Had the pleasure this morning of conversing with my friend--book dealer and biographer--Paul Bauer. Paul and I don't get together often enough, but when we do the conversation always gets going right away and ranges all over the place. A happy ease of give and take. I've known him for something on the order of 25 years. Tempus fugit like that Roman said. Fugitaboutit.
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One of the things Paul and I discussed this morning was the persistent anti-intellectual strain in American culture, the persistent devaluing of writing as a valid occupation/activity. Why on earth stare at a screen all day when you could be making something of yourself or watching football?
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I've learned to be selective about what I say to whom about my activities as a writer. Most folks I know find poetry incomprehensible before the fact of having experienced it. They've ruled it out of their worlds.
It's an old problem that's getting worse in many ways.
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I think that translation is perhaps the central problem that faces artists, culture workers and intellectuals today.
Poetry may well be nothing but the translation of the unseen.
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I'm pressing down into a pile of palimpsests as a pile of palimpsests press down into me.
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" the persistent anti-intellectual strain in American culture" -- so, why do you think this is -- is it merely a self-perpetuating habit? which, even so, would not diminish its force...
ReplyDeleteHi Rosaire,
ReplyDeleteI think there are a lot of strands to any potential answer to your question. My sense is that it has something to do with the braided history of Christianity and materialism in this country. Art and books, for most people I know, are inessential and frivolous. Whereas making as much money as possible is not. Lots of folks I know don't, as George W. Bush famously said, _do nuance_. I don't point this out out of a sense of superiority, rather one of dismay. And yes it all becomes self-perpetuating.