I left Lindsay’s generous blogging umbrella roughly two years ago to try and gain a profile of my own from which to maybe market a novel (still in progress). If my blog was heading for a particular place, then it’s my recent post on the state of contemporary English literature, which on the way answers why Ayn Rand most probably wouldn’t find an agent today, let alone a publisher. There are several footnotes back to SOLO.
At over 18,000 words it’s too big to cross post, so I’ve simply put up a link at the end of this post. It’s easy to get the gist of the piece from the following quotation:
… Be warned this ramble comes with several severe weather advisories, the first being the timid will want to take a wide berth: my views are often to an Eliot-esque Wasteland of content, with my memory cast to a pastiche of the past, and hope dwindling into the future. Or as I'm soon to say:
State funding of the arts is leading to the stultification of western literature under the reactionary establishment of Left-Liberalism, also called Progressivism, which has largely captured the means of production via the agents and publishers, and quietly indoctrinates the authors toward a homogenised literature via creative writing courses in progressive saturated tertiary institutions. Ours is no literature that will seed Le Guin's resistance and change, or that can be ‘disturbed by power’, as Solzhenitsyn feared, because it’s a literature which embraces the ethic of that power, the supremacy of the state over the individual, and incredibly for the arts, a collectivism over individualism, with at its base, the tax take which funds a complacent publishing channel, while eviscerating our private lives, our digital innards disemboweled and served up in the offices of government officials.
No, no. Big breaths, big breaths. Stay with me, please, that’s the simple version ...
And while I’m throwing rocks at sacred taonga, you’re also about to read:
For a time I harboured a notion that it could be in the pages of indigenous writing that the rebellion against a state-endorsing literature might take hold, (given classical liberal writing has all but folded its cards on the table): after all, a Maori oral literature had the 'trick of standing upright here' long before Mr Curnow sailed in. A literature working through colonialism surely must see the lie and damage of the state enterprise. Unfortunately, name me a Maori writer whose politick is not Left-Liberal, or advocacy for the future of Maori not tied to dependency on the welfare state? I don’t even think Alan Duff qualifies. So there will be no revolution away from a state literature born of Maori writing, for the same reason I have written there will be no Maori self-determination politically - and despite it appears arguable Maori did not cede sovereignty to the Crown via the Treaty (37) – because a progressive Maoridom is the antithesis of own-rule, individual or tribal. Indeed a progressive Maoridom is a culture happy to remain cowered on the leash of state also, accepting alms.
Can be read in full here: A Disquisition on Our Literature and JM Keynes – Standing Upright Here.
(Personal note to Lindsay. I bought The Total Passion something like a year ago, have still not read it. It’s on the read list for next twelve months – that’s my timeframes at the moment – in view of getting a review up.)