a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004 What a CrockLast fall, a poet named Jan Richman lost her job over a violent story one of her fiction students wrote for a class at the San Francisco Academy of Art. The Academy asked her not to come back for another term when certain authorities learned she'd assigned her class a violent story by David Foster Wallace ("The Girl With the Curious Hair"), which supposedly encouraged the student. Except that these authorities called him "George Foster Wallce." Why are the skittish idiots who want to blame everything on books always the ones who don't read?Anyway, Michael Chabon sprang to Richman's defense. Here's his opinion on the matter from the New York Times, as blogged by 3Jake. ... and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it. It's not quite as neat as that: Some art does inspire mayhem and murder. The Fight Club, A Clockwork Orange, various songs by Ozzy or Judas Priest -- even the Bible has inspired it. The point is not that art never plants unhealthy ideas in impressionable heads. The point is that banning worrisome books will never help because the first job of a school, even an Art Academy, is to educate kids, meaning literally to free them, so they won't be so impressionable. There's also a strong but not-airtight case that anti-depressants, more than movies or books, drive kids to violent fantasies and violence. The FDA says anti-depressants might implode the psyches of certain people -- not just teenagers -- and turn them suicidal. If that's true, then the case may be closed, since the rage of Eric Harris and Kip Kinkel (both on anti-depressants) was basically suicidal rage turned outward. C. Max Magee at The Millions thinks this Art Academy controversy will be good for the kid's writing career, which depresses me. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:12 PM | |
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