Day trip (from yesterday)
Sep. 22nd, 2003 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupI have two trips to New York in a single week. Time to rack up those Acela points on my Amtrak Guest Rewards card. The trip has been uneventful and hopefully will remain so until I return tomorrow and can post this. About the most unusual thing that's happened so far is they gave me a room key and I walked in and there were people in "my" room. They misassigned the room. The kind of thing that really shouldn't happen, but there you go.
It's a nice thing about New York, to be able to go across the street from your hotel and watch a movie that's hard to find in most of the rest of the country. I had been excited for weeks about seeing American Splendor, and it did not disappoint. I am trying to remember how it was that at some point during my college days I went to see ole Harvey Pekar give a talk at U of Chicago for some reason… I must have gotten ahold of the comic somewhere, though I don't have it now. Maybe it was when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flw was here?
Anyway, it occurred to me that all of us who toil in this strange new medium owe something to Harvey. There's the great moment when he explains to Crumb how his life would make a good comic book, and you see how miserable and pointless his life has been up to that point, and you wonder, how is it that any of us can consider our mundane existence to be the subject of art? And yet these journals are nothing but our attempts to put into words and make compelling the minor slights and excitements of ordinary lives. I guess it's art when someone else does it first… I also found it telling that he admits that there's a lot of things, essentially good things, that get left out of your life when you describe it for an audience. It made me think that perhaps my tendency to do that isn't so much my problem as a function of the medium of first-person narration. Crotchety irascibility is kind of all that really works here, or at least it feels that way to me. In that respect the Pekaresque aspect of our lives is magnified in how we talk about them to others.
I mean, I have a happy marriage, a beautiful daughter, and a pretty good life. But who can write about that?
Leading me to my next post, which is friends-only.
It's a nice thing about New York, to be able to go across the street from your hotel and watch a movie that's hard to find in most of the rest of the country. I had been excited for weeks about seeing American Splendor, and it did not disappoint. I am trying to remember how it was that at some point during my college days I went to see ole Harvey Pekar give a talk at U of Chicago for some reason… I must have gotten ahold of the comic somewhere, though I don't have it now. Maybe it was when
flw was here? Anyway, it occurred to me that all of us who toil in this strange new medium owe something to Harvey. There's the great moment when he explains to Crumb how his life would make a good comic book, and you see how miserable and pointless his life has been up to that point, and you wonder, how is it that any of us can consider our mundane existence to be the subject of art? And yet these journals are nothing but our attempts to put into words and make compelling the minor slights and excitements of ordinary lives. I guess it's art when someone else does it first… I also found it telling that he admits that there's a lot of things, essentially good things, that get left out of your life when you describe it for an audience. It made me think that perhaps my tendency to do that isn't so much my problem as a function of the medium of first-person narration. Crotchety irascibility is kind of all that really works here, or at least it feels that way to me. In that respect the Pekaresque aspect of our lives is magnified in how we talk about them to others.
I mean, I have a happy marriage, a beautiful daughter, and a pretty good life. But who can write about that?
Leading me to my next post, which is friends-only.
journals
Date: 2003-09-23 09:06 am (UTC)So, the fact that the vast majority of us have ordinary lives really doesn't matter. We write about what we find inspiring (different types of things for different writers), and when we succeed as writers that enthusiasm and interest come through. Some of the people on my friends list -- people I don't otherwise know -- can write very entertainingly or interestingly about what would otherwise be trivial details. So I read them and gradually get to know them. I hope that I can occasionally write interesting stuff for others to read.