"Milan Kundera, from his latest collection of essays, Encounters, in Part VIII, page 145 in the paperback edition Harper Perennial:  "Knowing the cost of the imagination, I feel above all a humble admiration for Fellini's films."

Yes, I do too.  I have for some time had one of my obsessions with La Dolce Vita and Otto e Mezzo, in no small part do to the director's choice of Mastroianni perhaps, even back as far as when I was stuck in  Margaritaville, a horrible period displaying my lack of career.  It was soothing for me to see the dream-like suspension of protagonist-worthy people going through their life's travels.  My mind's eye was far away from Washington, DC's business.  Maybe I needed the presence of other dreamers (and the drinkers, the escapers, the con artists that come along with them as some sort of example perhaps) to make sense of life, to make sense of the daily flow.  (They had me at one point doing this terribly long haul from Friday night closing to Saturday brunch, home exhausted, then back for Sunday night, then Monday day.)

Is there a touch of Dostoyevsky in Kundera's sensibilities?  Or is that sense of that possible similarity colored by the fact of exile related to a Russian state.  Both are writers, writers of a very serious nature, yes, capable of play and jokes, but of a deep sense of human reality, contrasting the art and the dreams of the imagination with the colder realities of state and prevailing public thought.  Alyosha Karamazov might not seem too far out of place in a Kundera, at least if you translate the Grand Inquisitor into the later half of the 20th Century;  a Kundera character might make an effective narration in Notes from the House of the Dead, an attendant before and after.  Is that the condition of history repeating itself, I wonder.

Here in our part of the world we endure our exile from the soul and art and the presence of the spiritual in our lives through the extended hopes and offers of material things, shopping.  But these hopes too are being worn quite thin, no promise of any security or ability to save enough for anything resembling retirement.

Kundera's comment, above, is prompted by "a dinner in Paris more than twenty years ago:  a pleasant young man is talking of Fellini with an amused mocking scorn."  We've all heard it, I think, anyway, that scorn, that lack of a willingness to be attentive to something outside the 'normal and practical realms of life.'  A dismissive flat 'oh.'  Or an, 'okay... you go do that...'  A failure of recognition, of realization, as the case of the good-sized body of art Milan Kundera points out for us in any of his essay collections and in many instances in his novels, things we might initially sense are for a better critical mind than our own but quickly come to grasp.  That's Kundera for you, and maybe not so unlike Dostoyevsky before him.

     In the presence of this clever young fellow...  I experienced for the first time a sensation I never felt in Czechoslovakia, even in the worst Stalinist years:  the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.

This is, of course, saddening.  This is, of course, a cause of concern, though there's not a lot that can be done about it beyond, for the moment anyway, the realization of this sense, as seen around us.

Who knows.  What can one say?  Well, I tried to bring the Shakespearean into play in my own "remembered novel," my story of college kids stuck in some sort of sweetness that does not allow for them to connect further, but perhaps my skills weren't up for the task, as my eye was drawn away by attending to other unsatisfactory business that leaves me in my own sort of exile, or by the dreary condition provoked by that same lack of satisfactory connection or disconnection (the closure we all would like to have.)  Which strikes me now as an interesting point to make, one that may not have occurred to me, as the DNA of such a situation were perpetuating itself in my own life.  The Kirkus review found the book's set up, though promising (in the hands of someone competent), to be undermined by flat dialog, repetition, clichéd sentiment, meandering plot.  I wonder, though, if such a review comes, itself, from a source of this death of art before the blank hungry face of widget commerce, this source of marketing's wisdom and wonder, this dictation of popular tastes and what might work for that.  Yes, marketing, an arms race, a competition to get to what sells, to know what sells, even to make exactly what sells...

Is art something to be marketed along with the rest of stuff?  Or did, at least at one era in time and history, simply make movies that were art, and write books that too were art, in need of art, loving art, showing us, perhaps as they fade, what might happen to us without art.

Kundera's sense--he has said it before, in The Curtain, Le Rideau--is that the novel is dying under an avalanche of the banal, of everyone now writing a book.  That I am still figuring over and turning over in my mind, even as I understand it to be quite true.

