a zoo in hell

3.09.2010

Better than the real thing.

For a long, long time, I've thought of myself as a fantasist or fabulist, moreso than a student of a particular genre and more clearly, not  a realist of any stripe. Lately though, I wonder if this is true. I write about other worlds, other senses of reality, and "otherness" because that is what I feel comfortable with. The alien and the other is my home, in many ways. (Besides the whole straight-white-male thing.) So, in some sense, when I am writing the unreal I am actually creating a sort of "realism" -- I am capturing that which is part of my everyday thinking.

Conversly, I know a few people who are so eccentric that it is a wonder they can make it through a single day of mundane life. They are proudly in their "own worlds" and I doubt they would want to live any other way. They also happen to enjoy realism and neo-realism much more than I do. So, to them, I wonder if "realism" isn't more radical for them. The only way they can process the mundane is by seeing it represented in a way where sense is artifically created out of something they find senseless.