THIS MODERN WORLD

So glad we live in one. [/snark]

First let me start with a true story that some of you might remember (I blogged it at the time): a couple years ago, I was in the ground floor studio of my old house, which sat maybe seven or eight feet from a heavily trafficked street. I remember specifically that I was working on the first Middle Man cartoon, when there was this huge crash and the whole room shook and I jumped up out of my seat so quickly that my drawing tablet fell on the floor and cracked open (I had to buy a new one later, and they’re not cheap). Was it an earthquake? An explosion? What the fuck? I ran out the front door and saw that an old Buick had run up over the curb and crashed into the side of my house. The driver, an elderly woman, was sitting in the front seat dazed, and I ran over — and here’s the really crazy part — I immediately recognized her as my eleventh grade art teacher from Iowa! She was many years older, of course, and everything was insanely out of context, but she’d been hugely important to me as a young artist, and there was no question in my mind that it was her. “Mrs. McGillicuddy!” I shouted —

Continue reading “Fact and fiction”

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Over at the Great Orange Satan.

Mike Daisey’s unravelling story is one of those tragic self-inflicted wounds. But I can’t help but wonder how many of the too-perfect stories you hear on TAL would stand up under similar scrutiny.

I am a longtime fan of “This American Life,” but I have never assumed that every story I heard was literally true. The writer and monologist David Sedaris frequently tells wonderful personal yarns on the show that may not be precisely true in every detail, but this was not a story about a family car trip gone bad.

Like David Carr, I have always assumed there is some amount of fictionalization in the stories on TAL. Unlike Carr, I’m somewhat more bothered by this, because a story presented as fact resonates differently than a story presented as fiction, and to present fiction as fact — even in the instance of a story about a family car trip — strikes me as cheating somehow. The story somehow becomes more absurd, more meaningful, because it is presented as something that actually happened. It gains currency it did not earn through the art of storytelling alone.

But I could be wrong. Perhaps this is the very first time anyone ever embellished a story on TAL.