"The cost of the imagination," yes, this is something true and operating in the world we know.  That, to me, even is the principle plot line (or through line as they call it?) interestingly enough.  And where in one part of the world they might send you away, one way or another, or 'discourage you' authoritatively, in another part of the world that squelching down of the habit is an accepted standard of daily life, a discouraging of any sort of 'weirdness,' any sort of being a real person of feeling, flesh, emotion and blood and imagination.

In the great attempts to produce equality in the market economy, either through 'democracy' or through 'communism,' either through 'secular' state or 'non-secular' state, it seems we are still forgetting something, still continuing to lop the heads off of something new and original and provocative... sensitive.

In my own artistic confinement to the solitary, occasionally broken by something outside of a restaurant, there's something noticed one might, in America, having never seen it quite directly, associate with the Soviet, if that is anyway near the right term.  In the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts there are acres of red carpet and grand chandeliers hanging above, people dressed to see and be seen.  This is where art is found, apparently, by all indications.  But it ever seems to cater to that which is safe, that which is already considered art, going back a ways.  There is some authoritative hand hanging over such places. Now, that is only a small part, this suspicion, of my experience, largely of delight of being taken for something cultural when I go to the Kennedy Center.  But, it is a voice inside my head all along, telling me, as I know, that there is, indeed, "a cost of the imagination."

Yes, there is a cost, and perhaps the sooner you know and realize it, the better off you will be, not getting as down as you would with a different expectation, not getting bent out of shape at the sorts of work you must do to stay alive.  Maybe you know what to look out for, say that some American artists tend to become alcoholic, or that a French artist can never be getting his due until after his death, or the tradition of prison and exile in, say, Russia.  And perhaps this sense of cost reverberates in the excellent stories of Andrei Platonov, Among Animals and Plants, The Potudan River, that seem to echo with a minimizing of ego as a through line, perhaps attributable to the harshness of the Soviet human condition, observant of the difficulty inherent in loving another.

Those who make art need it to sustain themselves.  And they know that the cost of the imagination, of being able to create, comes hand in hand with the realization that life isn't about easy happiness.

Notes from the House of the Dead.  It's a catchy title.  Based on the author's own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia as a political prisoner, Dostoyevsky's own "Introduction" allows for the main fictive set-up, that what follows are taken from the discovered notebooks of a nervous reclusive schoolteacher (teaching Siberian locals the French language) and former inmate.   Like the sweetest of Dostoyevsky, there is a touch of brief self-indulgence, a tender self-portrait of the misunderstood, of a man observed to burn a candle 'til dawn at work at something, secretively writing.  The device is necessary to establish one of the main elements of the fiction here, that when you, or anyone, goes off to such a prison, your personality dies, thus setting up the redemptive possibility that it will come back to life (at least, according to David McDuff's introduction.)  But more compellingly, to my own tastes and understandings of matters, this odd character alluded to, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, is a quiet self-portrait of the man himself.  A nobleman, fallen to such a condition.  A keeper of similar hours.  A nervous type, maybe somewhat frail and thin.  A writer.  Of course, we will allow it, as it is only right to.  For four years Dostoyevsky was so imprisoned, and the material, of course, is directly and entirely his own along with his own imagination.

He disliked electric lights.  He would rise at one in the afternoon, as he lived with his small family in St. Petersburg, and the writing would start when everyone had gone to bed.  From a New York Times Travel Section piece, I remember he would sometimes roll cigarettes as he stayed up and wrote, though he, along with the doctor, would not allow himself to smoke even one of them.

In prison he found a way to write about the world and about society and its human factions.

Connecting with books, I find, is something religious, a kind of holy encounter.  There are strange magnetic pulls one picks up from the books along a shelf, as if there was indeed within them, an understandable code of some migration that needs to be made.

So why should I find myself sitting outside of a Starbucks with Kundera's Encounters and the aforementioned Dostoyevksy, along with my own attempt at a memoir couched in enough fiction to protect the privacy of the innocent, on the day that is the first day off of three after the four nights behind the bar with its own 'dead,' with its own people deprived of their personal lives through some sense of honor or committed crime or lack of normalcy and normal times.

