AudioShocker

The usual tactic, when I realize that it's nearly the end of the day on Monday (though not so late as to totally bail on posting, like I did last week (and apologies for that)), and I still need to post something, is to think back to whatever cultural thing I did over the weekend and spin something out of that. Which mostly involves whatever movie I happened to see over the weekend (except for that long drought over the summer when I wasn't going to movies). But this past weekend, the movie I went to was one that I went to more as an aspect of my daily life, then the quasi-life implied by these accumulated articles. I went to see Bright Star, the new movie about John Keats--everyone's favorite Romantic poet who died tragically young of tuberculosis. It was really quite good, but doesn't really fall in line with anything else that I've ever blogged here.

So I'll just say that Bright Star is an excellent case of there being no weak actors in a movie. There really weren't. It was a solid script, but I could imagine it having gotten a bit out of control if it hadn't been carefully acted. So that's interesting. The movie also very accurately got at interesting things about writing poetry, which is also cool to see, since writing is one of those things that only rarely ever gets captured well on film.

Also, it was funded by, amongst other things, the Australian government and funds from the British lottery, and a mighty handful of other things (including, I should mention, BBC Films and Pathe, both of which are obviously pretty huge makers-of-movies), but it was funny to me at the opening when the cascade of funding sources was first displayed.

Over the weekend, I also went to a reading of short nonfiction pieces by local writers. Nonfiction, "creative nonfiction," memoir, whatever you want to call it seems like the big trendy kind of writing these days. What with folks like David Sedaris, or Dave Eggers, or whoever else. And things like radio essays on NPR (one of my least favorite things in existence; another of those strange things where I find myself agreeing with Republicans (another being that Michael Moore is annoying), that NPR is stupid and not worth listening to. Though, if I drove a car, I guess I'd wind up listening to NPR at least occasionally, though for the music, not the NPR.

Of the various reasons why I dislike this so-called creative nonfiction, is that it tends--and maybe this doesn't go for the really popular stuff, of which I've read very little; I tried reading Sedaris's Naked but put it down after finishing the first essay and never picked it up again--to be structurally unsatisfying. For instance, most of the pieces I heard over the weekend were basically either a) interesting stories, or b) whiny setpieces about difficult times in people's lives. Certainly, people's anecdotes can be compelling, and there are several anecdotes that I like to tell myself (like the time I went hunting for the lost Zildjian brother in Mexico with Ringo Starr), but they're never that intellectually compelling. I have emotions, certainly, but when it comes to literary texts, plot and action, and thereby structure, are super important, and anchor the emotional import.

Along with this "this is my interesting and compelling story" model of contemporary essay-writing, comes my other major beef: for all these pieces, the authenticity and veracity of the tale is awarded externally from the story itself. It need only be labeled as "nonfiction" and suddenly a piece of writing becomes what actually happened. I suppose the smarter of the essayists will admit that, of course, it's just their memory of the occurrences, and certainly someone else would remember it, and therefore tell it, differently, but this doesn't seem to interrupt the perception of truth in the essay's reading. That's why that Million Little Pieces was such a ridiculous scandal. Lazy readers wanted to believe that the thing was the truth without the piece needing to earn that and became very angry when it turned out they had been lied to. But had they read the book devoid of its "nonfiction" label, they'd have recognized the narrator as the unreliable narrator that he was, and called into question his telling and tale.

So, by never having to do their own work to develop their own authenticity, the bulk of nonfiction pieces are as lazy as their readers are. More lowest-common-denominator cultural trash. Congratulations.