CSotD: Man plans, Lord Stanley laughs
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Yesterday, I was able to create a balance between fair use
and coherence, but today that won’t work.
Using part of Molly Brooks’
examination of sports, theater, fiction, reality and suchlike doesn’t begin to
explain it, but using the whole thing stretches the definition of “fair use”
beyond my comfort zone.
This is Page Two of Seven and you need to see the rest, so go have a look. I’ll wait
here.
Okay, everybody back? Good.
Start here: It's not a piece about sports.
It's a piece about life and reality and stuff like that, and I like the way she makes the potentially ponderous so readily accessible.
And, when it comes to sports, Molly Brooks understands what she’s looking at, but she's got these other things going on, and what I
find particularly fascinating about this piece is how she dances along the line
of overanalyzing matters, but then slides in a justification in the nick of time and not at all in the sense of backing down.
Which is to say that, just as my inner Lou Grant is
beginning to grumble at her for dragging poor Aristotle into a discussion of hockey, she
justifies it by pointing out the absurd level to which sportscasters stoop in
order to try to impose a dramatic template on a real-life event.
She not only justifies her summoning of the philosopher, but adds a quiet "where have you been?" factor, which is that, if you think it’s ludicrous to bring Aristotle’s
theories on drama into a discussion of hockey, you haven’t watched a lot of
sports and you certainly haven’t seen any coverage of the Olympics in the past 30
years.
It’s not enough to skate faster than anyone else. You have
to skate faster than anyone else because your sister has cancer.
Each Olympic athlete requires a backstory, preferably both
noble and tragic, and with some sense that victory will not only clinch the
gold medal but will also miraculously send the stricken relative into remission.
And, as she notes, it’s a part of looking for meaning in life
and it is part of the human condition.
That is, the absurd sob-story coverage of the Olympics may be a laughable exaggeration of the compulsion, but we try to impose that kind of narrative structure on sports because we want to
impose a logical narrative structure on life.
And sports, and life, resist that urge.
So Brooks acknowledges the well-trodden point that the reason "truth is stranger than fiction" is that fiction is required to be consistent and to make sense, but she accelerates it by using the example of sports to emphasize the minutiae that can throw off the best laid plans.
Maybe the fun of sports is that we can watch the chaos unfold knowing that it is real life, but without the guilt of it being "real" on a level that should inspire genuine pity and terror. It's someone's career, but it is only rarely someone's actual life. So we can enjoy the pity and terror, and, as she notes, the occasional triumph, in a state of innocence.
It's also kind of fun to come to the theater knowing the cast of the play, but not knowing whether it will be comedy or drama. But that's life.
I note that Brooks just completed her MFA this spring. I suspect that some people within my readership are saying, “Why, yes, Molly Brooks,
of course.”
But I am also confident that a large number are seeing her
work for the first time, as I was.
Poking around in her other comics, there's a wide spectrum of material and the old man in me remembers when I was back on campus and went through the microfilm looking up my rather random contributions to the school paper some 20 years earlier.
Some of my work was unsuccessful and some was naive and some was tendentious and some was silly. I had anticipated seeing how unpolished my voice was, back then, but what I hadn't expected was to see how adventurous I was, how many different things I threw out there.
"Developing your voice" involves some narrowing and channeling, but it shouldn't have to involve discarding that sense of daring.
Maybe Molly Brooks will settle upon a voice and a set of topics and a style.
But I hope it's not too narrow, too channeled, because there are any number of contemporary cartoonists who work in the semi-confessional world of "here's my take" and who are interesting until you feel you've pretty much gotten their take, at which point you don't need to read them anymore.
And, while the notion of a theater that doesn't tell you ahead of time whether the play is a comedy or tragedy is mere fancy, the notion of a cartoonist who is equally unpredictable is not.
I like the idea of clicking on a cartoon and not knowing whether it will be about knitting or sports or whatever, and particularly if it means I might go to a hockey game and find myself sitting next to Aristotle.
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