Confessions of a Miscreant

Yesterday's post was a mistake, I know.  I admitted as much when I posted it.  That photographer I mentioned is sure to make trouble for me now.  I'll never get a fair shake from the big boys and girls.  They'll see me as the miscreant I am, and will laugh at the naiveté of my images.  I know, I know. . . I've done it again.

I should be kinder to people.  My critical nature is a source of friction.  People like it O.K. when I am critical about myself either rightly or wrongly.  But even then, they know it would be better if I didn't think so much about myself. And they are right.  For a while, when I was in a band that played a lot at a local pub, I would hang out there, drink beers, eat chili dogs, and I learned the lingo.  "Dude," I would yell, or "There's the Big Guy", and people really liked me.  I learned that was all I needed to say to make people happy.  The band was not very good, but we were popular.  My never paying for a beer was a testament to that.

But the band broke up and I lost my girl and my cynical nature reemerged.  It's never done me any good.

So this year, I will try to lose it.  That will be my New Year's Resolution.  Who really likes Woody Allen?  I'll have to reject all my role models, probably.  I search around my head for a hero.  Someone uncritical and sincere.  Steinbeck, perhaps.  I'll have to research that, though.  I don't know enough about him.  I like some of his writing, but he's always seemed a bit bland to me.  I'm going to have to explore, read new authors, watch different movies.  I've been subjected to too much dissidence.  There are people who can help me though.  For instance, this from The New York Times:


"Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones." (A.O. Scott on Jonathan Franzan's "Freedom")


Of course, I've been hinting that the only happy people I know are the ones who have lived the traditional wisdom, have sought The American Dream.  I've been trying to see through the dissident haze that has clouded my vision, that lead me down this dirty little path.  


I'll be careful of my language, too.  We think in language, and language is our prison--we've all studied that.  Here is part of another review of Franzon's book in "The Atlantic" that is apropos: 


"[A]lthough the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, 'There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,' one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriagesucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom."


I love this stuff.  I see how sloppy our proletarian dissidence has become.  


If I have offended any of you with yesterday's missive, know that I have learned my lesson and am beginning to mend my ways.  I hope it is not too late.  It probably is, and I will most assuredly run out the rest of my days under the shadow of the life already lived, but by Grace. . . . 


We'll see.