It's been years since I read Notes from the House of the Dead.  I did not find a conscious memory of reading its introduction, even though the 'sudden flooding wind' of the equally important introduction of The Brothers Karamazov is never far from my mind.  Did I take some aspect of that rare character of that noble person living out life in Siberia earlier as some sort of cliché;  and now I find it real and valid as I struggle on my own.

He had made an early writing career out of "subject matter primarily from the dreams of individuals oppressed by a hostile social environment," as the 'translator's introduction,' by David McDuff, in my Penguin Classics version, copyright 1985, of The House of the Dead, page 10.  It goes on, next sentence, "He had concentrated on the depiction of unhealthy, morbid states of mind, fusing these with a vision of another, brighter, but unattainable sphere."  And what follows is a further development of what the earlier Dostoyevsky was up to along such lines as I would not be able to come up with as far as brilliance and insight, basic contrasts between constructed self-ideals and the reality in which they must find themselves in.  Thus, perhaps, it is not a total dismissive, to coin that which belongs to the Dostoyevskian as such.

One can sense through what he himself has experienced, that there is, at least there can be, the Dostoyevskian in life, in his own life.  Where to put one's finger upon it, in the dreamer himself and his failings to be practical, in the 'fallen nobleman,' in the situations of life, where?...

This is basically 1860 after his release in 1844 that Notes is published.  I wonder, just because maybe there is some fun to it, if the world of Chekhov is possible, with first that of the earlier of Dostoyesky.  It is one of those 'books' of actual experiences that I will always return to in my life and find, oddly enough, some truth in, though I know not what that says exactly about me or anyone else.  It is one of the books that follows me along to the coffee shop's patio, and if to prove its weight and its reality I found myself quite a bit nervous and distracted and thrown off kilter when a pretty young college senior came up to me as I sat under an umbrella's shade staring into a notebook without any effect upon it and asked if she could borrow my phone, as hers did not work.  "Mine is old, and doesn't work so well either," I explained, turning it off all the way then turning it back on to the apple logo and handing it over to her.  "I won't go far," she said.  And yet she soon walked far away enough that she did disappear behind the shrubs in front of the tea house and brownstones to the west along R Street, making me even more nervous.

And yet, somehow, even though she could have walked away, she returned, sat near me waiting to make one more call, explaining how she intended to go to law school, got up once again, apparently made her connection, and when she came to return my old iPhone, she said to me, 'you are a saint.'  And I shrugged.

From Paris Review -- The Art of Memoir No. 1, Mary Karr

INTERVIEWER

In your memoirs you barely mention your college years, or the years just following. Why?

KARR

You remember through a filter of self. The periods in your life when that self is half formed, your memories are half formed too. In Lit I wrote in passing about lurching around, getting drunk in punk bars. My best friends had a band called the Suicide Commandos who toured with the Ramones, so I hung out with them a bit. But getting drunk with the Ramones—who cares? The through-line has to be a change in your character, and being loaded seldom involves psychological advancement. No character change, no plot.

No character change, no plot.  I have to wonder, this is my problem.  And with a very similar set-up.  The barman who goes on drinking...  that's not much of a story.  And probably the problem with my own 'memoirs.'  No real change in character.

Change is difficult.  Change you have to be brave for.  Maybe you feel shame, "how long have I been doing this (with no growth, no advancement, the same old same old.)"

I get ready to tie one of my work shoes tight, a pair of Doc Martens, a sort of sneaker-shoe, of leather hiking boot like trim over light brown canvas like synthetic (I suppose), a non-slip sole, in which are a high quality full length arch supports.  It is wine tasting night at work.  I will ride my bike there, going through the woods, where perhaps I will dismount, to take in the airs of the forest.  Last night there was the Jazz, and it was a night that, by ten o'clock drove me to drink.  People make it look so desirable.  Hunger is strong at that point.  And it's as if the hands are all stretched out toward me, fill my glass, whatever you think.

