kidchamp dot net

12.11.07

101 in 1001: 010 attend a taping of (jon stewart's) the daily show

Dear Daily Show Audience Members,

Due to a writers strike, “The Daily Show” taping on Wednesday December 12th, 2007 has been cancelled. Unfortunately, we have no additional information as to when this strike will end. Your cancelled show tickets will NOT be automatically rescheduled, you will have to start the process again. If you would like to attend a future taping of the show, please reserve tickets on our website at www.thedailyshow.com. Since we have no direct control over the strike, we cannot guarantee that the show will actually tape on the new date that you select. Of course, we are all hoping for a speedy resolution to the labor dispute.

i reserved those tickets back in june, man! i don't mean to whinge - being a thwarted daily show audience member is a lot better than being a daily show staffer right now, to be sure, and we're flying out west tomorrow anyway* - but that sucks.

out west, yes yes: joe's parents were going to be here in manhattan for the week surrounding christmas, but plans mutated, and we're heading out to arizona instead. speaking of 101 in 1001 items, i have high hopes for 086 (tour arizona mining towns with joe). expect sexy photos of frontier decrepitude! and please don't be put out if your annual "season's greetings from new york!" card has a phoenix postmark - until, oh, fifteen minutes ago, i've been up to my eyebrows in the february issue of the ladymag. it's been extremely unpleasant.

at the extremely pleasant end of the spectrum, louis menaud's "woke up this morning" (from last week's new yorker) yielded several of the most satisfying phrases i've read since...well, since the last time i read fitzgerald or wilde. a few of my favorites:

The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness. Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists.

[...]

At least one person has read the entire “Journals: 1952-2000,” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Penguin; $40), from start to finish, and this person can report that the work yields the exact degree of pleasure that can be derived from standing on a moving sidewalk: it’s painless, you don’t want it to stop, and there is not a single surprise in it.

the whole feature is great, both in little bites like those and because of menaud's larger points about what makes someone a great diarist (warhol was, reagan wasn't). it made me want to be a diarist, or to have a diligent and affectionate editor who could unpack my writing (i should be able to do that for myself, of course). read, internets, read! if you yourself have a diary, and/or a blog, consider what menaud calls the id/ego/superego theories** of diary-keeping: do you agree with any of them?

*we planned the trip after the strikers settled in for the long haul.

**as follows:

Writing is onerous (especially with an ultra-thin pencil)—writing feels like work because it is work—and, day by day, life is pretty routine, repetitive, and, we should face it, boring. So why do a few keep diaries, when diary-keeping is, for many, too much?

Three theories immediately suggest themselves. They are theories of the ego, the id, and the superego (and what is left, really?). The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find that they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps.

The id theory, on the other hand, states that people use diaries to record wishes and desires that they need to keep secret, and to list failures and disappointments that they cannot admit publicly have given them pain. Diary-keeping, on this account, is just neurotic, since the last thing most people want to do with their unconsummated longings and petty humiliations is to inscribe them permanently in a book. They want to forget them, and so they soon quit writing them down. Most people don’t confess; they repress.

And the superego theory, of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification. When we describe the day’s events and our management of them, we have in mind a wise and benevolent reader who will someday see that we played, on the whole, and despite the best efforts of selfish and unworthy colleagues and relations, a creditable game with the hand we were dealt. If we speak frankly about our own missteps and shortcomings, it is only to gain this reader’s trust. We write to appease the father. People abandon their diaries when they realize that the task is hopeless.