Obviously, a list like the one I mostly made yesterday is a steamingly hot pile of bullshit. Nobody can possibly get to everything, and in my desire to include everything so that as few people feel their favorites are left out as possible, there are books half-or-even quarter consumed, shows third-watched, movies I went for a fifteen-minute trip to the bathroom in the middle, music I talked to friends while listening to, and still... there's plenty to piss everybody off.
I increased the list from 120 to nearly 300 and keep finding new things I forgot to put in. One wants to be inclusive and include things which celebrate more artists and types of people than just the ones whose stories are traditionally most told - not because of political fashions, which (I won't censor myself) are 50% just fashion and much will seem dangerously silly to our grandchildren; but because what's the worth of art if it can't communicate something cathartic to a range of people wider than the demographic which created it?
But you can't put whipped cream on baloney and expect that it will taste like something worth eating to everybody but a small demographic. And even the dishes many find worth consuming are not palatable to everybody. It should be obvious when you make a list like this that the point is to say:
1. These are just my personal preferences.
2. My personal preferences are the correct ones....
Posterity may have a very different opinion from mine, and I frankly don't give a shit. The point is not to be 'right', nobody 'gets it right', the arts aren't science. The point is to say what you think is right, what you think is valuable, what you think is worthwhile for other people to experience.
I have a much too easy job, and I spend way too much of my life consuming this stuff. I may have wasted my life with it because all this is time I rather could have spent creating it. It's an enormous privilege among privileges, and however difficult I find the rest of my life, this is the great joy of my life. And perhaps it's precisely this joyful privilege makes me an inadequate consumer of it. Perhaps it warps my perspective about what's essential in it, and perhaps it yet again goes to show how out of touch the most avid consumers are with what new generations newly deem the most essential things to communicate - which always differ generation to generation according to the social concerns of this particular moment.
You want to be inclusive, but there are just those books and movies you don't see the value in even if everybody else does. If there's a lack of women and non-cisgender people on this list, it's not because they are in any way inferior creators (just having to put that proviso in makes me feel ridiculous), it's precisely because misogyny and transphobia is that deep and rife; and to my inconveniently obnoxious view, artificially boosting the numbers in cultural history is to dishonor the extent of that erasure, make it seem a smaller problem than it clearly was, and cause moderates to wonder why there's any urgency to promote diverse voices at all. Black men, gay men, may have been shut out of the mainstream, but at least they were permitted creative avenues. But women were widely shut out of every single avenue, and the disproportionate amount we suddenly tout the number of women through history who did find an avenue just goes to show how few women there really were before very recently, and how urgent it is to promote creative women in our own day. But I refuse to include the stuff I don't like. If this list has any integrity at all, you can't include the things you don't see the value in. Please don't ask me where are Alice Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Steinbeck, Ava DuVernay, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Jack Kerouac, Audre Lorde, Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia Butler, etc. etc. You're just going to get mad... and we all might lose enjoyment of company we value. And for that matter, no Hemingway either, no Norman Mailer, barely any John Wayne, barely any John Huston, no Raymond Carver, because if anybody proves the notion of toxic masculinity correct.... that shit's just boring...
Furthermore, there are all those sacred cows whose beef tastes rotten... Nobody can tell me Moby Dick is a great book and have me believe it - I've eaten every square inch of that whale, some parts of it four times, and however great individual passages are, half of Moby Dick is a technical manual for whaling, an experience little different than reading all the instructions for Windows XP. Nobody can tell me that Edith Wharton, that antisemitic pseudo-Victorian prig, can make the world care about her exhaustive documentations of every single trend among the 1900 dull New York rich WASP set. Of course characters find that world constricting - so do the readers, and she secretly seems to love all those arbitrary, pedantic societal rules and trends she claims to hate. Nobody can convince me they enjoy a Stanley Kubrick movie after Paths of Glory in 1957. Kubrick is pure masochism that everybody claims to love as though they should pat themselves on the back for enduring him - in Kubrick there is no joy, no humanity, no compassion. It's antisocial filmmaking done by a human machine, to be watched by machines after the rest of us are extinct. Also, **** both Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. And then there's the beatniks, the Beats, The Beats, The Fucking Beats....
Furthermore, I decided to not include all sorts of artists I love who spent a huge part of their lives abroad and whose sensibility belongs probably more to another nationality than ours: no Ernst Lubitsch - a top 5 filmmaker of all time IMneverHO, no Billy Wilder or FW Murnau, no Fritz Lang or Jean Renoir (my pick for the greatest of all filmmakers...), no TS Eliot (I'm not even sure he'd make it anyway) or Ezra Pound (fascist filth... even before Mussolini...), no Stravinsky or Schoenberg, no Beatles or great Canadian songwriters, no Chagall or Mondrian, no Auden or Thomas Mann, no Polanski or Forman, not even my favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer ... etc. etc. etc.
And obviously, we're not going to tread the genre fiction ground again...
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What I value is things that express the worldview that life is a very dark thing, full of banality and boredom in the best of moments, full of suffering and malice in the worst. Life is a thing from whose darkness there is absolutely no escape. And yet, at the same time, communicates the paradox that life is something worth loving, valuing, and celebrating. There's no escape from life, and I generally don't value things that want to move us to action, because action has as much a chance of ruining lives as indolence does. Life is just something we're trapped in, but we're trapped in life together, and in spite of all the suffering, all the boredom, there is dignity, there is fun, there is friendship and love, there is
This is probably the beginning of a larger essay. If I ever get to it...
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