Adam Bellow -- Saul's kid -- writes at the National Review Online encouraging (American) 'conservatives' to Let Your Right Brain Run Free, suggesting that the American 'right': "may have reached the limit of what facts and reasoned arguments can do", and that fiction is the next area to conquer -- and so:
Adam Kirsch writes about what he thinks 'Adam Bellow and other conservatives get wrong about the political leanings of creators of imaginative fiction' at Tablet, in The Tea Party's New Front in the American Culture Wars: Literature (which is how I became aware of Bellow's piece), making some sensible arguments.
I can't really bring myself to respond -- basically because Bellow's piece is simply too fundamentally misguided to even begin to address. (My own incomprehension of the simplistic, extreme, and total 'left'/'right' divide in American politics and society he posits also makes it hard for me to play along with his pseudo-arguments.)
We need to invest in the conservative right brain. A well-developed feeder system exists to identify and promote mainstream fiction writers, including MFA programs, residencies and fellowships, writers' colonies, grants and prizes, little magazines, small presses, and a network of established writers and critics. Nothing like that exists on the right.Rarely has a piece both sent such shivers up my spine and had me laughing so hard .....
Adam Kirsch writes about what he thinks 'Adam Bellow and other conservatives get wrong about the political leanings of creators of imaginative fiction' at Tablet, in The Tea Party's New Front in the American Culture Wars: Literature (which is how I became aware of Bellow's piece), making some sensible arguments.
I can't really bring myself to respond -- basically because Bellow's piece is simply too fundamentally misguided to even begin to address. (My own incomprehension of the simplistic, extreme, and total 'left'/'right' divide in American politics and society he posits also makes it hard for me to play along with his pseudo-arguments.)