Not sure we’re at post-catastrophic yet, though. Just barrelling towards it, all guns blazing.

It’s not that I necessarily prize British theatre over American, but there is no equivalent activity on this side of the pond concerning our native playwrights. Theatre Communications Group, publisher of both “American Theatre” magazine and play collections of many important American dramatists, is basically all we have in terms of some entity that continuously tries to keep drama available in print, and part of the national culture conversation. But they’re relatively small size and non-profit orientation pretty much guarantee that they will not factor much in the general American consciousness. I don’t know if we can transform the US into a culture in which theatre is a vital resource. I suspect it’s the easier (and more lucrative) commodification of fixed media that will forever steer the conversation in an American culture obsessed with selling and profit.

Angel: there’s a place that we don’t know, and there
on some unsayable carpet, lovers display what now
they can never bring up to knowing – their bold
high figures of heartplay,
their towers of pleasure, their
long-since groundless ladders, leaning
on only each other, tremulously, – and understand
before the surrounding onlookers, the innumerable soundless dead…

But this seems to me neither pessimistic nor optimistic, like most poetry.

Katherine, it’s frankly bizarre to think of him as a left wing thinker. And with respect, art emerges from the tension between chaos and order. If only one is present, there is no art worth speaking of. Also, I’d say the radical right is a significantly more destructive and pernicious influence in the world at the moment, and more to blame for celebrity culture (think Murdoch) than anything Nietzsche wrote.

Sigh. When I was in high school, everybody I knew was reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, so I decided to have a crack at it. I started with The Hobbit and got about ten pages in before I threw it up as a lost cause. A little later, somebody told me that I’d started with the wrong book — that actually I should have begun with Book One of the trilogy proper, The Fellowship of the Ring. Well, I started that one too, and I got almost fifteen pages in before I concluded, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

In college, I was discussing this with a friend who was also a Tolkien aficianado. After I expressed my dislike of Fellowship and the trilogy generally, she said, “You started with the wrong book, George! You really should have begun with The Hobbit!”

I don’t really have this problem with many writers. My first Nabokov, for example, was Pale Fire, I think, and I was taken enough with it to read Lolita, Ada, Despair, and many of the early (Russian) novels, never experiencing the same displeasure. Some were better than others, but all were worth my time. I think, at this point, I may have to leave the Teutonic shoe-banger aside at last. For what it’s worth, it’s precisely the Nietzschean qualities of The Birth of Tragedy — the Grecophilia, the bombast, the galumphing Dionysianism, all those aspects of it of which he was not critical in the “Attempt at a Self Criticism” that prefaced later editions of the book — and not its Schopenhauerian origins that make the book, for me, unpalatable.

Katherine,

Marcuse’s thinking on the subject of art, and his problematic relationship to things like the Red Army Faction, evolved somewhat through the years. His final book, The Aesthetic Dimension, is rather less susceptible to being co-opted by the radical left, and is worth a look.