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Blogs by Erik Hare
Blinding Daylight 3/10/2008 5:55:38 PM
Welcome to the first Tuesday of Daylight Savings Time! I hope everyone is saving lots and lots of daylight. I wonder after more than 40 years of this how much daylight is actually in the average American’s savings account. But that is beside the point, as this is the day I answer my mail. I got quite a bit of it this week!
I appreciate your comments on terms like “pedestrian” and “street”. We are afraid of so many things these days, but especially of each other.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I don’t understand many things about the way other people approach life, and I have to remember that if I’m going to be effective at proposing new ways of looking at things and doing things. I don’t want to preach, but I do want to convince. That means I have to talk to people in ways that they understand. It can be hard at times.
For example, I really don’t get Starbucks at all. There’s not a single website frequented by writers that doesn’t have constant references to what’s going on at Starbucks, but I haven’t been in one for a long time. There are so many great local coffee houses, like Nina’s (pronounced NINE-ahs in Saint Paul) or Gato Azul or Rudie’s that sell coffee as good or better for half the price. Plus, they are all different and funky with their own sense of community.
Perhaps people just don’t have places like this where they live, and that would be a problem. But honestly, I don’t see the appeal of a mass-marketed place to anyone with an option. Are people afraid of something that’s different and non-conforming? I hope not. Although, I have to wonder why whenever someone has the affectation of foreign names for things, they never use German or Russian – as in, “I’ll have the Gross Coffee” or “Make mine Bolshoi!”. I really have to wonder if there’s an exclusionary principle at work here, screening out clients by class. I really am Pedestrian, you know.
Enjoying your blogs, especially the one about the fake memoir. It really shows the state of publishing and the state of morals in the USA when people think 1) memoirs sell better than fiction 2) I'll just say my fiction is memoir.
I didn’t really get into it that much, but it does say something about our nation in general. Why is it that authenticity doesn’t have a great value, if not culturally at least personally? While our culture does have a firm foundation of fear in it, we also seem to have a personal fear that our own lives are somehow not worth as much as others and our personal experiences don’t “count” as much as those on the other side of our own fear.
These are two sides of the same coin, from what I can tell. I think it’s all a part of what I call “Cultural Autism”, or the feeling of being overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of stuff thrown at us that we can’t make sense of. People react by retreating deep into their sense of themselves, all the while knowing that they are missing out on something. It’s all fear driven – fear of those not just like us, fear that we aren’t adequate, fear that we can’t possibly get a handle on our own lives. The result is that people constantly “fake it”, lest their Cultural Autism get the better of them.
I can’t tell you how many people thought that the fake memoir, “Love and Consequences”, was a good read. I found many things in the first chapter (published in the NY Times) that were clearly not authentic at first read; the worst offence was the idea that someone would introduce their friend as a character by way of the moment they were brutally gunned down in the street. Why anyone found this to be authentic, I’ll never know. It wasn’t this woman’s story to tell, fact or fiction, but many people just couldn’t possibly see that. They liked hearing the story told from their own cultural perspective just fine, as that wasn’t a heavy overload of reality being thrown at them. Whatever.
That’s enough pontification in response to letters for the week. I’ve got some more hopeful stuff planned, since it was a rather dark week for my postings. Blame it on a lack of daylight. In the meantime, if you find me excessively dark, ponderous and depressing or if you think I write with a ray of light showing through the night, send me mail. I love getting mail from everyone, since you are the reason I’m here at all. Send it to me as wabbitoid47 at yahoo.com. Thanks for reading!
