Opinatio

I was just leafing through a neighbor’s copy of the New Yorker (never subscribe to the New Yorker -- let a neighbor do it and take his copies when he’s done not reading them) and saw an ad for something called the Moth Storytelling Performances. Many things bug me (no pun intended) about the idea of Storytelling Performances. For one, the ad copy refers to them as “literary.” This seems inaccurate.

If you look the word up in an etymology dictionary, you’ll find that it was built to refer to “alphabet letters,” i.e., writing. In the 18th century it was nailed down to apply specifically to literature, but to my mind that means, again, writing. Books. Especially novels, poetry, and scholarly works. Not a kind of pretentious stand-up comedy. Every time I happen upon a storytelling event (usually a story on TV about storytelling), I see a man or woman of any race gesticulating wildly and overdramatizing their own autobiographies. It’s a derivative of the old monology fad of the nineties, which died even before Spalding Gray did. It isn’t literature.

As with what passes for “poetry” in the American mind nowadays (it comes to us in Slams, not slim volumes), “storytelling” is performance. It’s narcissistic, outlandish, self-indulgent, loud, artless, and ultimately boring. Where, in the past, a writer could guide you through the experience of her story like an orchestra conductor, the storyteller now hurls it at you like Gallagher and his watermelons. You need to be entertained, and what’s a storyteller to do if all he knows how to do is tell stories? There are fewer and fewer outlets for the written story, so he has to assume a persona and take to the stage, which is something called “acting.” He also has to compete with other storytellers in American Idol fashion and turn his art, if that’s what it is, into a shtick so he’ll stand out.

Why is every goddamn thing in ths country a goddamn competition?

I don’t know. This saddens me for some reason, and I can’t decide if it’s ironic or not that the sponsor of the Moth program in the New Yorker was Lunesta -- a sleeping pill.