The candybar thing.

 

You know how abstinence educators do that exercise where they get kids to pass around a chocolate bar while they talk about how bad sex is, then by the end of it it’s all melted and gross, and they use that as a metaphor for whatever it is their point might be? I’m feeling like that candybar and it’s awesome. Of course, I’m talking about the internet exposure my dear publisher has arranged for me.

 

Three new links:

–Rick Brown’s review on The Examiner

–Another interview

–Bookworm Blues review

 

The thing I like about these reviews is that nearly any point they make, good or bad, highlights an actual decision I made, rather than an accident or oversight. I think that’s the most important thing in art–to make real what you had in your head exactly. I guess in some cases, chance can be an artistic decision too. But in those cases, like modernist compositions that include on the score instructions to just add in whatever the musician wants, it’s still a deliberate act, not just the artist doing it because he was distracted, tired, sloppy, or whatever.

That kind of gets me on a Kantian kick. I mean I know it’s not really taken seriously anymore. But I’ve always liked some aspects of his “categorical imperative.” If people followed it, we wouldn’t be so comfortable with mediocrity. Or so careless. At work today someone had left a copy of Psychology Today around. There was an article about new attitudes towards infidelity–they had statistics relating to different situations that contribute to the likelihood of cheating. Social groups, work, ability to handle conflict, and travel. To be fair, it all made sense and pretty much echoes common sense–more opportunity to cheat = more likelihood. But they were using this facet in another typically postmodern attempt to make people accept their bad behaviour instead of own it and change it. If we reduce behaviours to things like statistics and being “weakened” by long days of travelling for work, alcohol, or any other excuse, how does that figure in to the neat Kantian package I’m talking about?

These new ideas mean that people don’t cheat because anything is wrong. They do it because they have the opportunity and little else. Where’s the intent there? Do they really mean to normalize having no control over your life? Acting automatically towards no end seems to be the lowest state of human existence. At least if someone were to do something wrong as a way of acting out, they’d be doing something. That doesn’t fully work with Kant’s logic, but loosely I think you get the picture.

So because of that idea, I’ve always liked art that is as close as humanly possible to what the artist had in his head.

 

Anyway. I wonder how that O Henry is doing by now . . .