"There's devils on each side of you, with bottles in their hands..."  There's not a lot of progression in that song, though.

I make myself a turkey sandwich with Ezekial bread, a leaf of romaine, a sliver of white onion, a couple of asparagus spears.  I fill a plastic cycling bottle with filtered water and think of the last bastards who will show up late, near kitchen closing, and exact out of me the last severing of the nerves holding me.  As if to say, drink, drink with me, join me.  And once I start the feeling will never be right until finally I give up and go to bed, exhausted.

There's no  way out, but quitting that job.

Yes, how could I possibly not want a glass of wine after that bombardment, all those people making wine look extremely desirable, making it look like it tastes so good and indeed it does.  How can you possibly escape that great thirst?  Yes, I know there is something called self-control, but where is it found? Where is it when you get home and there's nothing on TV but the GOP Convention, and the fatigue having fallen concentrated in all your joints from twists and turns, riding the bull of the night, the strange sudden rush for chilled martini glasses, a complicated drink order and the business men wanting beer before they go downstairs for dinner.

My youthful co-worker, wise beyond his years, and tired from working two jobs, somehow senses my deep quandary.  "You have to be a different person with everyone you wait on," he observes as the night calms finally toward 10 PM and the magic hour of the kitchen's closing, upon the background thought that I could write about the experience of bar tending, though not in the fluff way you'd want to if you wanted to sell a lot of books and get rich from some self-helpy advice type thing about pick-up lines and how to find the right mate.  What would I know about that anyway?  All's I know is that an adult relationship in my line of work seems utterly impossible, further away the closer you get, like that Stephen Crane story of the men on a boat looking at the coastline so close that they will never get to.   Why?  Why is it impossible?  And yes, I should just admit this to myself and hang up the old towel, move on.  I'm never going to have a place of my own, never would want to.  Time to get out, if that wasn't years and years and years ago.  Funny how time passes, sliding away, disappearing, days of wine and roses.

But if you are a writer, that is your religion, your true life, and you must admit this and be true to it.  You need some bravery.  You need some clarity.  You need some exercise and yoga, you need some time off, a leave of absence at the very least, a grant, an easier gig.  You need to accept utter economic defeat, accept that you will never follow your father in his footsteps of being a great college professor who taught many many young minds expanding them.  You need to go back and accept your own awkward juvenile self as you are...  Isn't that what it's about, if we learn anything from the brave people who are gay and brave enough to be who they are, that lesson a gift to humanity at large, "I am gay," "oh, that's cool, I'm a writer, a poet, a deep thinker, trying to come out and be, be who I am, and not some poor schmo bar peon who secretly doesn't give a shit about wine except that it tastes good, is calming, adds significantly to a meal and maybe conversations, up to a certain point."

But how the fuck would I know, I haven't lived a normal life since maybe my first year out of college twenty four years ago, and even then...  Then I went to the library, the college library, going with my father up College Hill in the sweet mornings with him as he went to his office in the science building, to look at books, to try as well to capture the thoughts darting through my mind as I felt the pressure of trying to be adult, trying to find some sort of job, a serious job, which I have utterly failed at, and all I could basically think about was some highly unsatisfactory romantic condition there was no way out of.

Is the Buddha lesson, to put completely aside the Ego, the lesson I and everyone else is supposed to learn?  But then what do you do about gainful employment and all sort of thing?  What about the relationships you obviously crave and need?  Solitary confinement, no good.

There is in life some particular problem I have never solved, and I do not know what it is exactly, or how to solve it.  I can only begin with an apology, regretful that my ego came forward, did things, said things, when all along I was just consciousness, peace, happiness, contentment at the beauty of life.  Why was I, apparently, an excitable partly seemingly disturbed youth so prone to bad influences, a sort of peer pressure.  Why did I chose such a wrong path in life?  That is the very condition I must stare out of when I am asked to wait on people.  That is the ugly and hidden truth of my job, even as I find that a strange source of my compassion for them, even as I envy them and their together lives moving forward.

