Hate Mail - I'll Give Her The Last Word On This

You know who else doesn't think much of Patti Smith as a musician?  Patti Smith.

One thing there is not much of in M Train is music. I remark on this, and Smith nods. ‘Well, I mean, I’m not a musician. People’s concept of me is often so off the mark. In ’78, ’79, right before I walked away from public life, I experienced, in Europe, two years of what I would call being a rock-and-roll star. My last job, my band played to 80,000 people in Florence. I know what that tastes like, to be a rock-and-roll star – to have a limousine, to have girls screaming when they see you, girls trying to cut my hair, get a piece of me. But I don’t walk around with a concept of myself as a rock-and-roll star, and certainly not as a musician, because I really can’t play anything, except primitively. I sing, but almost everybody sings. I am a performer, but in my life, when I’m not performing, you know, I’m a mother, I have a cat, I’m sort of a loner, I write every day. My view of myself is more as a writer.’

Who am I to argue that point with her, having recently decided that, by right, anyone who speaks any language who writes things down in it as a writer.  That's as true as it is that anyone who speaks the language is a speaker.  Doesn't mean they have to be good at it just as anyone can pick up a guitar and intone stuff as they strum or anyone can pick up a camera and call themselves a photographer.  Doesn't mean anyone's required to pretend they think what they produce is any good.   As far as I'm concerned, she's only a rock-star.  She got that right and she doesn't even want that to define her.  Got to say, finding that made me have a bit of respect for her I didn't before.

Update:  Stupy is Trying To Revenge Himself On Me By Proving His Illiteracy

Stupy has posted the opening narration from the movie Spartacus as a means to taunt me.

In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring about a new society, the Roman Republic stood at the very center of the civilized world. "Of all things fairest" sang the poet, "First among cities and home of the Gods is Golden Rome." Yet even at the zenith of her pride and power, the Republic lay fatally stricken with the disease called human slavery. The age of the dictator was at hand, waiting in shadows for the event to bring forth. In that same century, in the conquered Greek province of Thrace, an illiterate slave woman added to her master's wealth by giving birth to a son whom she names Spartacus. A proud rebellious son, who was sold to living death in the mines of Libya, before his thirteenth birthday. There under whip and chain and sun he lived out his youth and his young manhood, dreaming the death of slavery 2000 years before it finally would die.

Stupy says two things about that passage

That's absolutely beautifully written, and the actual sequence in the film that it illustrates it is wonderful.

and

But, yknow, fuck that shit, because as That Idiot From Maine© has informed us, Trumbo was a Red.

Well, Trumbo was resting on the writing of the once popular, now sadly forgotten Howard Fast, who wrote his novel while in prison when he got into trouble with HUAC. I don't know the extent to which Trumbo might have been resting on Fast's book which I've never read.  It's been a long time since I read anything by Fast but I don't remember his writing being quite as flowery as that.  I wonder what he'd have said about the passage.  I think its kind of, you know, stagey. 

[Note:  I found a pirate copy online and have quickly read the first three chapters, the second of which, I have to say is literally a gut slam of shockingly disturbing writing.  It is the most shocking description of  the casual terror-violence of Roman mass-crucifixion I've ever read.  Compared to Fast's prose, Trumbo's is . . . not as good.]

That said, apparently Stupy is unable to read what he finds so beauteous because I'm sure he would hate what it says if he understood it.  The first sentence doesn't strike me as something that would make him and his Eschaton buddies happy.

In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring about a new society, the Roman Republic stood at the very center of the civilized world.

I wonder what would happen if some newcomer went to Eschaton and said something like "The pagan tyranny of Rome was overthrown by a new faith called Christianity."  I'll bet the old folks would rage and gnash their teeth if someone said EXACTLY WHAT TRUMBO SAID IN THAT PASSAGE.

Not to mention Trumbo's point that slavery wasn't overturned for 2,000 years after that, implying that Christianity had more than a bit to do with that overturning, which is simply true. I will point out that there are isolated places it happened a lot faster than that, Christian Ireland, for example. 

Of course, it being a Hollywood movie, the real history of the overturning of slavery won't fit in to 2 hours, it's extremely complex though about the only places where slavery was opposed and overturned were, in fact, places where Christianity was the primary motivation to do that.  The modern abolition movement is, in fact, by an overwhelming percentage, a Christian phenomenon.

Alas, Trumbo's ringing claim made with a perfect tense construction that slavery it finally would die was overly optimistic because slavery is still rampant in the world, today, especially notably in such Communist countries as China and North Korea, also in the post-Communist Soviets, especially Putin's Russia but in many other places in the world.   Here's a map showing the prevalence of modern slavery in different countries.





Oddly, it would seem, the places where there is the least slavery would support Trumbo's contention that Christianity would be the motivation for abolition, though some places in Eastern Europe cloud that contention, they are also places where Communism was imposed until fairly recently.  Communism, according to the map, doesn't seem to lead to the greatest success in getting rid of slavery (apart from Cuba, if I am reading the map correctly).

I will note that the map and the Global Slavery Index are not uncontroversial, even the definition of what is and isn't slavery is argued.  But that's for another series of posts.  Maybe in February, again.  There's still slavery in the United States, it's been totally abolished in almost no places.