I Think I Am, But I am No Different Than the Dumb Masses

I feel like I haven't been reading very much lately, but I do think i have been thinking about fiction and writing, and it is seeping into my blogging. Here is another one, except not really about literature per se, but more about one of the rockstars of modern literature: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (I am too lazy to figure out the accents, but I know where they belong.)

"Rockstar," you say?

You see, the New York Times contained an interesting article this morning about Garcia Marquez and the shiner he received from fellow author, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (whom I have never read). A photographer captured the black eye, received in the 70's as part of a thirty-year feud between the authors.

Aside from being a really cool photograph, the story behind it is completely titillating. I could not help myself, as soon as I saw the headline, from clicking to read the full article, and even more, to see the picture itself.

And that is when it hit me. This has nothing to do with Garcia Marquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. It has everything to do with me wanting to know the details behind his feud with another author, over a woman no less.

And really, how does that make me much different than these losers who want to know the grisly details of Anna Nicole Smith's life and death? My interest in the individual may stem from a different source (my love for his writing) than theirs (Wealth? Fame? Large Breasts? I cannot begin to imagine why one would be so interested in someone so completely void of holding interest for me.) But in the end, the lowest common denominator is that I wanted to see the black eye, and hear the lurid story of one author's life in much the same way that millions want to see Britney's shaved head.

Quite humbling, really.