell a bad joke.)</p>
+<p>But do not mistake irony for disgust.</p>
+<div class="fancyquote">
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>Don Quixote</em> could only have been written by someone who
+really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them
+more closely, and understood just what it would cost.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>– Elif Batuman, <em>The Possessed</em></p>
+</div>
+<p>It is weird to compose fiction. The moment you acknowledge that what
+you are doing is fiction, you have admitted to telling a lie. The gap
+between reality and the story hangs over the work as a wellspring of
+irony and humor. The artfulness of storytelling lies in the interplay
+between that awareness and the suspension of disbelief.</p>
+<p>If we admit that to tell a story is to weave a lie, where does that
+leave the audience, apparently gullible fools eating up this nonsense?
+In fact they are in on it. Part of fiction’s inherent humor is the basic
+dramatic irony that the audience knows it is a lie!</p>
+<div class="fancyquote">
+<blockquote>
+<p>[When I write,] I am describing certain aspects of pyschological
+reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately
+circumstantial lies.</p>
+<p>In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that
+the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word
+of it.</p>
+<p>[…] All fiction is metaphor.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>– Ursula K. Le Guin, Author’s Note to <em>The Left Hand of
+Darkness</em> <a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
+</div>
+<p>We know when we are being lied to. We choose to believe it, because
+we can learn just as much from well-constructed lies as we might from
+well-constructed truths.</p>
+<p>Everyone involved in this delusion knows exactly what is going on.
+Watch blooper reels from film and television; when actors break, in the
+most serious scenes, the veil is pierced, they burst out laughing.</p>
+<p>Paraphrasing Lee Maracle: I learned storytelling from my grandfather.
+I was a child, and I told him a lie. He said, “That’s a good story. Tell
+it again, differently.”</p>
+<p>Thus fiction emerges from collaborative lying.</p>
+<div class="fancyquote">
+<blockquote>
+<p>Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony,
+number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look
+straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with
+Dionysios, every now and then.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>– Le Guin, <em>ibid</em></p>
+</div>
+</section>
+<section class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I might as well disclaim that my
+criterion that a story be “humorous” or “ironic” or “satirical” must not
+be taken so strictly that we count as fiction only those stories which
+get generically categorized under “Comedy.” Putting aside the fact that
+this genre is a relatively recent invention, let me just observe that my
+idea of humor includes such a simple thing as portraying characters who,
+when placed in an unbelievably melodramatic scenario, react with a
+reasonable degree of realism. It also includes the opposite: unexpected
+reactions to mundane scenarios. Each implicitly satirizes real life.
+Finally, even the most serious drama toes the line of absurdity; the
+film ends and the curtain closes, and I grin, because of how
+embarrassing it is to find I have been, once again, willingly
+deceived!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
+<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>This author’s note is rich and
+informative. I recommend you find it and read it in full.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
+</ol>
+</section>
+</article></main></body></html>