It's exciting to be in such fine company w/ the other winners and other finalists.
***
I've been thinking about satire. I think I undervalue it. Smart, broadly drawn, topical, comic, absurd, etc. stuff feels very easy to write (as compared to, say, heavier emotional realism), and I think for this reason I haven't always taken it as seriously. But some of my more satirical pieces (the best example available online is prob my Monkeybicycle piece) have received positive responses, and I feel almost weirdly guilty about that, like they don't deserve the attention.
I also worry that satire might not be durable -- once its point has been made, once the joke is over, etc, there isn't anything left. And also, there's the timeliness, the specificity of certain issues. How can satire last past the political context in which it's written? Of course there are plenty of examples of satire that holds meaning for multiple generations. What sets those works apart?
I'm thinking about this because my piece that placed second in the Pank contest is, from my perspective, satirical, and although I felt confident-ish and quite tickled when I first wrote and submitted it, in the months since I'd gone into "harshest critic" mode and begun to dismiss it as a one-note joke. ...So because of this, the win caught me completely off guard, and has me doing some reassessing my own ways of judging stuff.
...I didn't want this post to get all me-me-me-me, and I'm afraid it veered off in that direction anyway. What I intended to do was pose a broader question regarding satire, its value as lit.
Thoughts?
I also worry that satire might not be durable -- once its point has been made, once the joke is over, etc, there isn't anything left. And also, there's the timeliness, the specificity of certain issues. How can satire last past the political context in which it's written? Of course there are plenty of examples of satire that holds meaning for multiple generations. What sets those works apart?
I'm thinking about this because my piece that placed second in the Pank contest is, from my perspective, satirical, and although I felt confident-ish and quite tickled when I first wrote and submitted it, in the months since I'd gone into "harshest critic" mode and begun to dismiss it as a one-note joke. ...So because of this, the win caught me completely off guard, and has me doing some reassessing my own ways of judging stuff.
...I didn't want this post to get all me-me-me-me, and I'm afraid it veered off in that direction anyway. What I intended to do was pose a broader question regarding satire, its value as lit.
Thoughts?
Posts
3 comments:
I think "to be your own worst critic" isn't just to say one is harshest on oneself, but also the least able to make apt judgments. You wrote the thing; what do you know about it?
Congratulations! Awesome news.
Congrats on the placement, Tim. That's a nice amount of money!
First of all, congratulations!
We're all very used to a story being anointed Good because of *how* it's done. Satire, meanwhile, has an inescapable reliance on subject matter. There's this sensibility that the only part a writer plays in that aspect of satire is selection -- it's more complex than that, but satire itself doesn't encourage one to think that way.
The difference between transient and enduring satire, besides the usual standards of execution, is angle of focus. That's why the wealthy and figures of authority are common targets -- they endure. The guy who has a better (insert whatever here) than you can always afford to be taken down a notch, no matter what economic model you actually live in. To make today's satire endure for the ages, it has to fit a more universal requirement. It has to comment on more than just its immediate target.
I think satire can be more durable than its counterparts, but it's celebrated differently. Something like A Modest Proposal...that essay is almost 400 years old, and I saw an umpteenth tribute to it yesterday.
If anything, I think satire is much more challenging to do well than other kinds of writing, even if it feels more playful.
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