An amiable gentleman who comes to the French wine bar where I work has come up with an intriguing idea.  "Hey, Theodore, I've got an idea for you.  You've been doing this a while, waiting on the high and mighty for a long time, politicians, lawyers, bankers, the high and mighty, the fallen, the in between...  With your credentials and accomplishments, why don't you write, say,  A Bartender's Guide to Sanity, you know, something like that.  With all you know, you'd put a psychiatrist a shame.  Sell it as an ebook, 99 cents."  He appeared to be onto something.  "You'll sell a million of them in the first month, like that woman I just read about.  Women will be lining up, tossing you their hotel room keys... like Wayne Newton and all those little old ladies out in Las Vegas."

What would I write about?  What does one have to say after waiting on people at a small intimate bar for more than twenty years?  Is that even an accomplishment?  Would what you have to say be about the obvious matters of drink service, wine, food, or about the stories that people leave behind either in the tales they tell or through their behavior?  Would it be about how to listen to people, be there for them as a sort of make-shift shrink, a good enough listener?  Would it be about the funny humorous stuff?  Would it be about the passages we all go through in life, the things we can only share with those we know well enough?  (Lord knows how modern life could make us lonely, cut off in our professions.)  Would it even be about that off kilter life of the night shift and waiting on people various and sundry?  Would it touch upon colorful coworkers, the ins and outs of restaurant work, the behind the scenes?  Would it be a practical guide in any way, shape or form even in any respect?

What do I have to do, anyway, with wine?  Once beyond the basics--and there are many intricacies to bury yourself in on the way to sommelier and wine master expertise, in many ways worth pursuing, if that is your passion--of explaining the place of wine in a meal with a bow to all the variation, what then?  (Good wine is good wine, all ye need know.)  What is it all about?

All I seem to be able to think about, or come up with, for the time being is some sort of bartender's guide to Enlightenment, though I'm not at all certain that would even hold water.  But, you might start by saying, that the Buddha was an ordinary person much like you or I, and he achieved Enlightenment and held that you and I could too.  Or, rather, is it all the matter of a strange, long and certain form of education, of a sort, maybe something along the lines of what was an experience, a background, for a younger Abraham Lincoln, that of a tavern, in his case not long lived, as he moved on, even as he left it in no small amount of debt (and I'm pretty far behind too at this point.)

A side point:  how can one aid in the general Enlightenment when at the same time with the other hand he serves the numbing down of conscious awareness?

Do you write about it, or, realizing its futility, do you get out of it, as quick as you can, realizing that you're not a business man, that it paid your bills, kept a roof over your head, provided a crude harbor and a modicum of human warmth while you struck out on your own (an attempt) as a sort of a writer, not quite effectively (and without the monetary rewards of, say, Dan Brown, ha ha ha), though not with any particular drama.  Do you have anything to say about it all, or does the writer's inherent interest lay completely elsewhere?  Does the writer's exile that one could previously locate in a particular condition, existing in the contrast between a nation as it would be and a totalitarian regime such as experienced by Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky along with the entire Czech nation, Central Europe along with her, happen now in a stranger more elusive far more confusing way, having co-opted the blood flow of popular culture and the ultimate confusion of all things complicated, overly complicated, too much so, really, for the human mind?

How much anyway would the readership put up with tales of Enlightenment without some stuff of practical interest?  Or, to put it another way, how many books would Kerouac's have sold without the intrigues of crazy Dean Moriarty and all the trappings of 'Beatnik culture, say, if he just simply wrote of insights had while reading about Buddhism and being St. Jack of the Dogs one spring near Rocky Mt., North Carolina?

Yes, I agree with my customers.  What can you do sometimes but have a glass of wine.

Presently I am one for the late nights, and can't do a damn thing about it.

The attempt to be egoless is so often misunderstood, misconstrued.  We attribute this to educators, and we hope it is so.  Who is an educator, then?

