Own Worst Enemy Tonight

I'll be out of town next week, so I doubt I'll post anything.

However, tonight at the Bishop (corner of 4th and Walnut in Bloomington), I'll be screening the film Own Worst Enemy. I wrote it with Mike Judd, who directed it with his wife Jessica. Everyone is welcome.

In the interest of keeping some Superman content, here's a story from the AV Club about one guy's identification with Superman. I might make reference to this in my book, if I ever get around to revising it for publication. By which I mean, if it ever gets accepted for publication, at which point I would get to work revising it immediately.

The AV Club story, by Todd VanDerWiff, is a lengthy story about his own experience with Superman comics, which didn't begin in earnest until he was in his 20's. He's trying to capture what makes Superman resonate with people, and he does a pretty good job. Here's how he concludes the article:

We’re all constantly walking forward through a life that keeps stripping everything we have from us and asking us if that’s all we’ve got. For every joy we have, we will have just as much despair, and for every good day, there will be a dozen bad.
But we’ve all been sent here for some reason. And maybe someday, we’ll figure out how to fly.

Like I said, pretty good stuff. He focuses on the inspiration component of Superman, and how that ties into the resonance of his situation. He gets at the idea that Superman lives beyond the media in which he appears, and his point is that this is why it happens. In essence, he's building up to the same points I try to make in my book. But where he uses his own personal experience and speculation/vague anecdotal evidence for his argument, I use fieldwork. That's not a criticism, by the way, it's just a different method. Good stuff.