Language is the theme here on Stacked recently. I have two things to discuss with you and shall start with a mini linguistic rant.
Yesterday I became an aunt again. Please look at the last four words in the previous sentence: “became an aunt again.” Once the first kid is born, don’t you become an Official Aunt For Life? If you’re already an aunt, how do you become one again? Rant aside, congratulations Paul and Monica.
Last night Rik and I attended the simulcast of This American Life. My experience sitting in a dark theater and watching the live video feed of a radio show led to some introspective thoughts about the nature of books. Books. When watching a radio show. In a movie theater. Should I describe this as being meta? Mind bending is probably a more appropriate turn of phrase.
Before last night I had never heard the radio program hosted by my new nerd-crush, Ira Glass. Despite having a blog, using Twitter, and owning a fancy phone–I am very technology and pop culture deficient. Next to the phone, my biggest electronic household item is a toothbrush. No television, no microwave, no digital clock. I do have a large black portable solitaire game which used to be called a deck of cards and is now known as a laptop. It has no internet access.
So, being so culturally unaware, I was amazed by the idea that books in their little paperback covers (and sometimes cardboard covers) are beloved not for themselves, but for what is within. We escape into the stories of books. Some stories are real and others are real in our imaginations. These stories educated us and allow us to forget our own hardships or find a kindred spirit.
But stories are not relegated to the page. This American Life presents a loosely knit theme where storytellers come together and present their interpretations of their own stories–stories that are similar to the listeners. They write and edit and debate which parts of the story are important, which can be left out, and what wording makes the most impact. Seeing Dave Savage choke-up while discussing his mother’s death is incredibly moving–more so because you connect with the words and the person as though no one else is in the packed theater.
Stories come in many forms. We see stories in dance, read them on the page, hear them in music. Some stories are good, better than good. They are well told and well presented. Others are terrible and lazily put together. Occasionally the awful ones are better known than a beautiful piece of introspection. But we are surrounded by them and tell our own stories constantly throughout the day.
Returning to my earlier rant on words, no one owns a story. As Edmund Wilson once said, “no two people read the same book.” Our life experiences lead us to interpret words in similar but semantically different ways from one another. Books are a powerhouse of information, their stories permanently etched on the page and fine tuned to a specific message. The theme of last night’s recording was “Return to the Scene of the Crime,” and it’s interesting to see such different approaches and interpretations by the writers. This morning I logged into my Netflix account and added the television tapings of This American Life to my queue. Hearing a story by the author adds a completely new dimension to the message and allows you to share something a little more intimate with the teller than can be gotten from a book.
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