Well today i had another, short, discussion with another writer, who lives in this city and is around my age (a bit older than me). The discussion did not last for long, since an agent came into the bookstore and they had to arrange some business having to do with the soon to happen international book-fair. But even before that interruption it was going downhill, and fast.
Normally i am quite relluctant to attribute to others negative (or positive) qualities, since i reason that those are mostly my own projections and have little to do with them. But sometimes it is perhaps obvious that something is not right.
So this writer was talking about how today everyone writes in this country, when most of them have nothing to say, and no way to produce any art that needs to exist.
Now the first thing that is bad about this sentiment, in my view, is not that it has to be false; in fact many people do indeed write, and there is little in way of an audience of high art. But i found it to be in very bad taste to start a discussion like this when we both are writers as well (i have read something by him, he has not read anything by me).
So the discussion turned to how one must read a lot before writing, to which i replied that sometimes there has to be a balance between being subjected to high literature, and expressing your own voice. I echoed Pessoa's famous aphorism that "the good writer writes as he feels" (which means that the good writer is able to express his true emotions).
However in the end i felt bad about this discussion, since it seemed to be so that this person wanted to distance himself from the other people in our country who are writing, and i can only see that as something having a negative gennesis-point: he possibly feels that he is not as good as he wants to be, and so has to put down an anonymous flock of other writers to maintain his antithetical urge to view himself as something high-up in the pantheon of literature.
Btw his work that i read, a long poem about the gennesis of a new poetry, an ode to a new muse, did not really appear to me to be that great. Of course i said about it that it is indeed obviously about a neoterism, but thought to myself that i am in front of someone who has not really found any true voice.
Anyway, i will be meeting him again in the book-fair, so as to buy a book of kafka's poems, released by his small printing press. I do not know if he will form an analogous view of my own work if and when he reads some of it, but i am beginning to think it is futile to try to be friends with him.
So, in this thread you can reflect, if you feel like it, on the issues of high art, dismissal of the many people who try to write, whether or not an able writer is benefiting from having such tendancies to dismiss (ie to bother about) others he dislikes, and anything else that may be deemed as logically having to do with the OP...
Normally i am quite relluctant to attribute to others negative (or positive) qualities, since i reason that those are mostly my own projections and have little to do with them. But sometimes it is perhaps obvious that something is not right.
So this writer was talking about how today everyone writes in this country, when most of them have nothing to say, and no way to produce any art that needs to exist.
Now the first thing that is bad about this sentiment, in my view, is not that it has to be false; in fact many people do indeed write, and there is little in way of an audience of high art. But i found it to be in very bad taste to start a discussion like this when we both are writers as well (i have read something by him, he has not read anything by me).
So the discussion turned to how one must read a lot before writing, to which i replied that sometimes there has to be a balance between being subjected to high literature, and expressing your own voice. I echoed Pessoa's famous aphorism that "the good writer writes as he feels" (which means that the good writer is able to express his true emotions).
However in the end i felt bad about this discussion, since it seemed to be so that this person wanted to distance himself from the other people in our country who are writing, and i can only see that as something having a negative gennesis-point: he possibly feels that he is not as good as he wants to be, and so has to put down an anonymous flock of other writers to maintain his antithetical urge to view himself as something high-up in the pantheon of literature.
Btw his work that i read, a long poem about the gennesis of a new poetry, an ode to a new muse, did not really appear to me to be that great. Of course i said about it that it is indeed obviously about a neoterism, but thought to myself that i am in front of someone who has not really found any true voice.
Anyway, i will be meeting him again in the book-fair, so as to buy a book of kafka's poems, released by his small printing press. I do not know if he will form an analogous view of my own work if and when he reads some of it, but i am beginning to think it is futile to try to be friends with him.
So, in this thread you can reflect, if you feel like it, on the issues of high art, dismissal of the many people who try to write, whether or not an able writer is benefiting from having such tendancies to dismiss (ie to bother about) others he dislikes, and anything else that may be deemed as logically having to do with the OP...
