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obviousness continuum
Friday, December 20 2002
I dealt mostly with finishing work today, putting in the bathroom door for the new bathroom and cutting bits of trim in the miter block and then slapping it up. Meanwhile Ros and Anthony put in their second day on the bathroom tile project, finishing the installation with no complete tiles to spare. Now all that is left is grouting. I'd hoped they'd have some more surplus cement at the end of the day but they didn't, or at least they said they didn't.
In the evening Gretchen had me working on improving the look of the stairs going up to the second floor, a project I've been putting off during all the heavy contractor activity (which tended to tear up any finish work I attempted on the stairs). Now with the contractors mostly gone and company coming to visit this weekend (both Ray and Nancy and my old Los Angeles housemate John), we thought it would make a big cosmetic improvement to the house.
Over a dinner of leftover Mexican food, I told Gretchen about an idea I had for a fake letter to the editor. I would say that I was delighted that Home Depot was drug-testing their employees, and that I wouldn't even consider buying hardware at a store that didn't do this. I would then go on to say that Home Depot should also visit the homes of their employees to see to it that they are properly flying American flags, etc. Gretchen's response was fairly typical of her reactions to my satire projects. She said she thought that they aren't as effective as they could be because I usually don't make it obvious enough that it is in fact satire. "There are a lot of crazy people out there, and readers might just think you're another one of those, missing my point entirely," she said. She went on to suggest that I should write it in such a way that most of my readers would know it was satire. This suggestion frustrated me, particularly since I had heard Gretchen make it before.
[REDACTED]
I tried explaining the importance of uncertainty in making things stick in people's heads (is Boy George a boy or a girl, is Britney Spears a virgin or a chaste Christian?), saying that the beauty of my kind of satire is that people have to think about it a little harder to determine whether or not it was for real - and that by doing this, my effect was greater. Readers tend to discuss my satiric letters with friends, read them over again, and so forth.
[REDACTED]
In the end we simply agreed to disagree on where the best place was to lob satire along the "obviousness continuum."
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