2005-12-10 - 11:56 p.m.
I'm reading Anna Karenina right now. I'm about halfway through. Tolstoy suddenly has a lot to say about art as he tells the sort of random story of Mikhailov the Painter, here in the middle. In the book, Count Vronsky is trying to paint when we meet Mikhailov. Mikhailov, needing money, agrees to paint Anna but hates looking at Vronsky's own work. Vronsky, seeing Mikhailov work, fortunately realizes that he will never really be a painter, but all of his other friends actually think he is better than Mikhailov, the real painter - who actually knows how to paint from his gut.
The rest of the dillettantes are only able to really look at the surface and the veneer of education and the fact that they know Vronsky to assess things. From that perspective, they think his work is better than Mikhailov.
Mikhailov sees Vronsky's work as nothing but veneer and imitation with nothing to offer but an understanding of the history of painting, but no sense of why people paint in the first place.
I think this is sort of what's going on in literature today... it's been taken over by the dilettantes. The dillettantes rule, congratulating each other, creating work to no purpose, with no purpose and nothing to it but veneer. They can congratulate themselves for having read a lot of books and knowing a lot about grammar, but no one is going to glean anything from what they write and to and to anyone who cares about writing there work looks like plastic.
As Tolstoy says, it's like a man who loves a mannequin telling a man who loves a woman that there love is the same. The first man has a right to love his mannequin if he likes, Tolstoy says, but he should not be surprised when the second man doesn't want to hear anything about it and doesn't want to talk about his own love with him.
Go, Tolstoy. Of course, he was a rich bastard himself, but he felt guilty about it and I think he sold everything and died poor.
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