"Our neurotic safety culture has bred boring, stale young people. By sealing off reality and by removing risk, we’ve birthed generations of Zoomers and Millennials terrified of themselves and of everything else."
"When was the last time you read a modern novel or watched a modern movie which enraptured you with beauty and truth? Or one that didn’t force-feed this week’s progressive gospel, and next week’s progressive heresy?"
Spot on. Propaganda cannot be art. When artistic choices are made for political reasons there is no truth.
I recommended the literature of Knut Hamsun the other day, a writer who is unquestionably one of the greatest of the last century. The acquaintance to whom I made this recommendation initially sounded interested, and - as people invariably do these days - googled his name.
"Ugh, he was a Nazi!" they exclaimed, upon the discovery that 1930's Norwegian values are rather different from modern progressive dogma. This struck me, among other things, as terribly sad. In the mind of this acquaintance, one of the most important artists ever to live was immediately dismissed as unworthy: a product of an inferior past. To hell with his genius, to hell with his body of work, to hell with his immense contribution to literature. He was, their Big Tech conscience assured them, "a bad man".
That's the brilliance of modern leftist propaganda - it fortifies willful stupidity with moral arrogance.
Absolutely. I don't normally make movie recommendations, primarily because I don't watch them, but the Danish film adaptation is a great "drinking alone until 2am" movie.
that book is pretty darn bleak, less to be enjoyed than endured, and it also made me constantly desperately ravenous...but hey, De gustibus non est disputandum etc...
but if u really wanna piss off a woke scold, show them some Nabokov, is like flashing your cross to a vampire.
all puritans and fundamentalists absolutely loathe esthetics and the imagination, i guess it threatens their certitude.
Yes, Nabokov might well render a progressive catatonic. That said, the last people I saw misinterpret his work were on the right. It was in the middle of the whole Nina Jankowicz/Ministry of Truth thing and someone had spotted, during one of her zoom interviews, a copy of Lolita in the bookshelf behind her. This coincided with the groomer affair, and so consequently, there were a lot of people (who clearly hadn't read the book, or if they had, who didn't even remotely get it) calling the book "pro-pedophile."
I console myself that my replies was defending Nabokov, and not Nina fucking Jankowicz.
As im sure u know, general stupidity and this terrible handicap most people seem to have dealing with works of art (the inability to separate art from artist, the tendency to view written works as literal testaments of their authors, the refusal to grant art its own integrity and autonomy) cuts across all political and religious tribes, and even seems to infect otherwise intelligent and educated people.
When Nabokov wrote things like: "A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth," it drove just about every critic and journalist mad...i guess not having an overt "social conscience" is the blasphemy of our age.
'Never thought little old me would be part of the "counterculture".'
--there it is; everything i'm screaming and doing is to wake those of us up who don't realize that it is we who are The Pretty Ones now. yes... "little old you" had better step up to it!
"Neurotic times such as ours drain creative energy. Milton spent twenty years with Paradise Lost tucked away in his pocket whilst he wrote stillborn pamphlets in the ‘sea of noises and hoarse disputes’ of the Puritan Revolution. After the revolution failed, Milton published Paradise Lost." - Yup
"Our neurotic safety culture has bred boring, stale young people. By sealing off reality and by removing risk, we’ve birthed generations of Zoomers and Millennials terrified of themselves and of everything else."
"When was the last time you read a modern novel or watched a modern movie which enraptured you with beauty and truth? Or one that didn’t force-feed this week’s progressive gospel, and next week’s progressive heresy?"
Spot on. Propaganda cannot be art. When artistic choices are made for political reasons there is no truth.
I recommended the literature of Knut Hamsun the other day, a writer who is unquestionably one of the greatest of the last century. The acquaintance to whom I made this recommendation initially sounded interested, and - as people invariably do these days - googled his name.
"Ugh, he was a Nazi!" they exclaimed, upon the discovery that 1930's Norwegian values are rather different from modern progressive dogma. This struck me, among other things, as terribly sad. In the mind of this acquaintance, one of the most important artists ever to live was immediately dismissed as unworthy: a product of an inferior past. To hell with his genius, to hell with his body of work, to hell with his immense contribution to literature. He was, their Big Tech conscience assured them, "a bad man".
That's the brilliance of modern leftist propaganda - it fortifies willful stupidity with moral arrogance.
'Hunger' is one of the greatest novels of all time.
Absolutely. I don't normally make movie recommendations, primarily because I don't watch them, but the Danish film adaptation is a great "drinking alone until 2am" movie.
I was totally unaware of any movie. Sounds ideal. Cheers!
For writers its a sobering film experience, even drunk at 2am.
that book is pretty darn bleak, less to be enjoyed than endured, and it also made me constantly desperately ravenous...but hey, De gustibus non est disputandum etc...
but if u really wanna piss off a woke scold, show them some Nabokov, is like flashing your cross to a vampire.
all puritans and fundamentalists absolutely loathe esthetics and the imagination, i guess it threatens their certitude.
thanks!
Yes, Nabokov might well render a progressive catatonic. That said, the last people I saw misinterpret his work were on the right. It was in the middle of the whole Nina Jankowicz/Ministry of Truth thing and someone had spotted, during one of her zoom interviews, a copy of Lolita in the bookshelf behind her. This coincided with the groomer affair, and so consequently, there were a lot of people (who clearly hadn't read the book, or if they had, who didn't even remotely get it) calling the book "pro-pedophile."
I console myself that my replies was defending Nabokov, and not Nina fucking Jankowicz.
As im sure u know, general stupidity and this terrible handicap most people seem to have dealing with works of art (the inability to separate art from artist, the tendency to view written works as literal testaments of their authors, the refusal to grant art its own integrity and autonomy) cuts across all political and religious tribes, and even seems to infect otherwise intelligent and educated people.
When Nabokov wrote things like: "A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth," it drove just about every critic and journalist mad...i guess not having an overt "social conscience" is the blasphemy of our age.
i tend to think of politics in my art like feces in my water, one drop ruins the whole batch
Never thought little old me would be part of the "counterculture".
'Never thought little old me would be part of the "counterculture".'
--there it is; everything i'm screaming and doing is to wake those of us up who don't realize that it is we who are The Pretty Ones now. yes... "little old you" had better step up to it!
xxxxxx
erika
"Neurotic times such as ours drain creative energy. Milton spent twenty years with Paradise Lost tucked away in his pocket whilst he wrote stillborn pamphlets in the ‘sea of noises and hoarse disputes’ of the Puritan Revolution. After the revolution failed, Milton published Paradise Lost." - Yup
Explains a lot...