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January 18, 2004
You can judge a man by the quality of his enemies
Well, I hope not, or I don't come out looking so good.
Free For All Monday tomorrow, and if anyone else is looking for an opportunity to post unsigned attacks, please have a look at anonymous proxies before you post. Otherwise, I'll just put up your IP address, which in the seriously fucked-up mindset of some will make me the Bad Guy.
That I don't buy into the concepts of enemies or Good Guys or Bad Guys counts for nothing, apparently.
And I'm still waiting for the person who posted that to step forward. Or for someone who knows who did it to let me know who it was.
Not holding my breath waiting, true.
Apropos of nothing, PopMatters has a review of Milllennium Actress:
In a class on the personal essay, my teacher had assigned a pair of readings. The first piece was a criticism of memoirist Vivian Gornick, who had admitted to "composing" parts of her memoir, Fierce Attachments. The second was Gornick's response, in which she maintained that it was sometimes necessary to sacrifice absolute fidelity in order to communicate a greater, underlying truth. It bothered me that Gornick had played fast and loose with details of time, place, personality, and dialogue. Shouldn't a writer who claimed to be writing from personal experience remain faithful to the "truth," even if it was only the truth as she happened to perceive it on any given day?To my surprise, not one of the other students in the class took issue with Gornick's creative license. They all asserted that it was perfectly okay to use composite characters, compress timelines, and simply "make stuff up." Oddly, I found myself siding with Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, who wrote, "There's a word for that: fiction."
I wasn't sure why I was being so curmudgeonly. In graduate school, we tossed phrases like "social construction" and "subject formation" around like rag dolls. History is told by the winners; race, gender and sexuality are arbitrary markers along the continuum of human variation; individuality is merely a by-product of language. But this time I was the dumb bunny, the thickheaded literalist in search of "truth" and "reality." Despite my excellent education to the contrary, it bothered me that someone could write a personal essay about something that wasn't entirely true. It was acceptable to misremember, to have forgotten a detail -- such is the purview of the "personal" -- but to alter time willfully, or make up a conversation? It just didn't seem right.
There are bits of it that even mention the film. Quite favorably, in fact.
And it's possible to disagree without being disagreeable -- Neo ain't care for it nearly as much as I did, yet somehow things never came to blows. Go figure.
Posted by Aaron at January 18, 2004 07:34 AM
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