It quickly becomes apparent in dealings that Kirkus, the book reviewer, the world's toughest book critic, from direct experience with the  Kirkus Indie service, is all about marketing.  You wait out your eight weeks, the professional opinion, delivered in two paragraphs, is sent to you, you agree to putting their review up on their website.  And then the emails come, asking if you might better take interest in their additional services, such as a campaign on social media sites, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

And so the Darwinian world of book publishing with its focus on selling the sellable, marketing the marketable, popular tastes, a preconceived notion of what the reading public wants and needs.  If a book does not meet up to the get-rich-get-thin-get-stylish-fast standards (to exaggerate slightly), the review will come with some read-between-the-lines sounding, 'this is not marketable, and here is why...'

So, not being marketable...  how does that work, how did it happen, what evidence is there?  This is what their review will suggest, but of course in terms of the professional reviewer.  Flat dialogue.  No one wants that now, do they.  Repetitive.  Lack of clear plot.  As if to say, the writer didn't make this, well, marketable.  And you can only come across as sounding bitter if you don't agree with their professional assessment.  Or maybe you wrote it intentionally that way, the way the mind's eye saw the reality it wanted to portray.

I have my own reaction to Kirkus Indie's review of A Hero for Our Time.  The reviewer takes one of the central passages and misconstrues, misreads it quite obviously, not the careful readership we learned in college.  And so I quickly saw through, or perhaps rather lost faith in its terms of critique.  No effort was made upon the reviewer's part to take into consideration a broader and longer understanding of literature, is my gut response.  Literature involves oral tradition, for example.  It must, or it should at least.  This oral tradition, to the reviewer's tastes, was the material of cliché.  Oral tradition is not marketable, apparently.  5000 years of literary history and tradition, replaceable, no longer relevant, no longer worthy of attention.  That's the new geologic era we live in.

How can the work of the lone individual, concerned with rendering life as it is in order to obtain some deeper understanding, go up against the Titan of marketed fashion, mass culture, popularity's interest?  How can one propose literary validity going up against the dictatorship of current style, current interests without clever circumvention, without beating them, as it were, on their own terms, as if to say, "I know what will be more popular..."?

As I try to unravel my basic self from the Ego, post reading of A New Earth, a brief vacation, a break from the routine, comes along.  The cat seemed well enough,  I'd done my share of Restaurant Week, an hour of sleep, I pack a bag, a train reservation, and off I go.

The Shinnecock tribe of Native American, people of a different geological era, by all accounts peaceful, unlike their warlike cousins of New England and the Iroquois, taught the early settlers some useful things, perhaps in exchange for protection against the other tribes, but perhaps too, out of habit and custom.  Long gone are they, and now the high hedgerows, great mansions, vast lawns, private golf clubs, very fancy automobiles, exclusive boutiques on main drags,  intense New Yorkers, high power high capital types.  The settlers have progressed from the lessons of planting corn and beans and fishing.  It is nice that the Milky Way can still be found looking up from a backyard here.

I brought along Milan Kundera's latest collection of essays, Encounter, a good choice for train, jitney, and beach.  Short, pithy, to be read word for word.  A swim in the ocean.  All of it just what the doctor ordered, to get out of that bad routine of coming home from shifts, having some, too much, wine, staying up too late, getting up late the next day, losing faith that much productive can even be accomplished, the mood had set in, 'what's the point anyway...'

Back from vacation, back to the first round of night shifts, the secret seems to be going down to sit outside at the omnipresent chain coffee shop (that cares conspicuously little about recycling), and having a cup of coffee.  And somehow, this is far more motivating than sitting at home drinking green tea staring at failures of housekeeping and the cat's food dishes, I must admit.  There is the necessary flow of humanity in the background, so that one doesn't feel the loneliness that leads to distractions for idle hands.  (Perhaps this is why Buddha opted to share his enlightenment, just not to feel the isolation we all can feel.)

