Skip to main content
Post a Comment

Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!

I was describing the gist of this article to my spouse, reading out to her a specific passage, then tried to summarize by saying "Would you still read writers that are no longer politically correct?". In truth, some of these authors' ideas a far from what we mean by, or is used as in insult as, politically correct. But then I realized the aptness of the term politically correct, regarding the appropriateness of modern belief.

That said, in many ways, we hardly realize the people behind the words. I certainly did not realize the vapidness of Ayn Rand when I was reading her novels as a teen. I thoroughly enjoyed V.S. Naipuls Literary Occasions. unaware of him as a person. A more recent irritating author is David Foster Wallace, his Infinite Jest wonderfully written, line after unending line. I will finish it, but I have put it down once before when I found out more about him.

Then again, how many of us would turn our noses up at people if we knew of their pasts or their beliefs, particularly of men, so many such flawed human beings toward others?

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review/edith-wharton-house-of-mirth-anti-semitism.html?comments#permid=30082933

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Meanings of Ender's Game

In response to an Ender's Game discussion (Goodreads), with a link from Reddit, I posted the following: Much of the Reddit stream seems to focus on military tactics, or the lack thereof, used by the Ender, but who reads Ender and thinks it about military tactics, except the 20-year old grunt that started the thread? For a book written in the 80's, then edited in the early 90's, it seems more prophetic, with its use of game immersion, remote military operations and portable computing. Then when you think about the use of children in military games, one can think somewhat more deeply about sociopolitical indoctrination.  The series itself becomes a broader exploration of empathy and foreign culture.  The criticism seems more like the problem of a man with a hammer, who thinks every problem is solved by hammering, but even worse, every problem is about hammering. An additional post, regarding suspension of disbelief: Some people commented on the suspension of disbelie...
Post a Comment
Read more

Accomplishments of Mayor de Blasio (as of December 2014)

I realized that de Blasio's accomplishments go unnoticed, primarily because affluent white people do not benefit from them. The benefits the mayor has brought are often corrections to the abuses of Bloomberg's, along with prior mayors', policies: Policing The NYPD conducts fewer stop-and-frisks. The city dropped its stop-and-frisk appeal. NYPD officers are starting to use body cameras. New York police officers are being retrained. Carrying a small amount of weed will probably result in a ticket, not an arrest. Teenage inmates are no longer put in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. The city has settled with the “Central Park Five.” Poverty There are 23 new homeless shelters in the city There's a new rent subsidy program for homeless families. More public housing units are available to homeless families. Traffic Pedestrian deaths are at a record low. The speed limit was lowered from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour. There are harsher ...
1 comment
Read more

The Right to Write - NYTimes.com

In an article,  The Right to Write - NYTimes.com , I commented on the right to write, since writers are sometimes questioned on the validity of their writing, e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin: One, people always have the right to write, but readers concurrently have the right to reject said writing. Much personal criticism of depictions from writers is whether the depiction seems valid or plausible, but even that is an exercise in empathy, since it requires one to experience that depiction ideationally.  Two, there is a streak in Americans, and maybe anyone, that states that you cannot understand 'my pain', usually the death of a child or some horrific personal lose. Over a longer term I have sensed that people most easily accept empathy if it is expressed by someone with similar experiences, an aspect I believe is part of human nature. I find both irksome, since they deny empathy.
Post a Comment
Read more