To continue my further inter-site dialogue with Southall (now linked at the side), I have to refer to this:
"I don’t mean a single word of it. Some of you are pinning significance to these lines, finding profundity in the colons and the html coding and the occasional bursts of profanity, feeling passion and belief and a definite sense of purpose, and the simple fact is that I’m sitting here, for the most part, with a bottle of Nastro Azzurro or whatever next to me, and I’m just writing, like it’s a job or a chore or a reflex action."
Well, of course. None of us do. All good writers (all good artists) are a strange mix of the fraud and the sincere. If we really all meant the stuff we wrote, what sort of people would that make us? Not the kind fit for human society, at the very least. This is, of course, a point he makes later; but whereas he points out that this level of projection or screening is necessary for our mental health, I would argue further that it is necessary for the creation of the art work.
"I don’t mean a single word of it. Some of you are pinning significance to these lines, finding profundity in the colons and the html coding and the occasional bursts of profanity, feeling passion and belief and a definite sense of purpose, and the simple fact is that I’m sitting here, for the most part, with a bottle of Nastro Azzurro or whatever next to me, and I’m just writing, like it’s a job or a chore or a reflex action."
Well, of course. None of us do. All good writers (all good artists) are a strange mix of the fraud and the sincere. If we really all meant the stuff we wrote, what sort of people would that make us? Not the kind fit for human society, at the very least. This is, of course, a point he makes later; but whereas he points out that this level of projection or screening is necessary for our mental health, I would argue further that it is necessary for the creation of the art work.
