Another year begins, God help us! It seems like art and literature are hurting since most people can’t tell a good piece of art from a crack in the sidewalk and most would rather have a root canal sans anesthetic than read anything longer than one short paragraph. Social media seems to be going down the old oval drain since most of the posts that I have seen recently are i-phone pictures of what the sender had for dinner.
The “literary” books are mostly pointless, a conclusion that I came to after slogging through a Jonathan Franzen novel where nothing much happened and what did happen seemed pointless. I guess the author’s picture on the dust jacket should have served as a warning since the author had an expression on his face as if he had just had an accident in his pants. The trouble is that anyone who enjoys the arts or reading is bullied into reading what ever is getting all of the current buzz, reads the damn book and then has to pretend that it was wonderful so people will think you are one of those in the know. I think that a goodly number of such books would be vastly better if every now and then something would get blown up.
Anyway, lets gear up for the new year – it looks like it will be a long slog to windward. Best of luck.
Another year begins, God help us! It seems like art and literature are hurting since most people can’t tell a good piece of art from a crack in the sidewalk and most would rather have a root canal sans anesthetic than read anything longer than one short paragraph. Social media seems to be going down the old oval drain since most of the posts that I have seen recently are i-phone pictures of what the sender had for dinner.
The “literary” books are mostly pointless, a conclusion that I came to after slogging through a Jonathan Franzen novel where nothing much happened and what did happen seemed pointless. I guess the author’s picture on the dust jacket should have served as a warning since the author had an expression on his face as if he had just had an accident in his pants. The trouble is that anyone who enjoys the arts or reading is bullied into reading what ever is getting all of the current buzz, reads the damn book and then has to pretend that it was wonderful so people will think you are one of those in the know. I think that a goodly number of such books would be vastly better if every now and then something would get blown up.
Anyway, lets gear up for the new year – it looks like it will be a long slog to windward. Best of luck.