Thought of the Day

Since I stopped working on Thursday nights, I don't get much time to blog anymore. So, with some trepidation, I hereby launch "The Thought of the Day."

I think--as I was shelving some Norman Mailer--that we tend to make too much of artists. Of their biographies, I mean. We idolize them, and the more whacked out they are, the better. Plato warned us about the poets! When I was in college, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats--all those guys we admired for their lifestyle as much, if not more, than for their poetry. In recent times we've seen Mozart, who was probably a fairly conventional sort, transformed into a wild genius and eccentric by "Amadeus." Before, people who listened to Mozart were considered stuffy--now they are thought to be "with it" and sort of rebellious. For every weird artist, however, there are sober and thoughtful ones who also produce great art.

The herd mentality of this adulation first hit me when I read Dan Wakefield's New York in the Fifties. He describes people standing five and six deep at a Greenwich Village bar-- watching Dylan Thomas drink. It struck me as very silly.