[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

I am increasingly finding this to be bullshit. Why is the emotional/spiritual/social etc life-experience of a "first world" human less valid than others? And do you really understand everything about your own existence at your specific location and time, or can fiction that takes place in contemporary America perhaps illuminate some aspect of such an existence you hadn't previously considered?

i don't know. when i first came to the us i had this classmate who swore revenge upon the world because he had grown up poor. he declared, with tears in his eyes, that they had an old car!

having come from a country full of starved people and having to ride tuberculous minibuses all my life i laughed to his face at that sort of spoiled shit. like the world owed him.

now don't get me wrong-- it's not that i can't empathize with the pain of social shame, however artificial. and it's not that i cannot empathize with a bourgeois or even an aristocratic character. of course i can. since the beginning of time we've read about heroes and princesses and that sort of shit.

what i'm actually refering to is a notion so nebulous that i have to keep writing about it until i can put my finger on it and find out what i'm thinking. because really i don't know what i'm thinking until i can ramble about it for a while. so thanks for the excuse but sorry i can't explain right now.

but fuck, i'm just having a really hard time empathizing with the characters of contemporary american fiction. and it's a gut feeling and i'll have to figure out why. i begin and i want to kick them in the ass.