Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

Over the weekend, a friend was talking about his favorite writer Jerzy Kosinski, being found a hoax some time ago: he had ghost-writers, made up half of the details of his life story, and never gone through the experiences he said he did.

My friend said he hed been disillusioned by the discovery, and found himself eventually needing to reassess his love of Kosinski.

I said that it all depended on whether one was a devout follower of a writer or his ideas (or perhaps here, the ideas he came to be associated with). If the case belonged to the former, then the revelation would shatter the cult of personality many have come to substitute for one’s substance these days.

If one were a follower of a writer’s ideas however, the revelation of ghost writer’s would not jar the follower’s conviction about those ideas. Kocinski’s ideas were good. I’m sure many people had them before. Ideas are not exclusive, but rather, a continuum of past ideas.

Do we continue to absorb new ideas or do we trudge back into the dusty halls of the past looking for clues to where we came from? One could argue that if knowledge is indeed a continuum of ideas, then there is no need to look back. But O how much of the glorious past has been lost! This year alone, I had the great fortune to stumble upon Juan Del Enzina’s villancicos, the fantastic comic talent of Salman Rushdie (everyone’s heard of his Satanic Verses, few have actually read it) and his ability to carry on the proud tradition of creating labyrinths a la Jorges Luis Borges, Temur Kevhishvili’s Gorgian polyphony, and Yasujiro Ozu’s and Jean-Luc Goddard’s disjointed films.

Sure, a film student or a music major (I am neither) may have heard these names, but it frightens me that if there are actual aspiring screenplaywrights who have never seen a Bergman film, novelists who know nothing of Honore de Balzac, and jazz majors who think accomplishment is to play the horn like Michael Brecker…

…how little I must know while I search and grope in the darkness of ignorance to establish a cross-discipline of knowledge.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.