Turning toward an omnibus reflection, an impression of vacation radio playlists:  childish (almost kindergarden) melody, up-beat pop, verging on shrill, aimed perfectly at satisfying the adolescent emotional part of the brain, computerized voice (maintaining an artificially perfect pitch) singing claim to an insistent message about  'me,' wants, needs, wrongs suffered, "I'm going to stand up for myself now," etc.   Intended almost specifically to drone out any thoughtful conversation, realization, inner self-knowledge of a deeper sort, reflection, quite possibly (one impression.)  That, along with a heavily breaded plate of fried food, the fisherman's platter, and the guts rebel.  (Kundera, right about that too.)  Retreat from the television, find the Milky Way again after eyes adjust to darkness, and then sleep.  I am guilty of the same adolescent sins, believe me, a life too involved with pop songs.  I know.

On vacation, one discovers again a competence toward things, more than the job will grant you.  (Maybe this is simple daylight talking.)  You read Kundera, finding essential reading.  I realize again how I could begin to feel pretty down without that life of the mind, and without that habit of writing that in the worst of hopeless nightshift bar routines I lose ahold of, too many nights left holding the bag alone, letting the Ego tell me I need wine to numb the pain, only making it worse.  The potential of literary genius, one can lose faith in easily enough in the grind of routine.  News bulletin:  it's not that hard to be one, actually.  Just a little 'right mindedness.'

Kundera is right on with his critique of art and writing in our times.  It's become all about fashion, all about marketing, all about what's in style, in popular terms, in the terms of the latest academic foolishness, in terms of the politically acceptable to the narrow restrictive mind of the mainstreamer.  Proliferation of a certain kind of story, one that has to be marketable to at least a segment of society.  (Howard Zinn, with his talk about how corporations go and make the stuff that has for them the greatest profit possibilities, rather than that which is good for the world and responsibly crafted, mismanaging all resources they touch.)  We have become style addicts.  Plain and simple.  Attributable to the constant bombardment of ego, emotion, sentimentality, such that we tend to be discontent with that which is not in style.  And soon, everything, even our concept of educating our children and young folks becomes a service to the ego, teaching to The Test (rather than that process which is inherently educational, beneficial for the growing mind.)  Like cigarettes, the selling of even that which is bad for you, through proper style and exclusivity and egotistical self vision, sexiness, manliness, suaveness, etc.

Kundera writing about Breton in exile in Martinique, discovering the local intellectual literary journal Tropiques...  a chink of light, a recalling of that time in the mid 20th Century, a time of World War, the importance of literary journals, sorting out a way to think that would then help us gain a sanity toward the social and political aspects of our lives...   Which reminds you, that for all his faults Ernest Hemingway deserves some credit for participating in that something civilizing, the discussion of mind activity and mental forms through the literary form.  In Our Time, the early collection of stories, belongs to such a period, and holds a gospel about that which can only be gained through defeat, few great insights made without that passage.

It is, tangibly, far better for the poet to teach rather than the academic schooled in the various modes of various critical styles to be aped.  The polar fields of the moral compass are not bent by security.

You learn, after all, a lot through failure.  Nothing will ever change that for the individual life.  Strange, though, that defeat, in history, has been made quite terrible by egotistical minds of empire and power, as if it were sensed as a great Achilles Heel.  So with dunkings, burnings, beheadings, disembowellings, sieges, rapes, slaughters of innocents, Inquisitions, blitzkriegs, 'final solutions,' etc..  Defeat had to be terrible, it seems, as if the greatest fear to  powers that be was the communal discovery of the gains of the ego's dissolve.  The innocents, out of habit, are not to be tolerated, and so considered the biggest creeps, dangerous idiots.  Off to the gulag with them.  For whatever reason, subconscious fear, a desire not to find the enlightenment that the beautiful process of failure (something worth writing about) brings.

How to be a Republican:

You need special treatment.  It's hard being rich.  You shouldn't have to pay taxes like the rest of people, who are probably just rabble anyway.  After all, you are entitled.

You have such a fine and well-tuned and appropriate moral vision of what human beings should be doing, that you are entitled to tell other people how to act, as if they couldn't learn for themselves through life and their own experience.


Don't get weird.  Don't go talking about anything like global warming, corporate-caused environmental disaster, the ultimate limits of water, oil, atmosphere, weather.  "Carbon footprint?  Ah, what's that?"

What you need is, after all, leadership.  Your own leadership.