Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Cringe Reading Series


Tommorrow night I'm going out for some free entertainment. The Cringe Reading Series happens the first Wednesday of every month at a local bar. The readers are ordinary folk who are crazy enough to read from their own high school diary. The place is supposed to be packed, and the entertainment value will be about as funny as John Hughes deep throating are-you-there-god-it's-me-Margaret. I will have to post a follow up review, and who knows, maybe a few too many Brooklyn Lagers and Dear Diary introductions will solve Louis Menand's paradox of representation-
    "But (a paradox of representation) we would actually feel that we had a more intimate sense of Virginia Woolf if we read about her in someone else’s diary. Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)"
Well Mister Menand, I beg to differ. The high schooler of us all is another person (just ask our moms), and the high school diary is all observation with some shallow-as-a-puddle-in-the-Sahara introspection. An alien and a lost cause. And for one raucous evening, a celebrity. Who says you can't have fun in the city with no money?

3 comments:

SavingDiva said...

Man...I wish I still had my high school journals...I threw them away in college...

PiggyBankBlues said...

i know, it was A LOT of fun, and got me wishing the exact same thing as you!

Anonymous said...

So glad you came out and had fun!