You know what's amusing? Jack Kerouac, who you'd think was an ardent leftist, was a staunch conservative who supported America's military invasion of Vietnam. His fiction has nearly no political content.

I don't read much litfic, but have a good sense of the visual arts and I don't see an explicit political program, especially since it's nearly impossible to communicate one in non-representational imagery.

Political orientation may be important in personal relations and networking much more so than the actual content of the work.

The rest of the interview comes close to the favorite conservative complaint that their voices are strangled by the libral media conspiracy, with a good amount of anti-intellectualism thrown in for good measure.

So you don't like lit-fic or modernism. That's your prerogative. To dismiss it all with a blanket "Feh" is like trying to introduce someone to a Prokofiev symphony only to be told, "Aw, all that classical stuff sucks, it's so over." One's right to say it doesn't necessarily validate it.

Posted by: Peter L. Winkler on May 19, 2009 1:13 AM

FWOW, I think Andrew Breitbart is a fatuous idiot and 3rd rate opportunist. The culture war is a phony crusade against an imaginary threat that conservative hucksters use to line their pockets.

Hollywood's product, especially films, have never been less political. As James Toback recently said, movies today are made for five-year-olds, people who want to be five again, or parents with five-year-olds. The films don't deal with politics and have no political program to communicate.

Posted by: Peter L. Winkler on May 19, 2009 1:23 AM

Michael, is that good-looking man in white you or Tom Wolfe?

Posted by: Pupu on May 19, 2009 10:23 AM

Posted by Shouting Thomas at May 18, 2009

You live up in the Ketskills. Just get into the Hudson River School, you know Bierstadt, Cole and all that stuff. Let the left have their shit on canvas or carved crap. Fuck 'em. They are wallowing in their own filth (whether it is art, literature, film or whatever they decide to call excrement these days. I don't take dumps, I take "Basquiats") and they know it. And that won't last much longer the way things are headed. A broke, dissolving society can't support useless garbage for too much longer. Fin de Siecle and all that...

Also, as therapy for the dreck that constantly gets held up as "art" by shit-for-brains droolers these days, get your guns and head own down to the Phoenicia Fish and Game Association on Rt. 28. Not to far from where you live, I think. Only $45 a year to be a member!

Posted by: Anonymous on May 19, 2009 11:38 AM

I especially love the irony at the end of the interview: being a conservative can become a kind of countercultural, bad-boy image.

(Probably a bit of disarming self-parody is the key ingredient needed to pull that off.)

Posted by: Fredösphere on May 19, 2009 1:14 PM

Nice interview, Michael

Posted by: Todd Fletcher on May 19, 2009 1:29 PM

anonymous,

I am definitely considering taking up hunting and fishing. Haven't done either since I was a kid. Used to hunt and fish with my dad.

The Phoenicia Fish and Game Association is a definite possibility.

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on May 19, 2009 5:18 PM






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