Distance has been annihilated to such an extent that the past has become the only place to which we can get away. It's the only inaccessible place left. The present is lateral. The present is two-dimensional. He doesn't buy the argument that novelists who use real-life characters in their works are thereby less original.
All characters come from somewhere.
I absolutely don't think that because you're imagining characters who existed that you're doing less work. I don't think one applies imagination any less to this material. Novelist and critic Jonathan Dee disagrees vehemently. In an influential essay in last year's Harper's, Dee blasted what he saw as the lack of originality implicit in works that use material from previously published sources. In the visual arts, a similar sort of appropriation has occurred, but Kathryn Hixon doesn't see it as necessarily fatal to the finished product.