Day 14 - Palahnuik on TV

Chuck Palahniuk has a new book out called Haunted. It includes the short story Guts, which in the course of his readings of it on book tours has allegedly caused dozens of people to faint. Here's snatches of his take on TV:

I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it...

I am socially retarded in that when people talk about The Sopranos or Friends, or Seinfeld or Sex and the City, I have never seen these shows so I have nothing to add. But by the time something makes it to television, it has been through so many committees, so many processes, it is such a commodity, it has been so edited and produced and art directed, that I don't think there's really anything original there.

I want to be talking to people in the Laundromat and on the street and in the airport, and hearing their stories, the stories of the people next to me on the bus. Everyone I talk to has got stories that are so much more compelling and entertaining and hilarious than anything I would ever see on television or almost any movie I could ever watch. And I'm always so much more entertained by real people, even total strangers, than I am by what's on that screen in front of me...

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies, they're lived through what we watch on television, they're not actual events in our life. And in a way they don't really exhaust or fulfill anything for us because they're just things that we experience in this detached voyeuristic way. We don't have friends, so we watch Friends on TV.