OH, NO. I had written short stories before, I've written lots of stuff, I like writing stuff but I'm not stupid enough to believe that what I enjoy writing is going to be what other people enjoy reading. That's the difference between us, maybe. I hadn't ever subjected a writing teacher to the junk I scribbled before and he said it was from OK to promising. I'm sure if I'd had word processing technology available to me when I was in school that my teachers might have liked reading my expository writing better. Up till now it's about the only stuff I've ever shown anyone
I think the melodramatic angst of the tortured writer is one of the more ridiculous poses of literary life. It couldn't be that bad or no one would choose to do it. They should try a really bad job that they have to do. I think most tortured writers are people who mistake their obsessive self analysis for art when it's just them splashing their personality flaws on paper. Some of them get other sick people who want to read that stuff and a publishing industry that peddles that kind of crap to them. It's like the movies, sex and violence, especially violent sex and hate. Modernism as literature. I got past that a long, long time ago when I had to write a couple of papers in 20th Century French Lit class. One about Charles Peguy the other about Cocteau. It was the Cocteau, focusing on his Oedipus that pretty much did in my opinion of modern lit. I had read a lot of fiction before that and no where near as much after that. Most of it I'd never liked before, especially the English and French 20th century stuff.
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Oh, dear, you are mistaking ephemeral current fashion for modernism. Depending on context when I say it I mean everything from modern physics and secular liberalism to the origin of the latter in so-called "enlightenment" writing and practice. Another major piece to fall out of modernism for me was taking a more critical look at those enormous events in the history of modernism, the revolutions, the Russian, the various 19th century European ones, the French and American revolutions for what they really produced in life instead of in superficial, ideological assertion. When I realized the American revolution was an attempt by aristocrats to get poor farmers to fight a revolution for their financial benefit and that the Constitution was their protection of their financial privilage, especially the slave-holders, and that literally everything admirable in American history and culture has had to fight against that, the romantic myth that was on full display in the fascist insurrection of January 6th shattered. The one for the French Revolution - most Americans know as much about that as they saw during the singing of the Marseillaise in Casablanca - is even more ridiculous and destructive.
I said that any attempt to recreate any past is not only doomed to failure, it is morally wrong. The assumption that I am not going to deny that the French Revolution and the French Republican tradition that came from it has been a moral atrocity doesn't in any way negate the evils of the old regime it replaced, I think many, most of the appalling features of post-revolutionary France are a recapitulation of the evils that preceded the Revolution as all of those after the American Revolution and Russian, Chinese, etc. revolutions have replaced as bad if not worse. In that the American experience has been, perhaps, somewhat better since the Declaration of Independence was a promissory note that informed the future imaginations of those who had been promised what the "Founders" had no intention of giving them. The French revolutionaries talked a good game too but they were even less honorable in honoring "liberty, equality and fraternity" as the bros formed rival gangs, threw their rivals in prison and chopped off their heads as they imposed a murderous reign of terror on France, only to have that give away to an even bloodier military regime and a series of rising and falling bloody disasters. Of course, the Americans continuing blood shed was mainly white people murdering and enslaving Black People and other People of Color as well as the genocide of the indigenous People of Color during the same period. The modern would-be scientific regimes that came in after revolutions have been even bloodier, using modern science and technology even more deadly than the emblematic modernist symbol of revolution, the guillotine.
I remember way back, I think it was when Reagan was funding what would become the war lords of Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion, someone who was saying the US should keep out of that mess pointed out that the Afghanis weren't going to fall in love with us anymore than they did the Soviets, pointing out that they don't have to choose one of us or the other that they could hate us both.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE ONE SIDE OR ANOTHER SIDE IF YOU REJECT THEM BOTH. The idea you have to choose sides, the often unconsidered insistence that you choose "which side are you on" leaves out that choice. I don't have to choose the per-revolutionary France to reject the revolution and what came after it. I can reject those both and say we have to move on into the future. The idea that you can choose one or the other is an illusion, worse, it's delusional. The choice was that of the people of that time to make, they've all been dead a long, long time. And people who came later didn't choose either of them, they moved on. The delusion that we can chose a part of the past and make it our own is exactly that, a delusion, one which is encouraged by dishonest people who promote "originalism, fundamentalism, etc." The past they promote is likely a current myth, a construct that never existed in reality, as stupid as that stupid woman who carried the "don't tread on me" flag right before her comrades tread her to death to save their own asses. I have a hard time feeling sorry for her except as a chump for show-biz promoted "patriotism" based on the manipulation of emotions by using symbols instead of reality. I am not stupid enough to think that's a habit of thought that is limited to the American right, it's ubiquitous.
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