How many times have you stopped someone who was talking and said, “I’m familiar with that story,” or something similar? Or maybe not said anything but internally tuned out?
I stop reading if an article seems too familiar or a movie gets into that predictable zone. I roll my eyes and talk back to the television when they run regular-as-clockwork “news” pieces — there was an earthquake somewhere on the globe? Let’s do a streeter to ask if people here are prepared for the inevitable big one! It’s the week before school starts? Get our camera crew to Staples and find a parent who can talk about how expensive it is to buy supplies! End of May? Time to interview the city workers putting together our city’s “iconic hanging baskets.” Lazy journalism delivers these and other stale tropes.
We spend a lot of our life on autopilot with the familiar — the same route to work/school; the same path worn through the same supermarket to get the same groceries and eat the same food each week; the same schedule of activities each week. We paint politicians with the same brush because it’s always “same shit, different pile.” It becomes easy to dismiss things that seem familiar as being just so much of the same old story.
The past few weeks, I have been reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the first time and while I grabbed it to read as the Evil Book Club selection for June, I figured I knew the story and it would be a quick read.
What I discovered was that I didn’t know the story at all.
I kept checking that I had downloaded the right book from Project Gutenberg (I had) because it really didn’t align with the Frankenstein monster story that I grew up knowing. I know that Hollywood is notorious for changing stories — look at almost every Disney princess, so far removed from their fairy tale tragedies. I kept getting angry just how severely films have misrepresented Frankenstein and his monster but then I realized, all I had to do was read the book. I could have done so years ago.
There is a lesson in here for me, and it goes deeper than really needing to be familiar with the original text in order to appreciate changes made to subsequent retellings — although my academic self should have been all over that “primary source” research. I think the lesson comes back to my dismissive attitude toward the familiar:
I need to change my approach, not just to literature but to all the other stories around us.
I know I am guilty of glazing over when I think I recognize a story — but maybe I am missing important details. Maybe it’s only the once upon a time that sounds familiar and the whole contents are different.
I’m sure we all do this from time to time — whether we use a broad brush on any group of individuals or tune out when someone is talking because “it’s always the same thing” or skip that latest remake because we saw it the first time or read the book. What else are we missing? What am I missing?
Over the weekend someone told Shawn and I that we “really should” do more within a given niche. I’d heard that particular suggestion before and had never given it too much thought. This week though, rather than just hearing (and potentially ignoring) what they said, I listened. I thought about it, and I am starting to think it is a niche in which Shawn and I actually can work together. I was excited enough to search for and purchase a new domain, and to dust off a project that I’d put on the back burner. I’m hopeful about prospects for both the project and the niche.
On the reading front, I’ve already downloaded a batch of classic novels to try and read — not because they are on lots of “must read” lists or that they are cannon but because I am genuinely curious to learn if I’ve unfairly dismissed the original, seemingly familiar stories.