Jaime J. Weinman's blog is one of my favorites, (see the sidebar) because we share a lot of the same cultural obsessions (Hello, WKRP!) but also because there's plenty of room where we diverge.
Writers are weird, and we tend to like weird things. Developing a writer's worldview, I believe, has to involve being on the fringes, or feeling on the fringes, and developing a dispassionate passion for something that others wouldn't give a secont thought about.
Even when it does intersect "mainstream" culture, writers bring a level of detail and attention that can only come from an outsider. Friday Night Lights chronicles how football is more important than anything else in a Texas town, but it took Bissinger -- not one of those people involved -- to bring it to the nation, first as a bestselling book, then a movie, and in the fall, a TV series.
Al Gore is a weird geek, so we get a great movie about Global Warming. George W. Bush was a popular fratty coke-snortin born again Christian silver spoon legacy jock, so we get the worst President ever. Life's funny that way.
We writers are all the product of our obsessions. I find Weinman's obsessions endlessly fascinating. See if you do, too.
1 comment:
I love Jaime's blog. His writing is impressive and his knowledge intimidating. I am not so great an aficionado of opera and show tunes as he, and I don't have any particular interest in old sit-coms, but when he's blogging about cartoons and old studio movies, I'm right there with him.
Plus, he always finds the best stuff on YouTube.
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