Indeed sci fi an interest & McLeod superb. Can be easily overlooked & indeed the Sartre quote is apt as well as his era. I would expect no artist to dash to the barricades or be the symbol of any movement. Having seen too many decent women & men & children perish all too soon I would be very wary of that route Robin. To go to the barricades in battles that can never be won is a flaw of many 20th century political movements. I look back now in great sadness at many who lost decades of their lives & left us all too soon. But the 20th century mode of operations is now past tense & we live in times which someone like Fritz Fanon or Che Guevara would find baffling. Now total victory is the aim & goal in the raging battles of 2016. This alters the fudge theory of violence then negotiations which prevailed in the last century. The two macro 20th century wars will be the last that involve mass battles on all continents. To grasp change like this is hard to fathom for diplomats whose thinking is confined to thinking within the old box of solutions. The American effort to start a new Cold War is a mere distraction from adjusting to new models of warfare. One sees John Kerry trying to apply old State Department logic to a war with many dimensions. The public in America or Europe grapple with new situations assuming there are simple solutions. Their saviours & gurus of course offer their supporters a hostility to movements of people not seen since WW2. Both of these islands have vast uninhabited spaces that serve no purpose apart from scenic views. Yet we think we are "full up" or "let somebody else do their bit".
A Dylan or a Springsteen could lead by example & open up their many rooms or lands to help in this crisis. Many others too of course are in that bracket but merely march or talk from platforms on social concern. Human beings are perishing in the Med on a daily basis or being herded into camps to endure more misery. We watch all of this on print & electronic media but how many have spare rooms or larders to provide shelter for one victim? Words or gestures are no longer enough as we witness slaughter on the scale of the Balkans.
Europe now has right wing parties gaining votes in massive numbers & yet the left seem to assume this will all be a passing phase. An attitude of "It will be alright on the night" prevails but that is a cop out. On too many core issues left & right are united & this has roots in the 1930s. The Populist nationalism back then landed us in hell on earth but when we ever learn?
I don't expect a Dylan or Springsteen to enter the frey & both men are no longer young. This requires not just part time politics but a full vocational aspect 24/7. This means saying farewell to comfort & domestic bliss with the mom pop apple pie aspect no longer available. Can people rise to the tasks involved or do we stay inside Adorno's bubble? Mere observers of events beyond our shores viewed with despair on television.
Perhaps I am dancing in the dark on all of this or stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again!
sc
Turn that frown upside down
On Sunday, 16 October 2016, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Sean, consider:
"the man [sic?] who suffers and the mind which creates"
Sartre, What Is Literature? -- Sartre, unless I'm misremembering this, did give free pass to poets (though not novelists).
I think you're confusing (or conflating) the Artist as artist, and the Artist as citizen. In the latter area, everyone (not simply poets) bears an individual responsibility.
Not every artist is obliged to write from the barricades (though some do, and do so well).
Whatever.
The "logical conclusion" to your stance is that every artist has to declare their ethical stance on everything, all the time. :-)
Add your own cliches to mine.
Robin
(Incidentally, if you want to see what a ferociously committed group of leftwing writers looks like [living and dead], cast a cold eye across the Glasgow science fiction writers -- Chris Boyce, Iain M. Banks, and [the only one still standing, and the most interesting for all of me, and especially interesting in the way he foregrounds politics in his earliest novels] Ken McLeod. R.)
On 16 October 2016 at 16:46 Sean Carey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
So to take your point to its logical conclusion all artists have a free pass to go down the Dylan or Springsteen roads? This means you grant them a licence to avoid ever declaring their ethical stances on anything.
