In the current salon.com G Keillor jokes about who not to have lunch with...
'.... Conviviality is no small achievement. Back when I was young, most major
American writers seemed to be alcoholic or suicidal or both, and we students
absorbed the notion that the true sign of brilliance is to be seriously screwed
up. The true poet is haunted by livid demons, brave, doomed, terribly wounded,
and if one was (as I was) relatively unscratched, you concealed this and tried
to impersonate doom.
The prime minister of high culture was T.S. Eliot, who suffered from a lousy
marriage and hated his job and so wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a
small, dark mopefest of a poem in which old Pru worries about whether to eat a
peach or roll up his trousers. This poem pretty much killed off the pleasure of
poetry for millions of people who got dragged through it in high school. The
first line of "Prufrock," as you may recall, was "S'io credesse che mia risposta
fosse" -- he opened with six lines of a language 99 percent of his readers do
not understand! How better to identify yourself as a serious poet than to be
incomprehensible?
So the best minds of my generation skipped poetry and became historians or went
into business or took up farming. Who would make a career out of pretending to
be crippled? And they sensed that, in the poetry biz, there is not much
conviviality. (They were right.)
The problem with liberals in our time, even though we'd like to think we're
riding high at the moment, is that we're not so much fun to eat lunch with. We
carry an air of self-righteous sorrow about hunger, global warming,
homelessness, tax inequity, the heartlessness of big corporations, and a list of
crises as long as your arm. You eat lunch with a liberal and you are ashamed to
order dessert.'
etc, etc. I love the word mopefest. (I think Prufrock predates TSE's marriage.)
M
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