land of first drafts

I have a growing distaste for the "artistic" elite. My specific instances of late are writers, but I'm sure the incidences that I have encountered must have found their way into the other arts in one way or another. They are the Snobs. They tell you how the world is; no ifs ands or buts. They are the ones to tell you that the string of gibberish on the page in front if you is a masterpiece. You simply fail to get it because you are so ignorant of the fact that in 1912 James Joyce had a bath and made passing comment about how wrinkled his skin got in one of his epics. If you had only known that then surely the beat poetry in front of you would unveil its brilliance. They are the people who rant about how popular music is the bane of society, unintelligible dribble that will lead to the mass retardation of the coming generations. You should be listening to bands that no one has every heard of. Then, when the unknown band is popular because it was so unknown, you are to abandon it. If more than twelve people can get it, it isn't cutting edge enough. (Interesting social experiment: I made up a band (differing names for differing company) at an "art" party to try and out do the elites. Someone claimed to have heard them before.)

I had a professor belittle the William Carlos Williamson poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" today in class. In an online polemic, however, he viciously stands up for a book of Bob Dylan's poetry "Tarantula." He defends the work as an amazing discourse of the time it as written, using a style that is a " high-art symphony of allegoric metaphor, fertile with commentary on Civil Rights and twentieth-century politics through the ghosts of Kerouac and Shakespeare via Greek mythology."1 That the same man willing to craft such a sentence over someone else's work can imply that "The Red Wheelbarrow" isn't "real" poetry is astounding. He is, in that instance, the personification of the Snobs. It is as if art is measured by its complexity. If you can read and fathom a works depth without haveing to make far flung connections, that surely isn't worth your time.

Don't get me wrong, dear reader, I like complex materials. But I don't exisit on them and them alone. Vivaldi's Summer is one of my favorite pieces of music, but that doesn't mean that I won't sing along to Heartbreaker when it comes on the classic rock station or that I can't help but listen Soulja Boy every now and again. I read Dante's The Divine Comedy on my own time because I was never in a class that required it. And I enjoyed it. That doesn't mean I don't read the latest comercial fiction or devour a Terry Pratchett novel. The point I'm trying to make is that so many of the Snobs put on the air (and the tu-toned hair, skinny jeans, and ballet flats) of being a decade ahead while living decades in the past.
Anyone that claims to listen only to the trendy music, or only read Kerouac and his ilk, is either lying to you, or are impossibly one deminsional. One way or the other, they aren't the type of person who's opinion can be taken without a deal of salt.


"Majority always rules."

1. http://www.jackmagazine.com/issue7/essaysmspitzer.html

What to do in those few hours before waking. What to fill the half sleeping mind with. In those brief moments where the last fingers of sleep clutch the brain, the waking mind can control the fantasy of that ether world. That world where our fancy runs free and our heart makes wishes.

Brian Matthews had been wondering that for the better part of ten years now. He suffered from a delayed insomnia. Every night at ten or so he would drift peacefully to sleep, only to be awakened again after four hours to a mangled mess of waking dreams and half-conscious memories. Though the condition was now ruinous to his sleep every night, it had started out rather slowly. Only once or twice a month would he toss and turn in the hours before dawn, wrestling with sleep and wakefulness. Nothing worth note. When it started happening on a bi-weekly basis he took more serious concern. Doctor after doctor were puzzled. Psychiatrists and physicians gave him ineffectual pills while psychologists tried to emancipate hidden traumas that didn't exist. After a year of what he was beginning to think of as quack cures, Brian resigned himself to his predicament. Though he knew he had less energy than when he slept well, he was now used to it. And the semi-wakefulness gave him a chance for quite lucid dreaming and illuminated thought. He settled into his new routine remarkably well and without incident. The normal aspect of his life were unaffected. His job at a publishing company was unperturbed, he had the energy to play with his young daughter, and his wife (a heavy sleeper) stayed by his side in every sense of the word through his nights of peaceful frustration.
That was, however, until the early morning hours of August the Twenty-fourth. It was on that morning that Brian first heard the voice. It was small, but it was pleading. Just outside his ability to make out it out it lingered. He was just about to slip bake to sleep when it eased its way into his mind. His settling thoughts were jerked to attention as he fought to drown out the ring of silence to hear the voice again.