Saturday, July 25, 2020

Sunday, July 19, 2020

aimless travelers

"For the first time since leaving the United States on this aimless trip I saw other aimless travelers. I had been passing myself off as a teacher; they called themselves students. There were advantages in being a student: student fares, student rates, student hostels, student entry fees. Great, hairy, middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted, "Look, I'm a student! Do me a favor! He doesn't believe I'm a fucking student. Hey" They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters, who had gravitated toward this impoverished place because they wanted to save money. Their conversation was predictable and was wholly concerned with prices, the exchange rate, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest bus, how someone ("Was he a gringo?") got a meal for fifteen cents, or an alpaca sweater for a dollar or bunked with some Aymara Indians in a benighted village. They were Americans, but they were also Dutch, German, French, British, and Scandinavian; they spoke the same language, always money. Their boast was always how long they had managed to hang on here in the Peruvian Andes and beat the system."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

Saturday, July 4, 2020

a literary kingmaker

The new issue of the iconoclastic The Agonist is out, and in it for the first time, I got caught up with the Stephen King controversy. I had seen his name trending, and I know he is vocal on twitter, blocked by the president, etc., but there is too much of this stuff to follow it all. Anyway, in "The Doomed Equality Movement" by Daniel N. Davidson, I read

The author Stephen King has lately been excoriated for saying that he “would never consider diversity in matters of art, only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.” For that he was accused of exercising white privilege, being an opponent of affirmative action, and promoting systemic bias. Rather, his critics insist, one should judge by the criterion of diversity–which would mean the division of all honors so that all self-identifying groups get theirs.  

I do not know if any current "equality movement" will fail or succeed, but the passage reminded me of Stephen King's lament, expressed somewhere in his famous On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This memoir on the writing life is likely the only King that those of us who don't read horror have read, and in it, he expressed the wish that he were better recognized as a genuine literary talenta "sentence maker" as we could say. In the passage I'm thinking of, he is also considering his fellow novelist-musician Amy Tan, and expressing dismay that their bestselling novels are never recognized as having literary qualities, in particular he notes they are not recognized for "the language." I am recalling this from memory, and I'm sorry I don't have the passage handy, but we've come a long wayor there's been a long fall?when a figure such as Stephen King can be recognized and "excoriated" for being a kingmaker in the world of "high brow" art. Where is the Nobel committee? Or Joyce scribbling in his grave? Is Stephen King's opinion on "matters of art" supposed to matter at all? Why isn't Thomas Pynchon on twitter? And, no, I do not mean to imply that King is overrated in the genres he's working inthe horror novel and the tweet.

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