R_P_A_S
4th May 2007, 01:47
NOT SURE IF THIS POST GOES HERE.. BUT I WAS AT WORK TODAY AND A CO-WORKER WHO KNOWS I AM A LEFTIST SHOWED ME A BLOG THAT HIS FRIEND WROTE. HE SAID I WOULD LIKE IT BEING A LEFTIST AND THEN AS I READ THIS KIDS BLOG. I GOT CONFUSED... HE DON'T SEEM LIKE A LEFTIST. I MEAN I THINK HE IS SOME PATRIOTIC LIBERAL.. TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK...
sorry about the caps.
I read Barbara Kingsolver's fawning interview in Salon yesterday and it worked me into a tizzy, particularly the line where she says:
"If a writer can't make the world a better place, they should put down there pen, and bake bread."
Of course, this idea was expressed better, and with more verve by none other than Joseph Stalin, who said:
"Writers are the engineers of the human soul."
Barbara Kingsolver's statement (which is arrogant beyond belief- since she just published a new book, she obviously thinks she's in the category of writers who make the world a better place) is exactly the crypto-totalitarianism that pervades the American left. Her notion that people ought only to do things that are in a sense practical and make the 'world better' (for whom, against whom ?) is a dangerous concept, especially as it goes un-challenged. The idea that al the things we do in our life should improve the world in basic physical sense denies us most of the pleasures of being humans, or animal's for that matter. It alse denies the fact that improving the world can take far more forms than practical ones, like baking bread. Do BAPE hoodies improve the world ? for me they have. Does 50 Cents dripping nihilism (choruses that go 'I love to shoot gats, love to pump crack...love to hug the block/love to shoot my glock') make the world a better place ? DUH ! It totally does, but not in the way she wants us too. But 50 expresses a world that is real, much realer than Mrs. Kingsolver's organic, family farm for millions accross the world. Starving children love 50- they don't love Mrs. Kingsolver.
Her objection is the conservative, fascist and communist objection that has been made against most avant-garde, fashion, minority and youth art. It is the same idea that art must serve something other than it's creator, or that art (or for that matter, any other activity) must have a point beyond itself. Activities can, and should be done, for the pleasure inherent in doing them. Nothing needs to have, or even should have a moral.
Great art arises out of the revealing and creation of the world. If we step back far enough, not even the creation of the earth matters, or the creation of the universe. None of it has a point beyond the fact of its existence. But things can have a magnificence, and a wonder apart from some sort of socialist fantasy of communal existence.
Enforced Community, and its restrictions, is the enemy of modern man. Until the internet, it was our bane to have to live with what was around us. Maybe now we can live as we choose, without having to take what is available in a given area.
sorry about the caps.
I read Barbara Kingsolver's fawning interview in Salon yesterday and it worked me into a tizzy, particularly the line where she says:
"If a writer can't make the world a better place, they should put down there pen, and bake bread."
Of course, this idea was expressed better, and with more verve by none other than Joseph Stalin, who said:
"Writers are the engineers of the human soul."
Barbara Kingsolver's statement (which is arrogant beyond belief- since she just published a new book, she obviously thinks she's in the category of writers who make the world a better place) is exactly the crypto-totalitarianism that pervades the American left. Her notion that people ought only to do things that are in a sense practical and make the 'world better' (for whom, against whom ?) is a dangerous concept, especially as it goes un-challenged. The idea that al the things we do in our life should improve the world in basic physical sense denies us most of the pleasures of being humans, or animal's for that matter. It alse denies the fact that improving the world can take far more forms than practical ones, like baking bread. Do BAPE hoodies improve the world ? for me they have. Does 50 Cents dripping nihilism (choruses that go 'I love to shoot gats, love to pump crack...love to hug the block/love to shoot my glock') make the world a better place ? DUH ! It totally does, but not in the way she wants us too. But 50 expresses a world that is real, much realer than Mrs. Kingsolver's organic, family farm for millions accross the world. Starving children love 50- they don't love Mrs. Kingsolver.
Her objection is the conservative, fascist and communist objection that has been made against most avant-garde, fashion, minority and youth art. It is the same idea that art must serve something other than it's creator, or that art (or for that matter, any other activity) must have a point beyond itself. Activities can, and should be done, for the pleasure inherent in doing them. Nothing needs to have, or even should have a moral.
Great art arises out of the revealing and creation of the world. If we step back far enough, not even the creation of the earth matters, or the creation of the universe. None of it has a point beyond the fact of its existence. But things can have a magnificence, and a wonder apart from some sort of socialist fantasy of communal existence.
Enforced Community, and its restrictions, is the enemy of modern man. Until the internet, it was our bane to have to live with what was around us. Maybe now we can live as we choose, without having to take what is available in a given area.