mental: crazy or intelligent?
Feb. 14th, 2002 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fictionallast year on valentine's day, i wrote a long impassioned rant about how much i hate the holiday, and why it's terrible, hallmarky, and causes people loads of unnecessary grief.
i must confess i still feel basically the same way, even though romantically speaking, i am definitely on the up side of things. however, i suppose an opportunity to be kind to one another is not to be missed, and i will take that for what it is, essentially unimportant, but possibly fun. not worth a lot of mental preoccupation.
so what have i been thinking about lately? art and politics.
i study english literature, and i love it. i really do. and my specialty is the renaissance. in other words, dead white guys.
i admire the classics from the depths of my heart, and i believe that survival over centuries is a fairly good sign of great art. although i don't think art is necessarily limited to the survivers, for example think of Christopher Marlowe and his plays. Barely anyone reads him anymore, and yet his plays were possibly even greater than Shakespeare's...but i digress.
anyway, i thought i'd spice up my semester some by taking a class on James Baldwin, Gwendolen Brooks, and Amiri Baraka....Gotta get out of the rennaisance some time, I suppose...and it's been hitting me with even greater force these days. What am I doing?
politics might not inspire great art always, but great art cannot exist independently of it. we are people, and we live in world that needs reform and constant improvement. it needs the contributions of everybody, and we can't afford to throw that away, can we?
i'm mainly studying things that have no significance. i don't really feel i'm making a contribution. i'm not saying that i think i should ditch it all, and devote my life to the socialist movement (that's already been done by one of my very dearest friends, and we don't want to get repetitious, now do we?) but i really feel that i must do something.
something important.
i'm not going to give my dusty academia...at least not till i find something better to replace it. and i couldn't give it up anyway, it means too much to me personally. but i've got to do something....
i must confess i still feel basically the same way, even though romantically speaking, i am definitely on the up side of things. however, i suppose an opportunity to be kind to one another is not to be missed, and i will take that for what it is, essentially unimportant, but possibly fun. not worth a lot of mental preoccupation.
so what have i been thinking about lately? art and politics.
i study english literature, and i love it. i really do. and my specialty is the renaissance. in other words, dead white guys.
i admire the classics from the depths of my heart, and i believe that survival over centuries is a fairly good sign of great art. although i don't think art is necessarily limited to the survivers, for example think of Christopher Marlowe and his plays. Barely anyone reads him anymore, and yet his plays were possibly even greater than Shakespeare's...but i digress.
anyway, i thought i'd spice up my semester some by taking a class on James Baldwin, Gwendolen Brooks, and Amiri Baraka....Gotta get out of the rennaisance some time, I suppose...and it's been hitting me with even greater force these days. What am I doing?
politics might not inspire great art always, but great art cannot exist independently of it. we are people, and we live in world that needs reform and constant improvement. it needs the contributions of everybody, and we can't afford to throw that away, can we?
i'm mainly studying things that have no significance. i don't really feel i'm making a contribution. i'm not saying that i think i should ditch it all, and devote my life to the socialist movement (that's already been done by one of my very dearest friends, and we don't want to get repetitious, now do we?) but i really feel that i must do something.
something important.
i'm not going to give my dusty academia...at least not till i find something better to replace it. and i couldn't give it up anyway, it means too much to me personally. but i've got to do something....
