Le Cénacle

It is Morrissey's 65th birthday, which gives me an excuse to post this:

https://youtu.be/1jPGU5wbIwU?si=8ybNI...

(Excuse the lack of preview.)

I have been reading Balzac's Lost Illusions. Many things have changed since Balzac's day, but even now an author on the fringes of the publishing world who reads Balzac's novel can recognise the sense of utter desolation that is depicted: of a writer with high hopes and high ideals discovering what the vocation of literature entails in the actual world and seeing the mechanisms by which a writer's works make their way to the reader.

And now, of course, apart from the mere decline in prestige of literature generally, there are many added demons of desolation with which the author must contend if he or she is to carry on. Increasingly this is the age of surveillance, austerity (manufactured or otherwise), censorship, sensitivity readers, extremism-and-conformity, of "cancel culture doesn't exist and actually it's a jolly good thing that it does", of the evisceration of the humanities from all sides (left, right and other directions), of the malevolent worship of technology from those whom we might ironically call 'humanists', of the destruction of privacy, intimacy, space and time for thought, of the mindless automation of collateral damage, of the higher and higher pitch of the insane screeching of those who are 'on the right side of history' and 'making a better world'.

You might just wake up one day soon, and, if you're the kind to notice such things, wonder where the hell all the writers have gone.

And I will end this post as I began, with a tune from the birthday boy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSw6r...