Andrew Sullivan is the best. I don't always agree with his politics but he often leads me to interesting places.
He led me to this guy, Kevin Hartnett, who wrote the following:
All forms of desire have their natural enemies and I find that nothing saps my desire to read fiction like the Internet does. This is partly physiological—too much time at the computer withers my brain—but it’s partly dispositional, too. After the last round of primaries a couple Tuesdays ago, I spent an hour reading articles about the Tea Party. When I came up for air I was in an explicitly present-tense state of mind where anything written more than an hour ago seemed to be based on a world that had already been subsumed. Novels, which require a willingness to attend to more enduring themes, don’t hold up very well by this perspective.
Politics as a whole has a fairly degrading effect on my fiction drive. It’s not just that it’s depressing to watch the way Congress operates—it’s that it’s depressing in such an unredeemable way. Fiction can be depressing too, of course, but there’s something intrinsically optimistic about the process by which tragedy and frailty are turned into art.
7 comments:
I know exactly what he's saying. I'm not sure if it's politics for me exactly, but the internet and the lessened drive for fiction is something that I've experienced. I'd almost rather read gardening blogs than novels now. I wonder if this trend will last....kinda hope not. I probably just need a really good book - any suggestions?
Es una problema grande:
"I spent an hour reading articles about the Tea Party"
I refuse to read anything about the tea party (lower case) and in fact am interested in participating in an informed, reasonable, rationale discussion of possible rhetorical (!) links between their rhetoric and that which was employed by historical facistic regimes, like Mussolini's, who co-opted the affluent elements of Italian society to strengthen his party's hold.
I am going to the Rally for Sanity on the end of October.
@ Peggy, I wish I could go to the Rally for Sanity too :)
Today's Drudge is hillarious. Jerry calling Meg a whore. A madam saying Spitzer's as boring on telly as he was in bed. The sexy Russian spy and the cosmonauts. New subpeonas in the Edwards case. The increasingly bipolar-appearing Beck. Obama's podium miseries. I mean you can not write this sh** as a Hollywood screenwriter. We've become to the world of nations what Jerry Springer was to TV.
People overseas must think Americans are fat, lazy, tacky, dowdy, stupid, troublemakers.
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