Febyouarie 10, Febrewery 10

I don’t have the drive to write on Fridays. Here’s two bits:

I hear that Andrew Young, the author of Siberian Light, has started a new weblog, Taking Aim. Siberian Light was named Best CIS Blog at AFOE last year but Andy has finished grad school, found a job and closed shop, only to reopen it under a new guise. Blogging is like controlled substances — some try them and are not impressed (millions of one-entry blogs), others can’t stop trying — which doesn’t mean it should be controlled, of course.

Two — praise a work of art for being a “potent condemnation of totalitarianism” or any other -ism, and I’m off to grind my tomahawk, then back on my war path. I grew up, esthetically, on Nabokov’s Gogol lecture. The best way for an author to exercise compassion or charity through his work is to produce output that is intrinsically good — good, that is, within the author’s esthetic system, provided that system is not needlessly outlandish. A bad poem can’t send potent messages other than to untrained readers, whom it corrupts. Chopped onions make me cry, too.

One comment

  1. I tried to stay away – I really did. But everytime I’d read something in the newspaper, my fingers would just start twitching, ready to type…

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