>I don't want to sound spastic, but I have fallen in love with the book,
> Kafka was the Rage..., I went online to find anything about it. I came
>across your page, and I was very impressed and taken in by what you have
>written. I feel now that I might have been born in the wrong time. I wish
>the youth of today was still caught up in culture and society. Maybe I am
>being too romantic, but I have a warmth that yearns for that type of
>stimulation. I would love to hear more about your experience, and I would
>love to read more of your work. I don't mean to startle you, but isn't the
>internet suppose to be an outlet for finding people who want to share with
>you your own expressions?
 

I assume that you've followed up the links in my book review to find the other articles about Sheri.

As far as being born in the wrong time, yes, I feel that way a lot too. I was reading a book by Alfred Kazin last summer called Writing Was Everything, about New York writers in the Forties, and it brought up exactly this feeling for me. But Anatole Broyard himself, and many of the other writers and artists who were active during the Forties and Fifties and Twenties and Thirties often felt the same way. The visionary artist is always (well, often anyway) out of step with his time.

It's easy to yearn for something which is to appreciated now because we view it from a perspective of time. It's harder to recognize the value of the things which are new and important right now. Writing is not ``everything'' in today's world. That's old news: it's yesterday's newspaper. Different forms of artistic expression are on the cutting edge now, and you won't find them by looking at what's taught in universities.

I myself lived through an amazing era: the Sixties. It was not writing that was everything then, but rock. When I look back now and see the way that our whole conception of music changed, both in terms of lyric and melody but most of all in terms of the overall ``sound,'' I am amazed that I, who completely despised rock when I was a teenager in the Fifties, was actually alive to witness all this. I don't think that any literary or artistic movement has ever been more important than this.

And during somewhat the same period, we had a revolution in cinema, which started in Europe with Bergman and Truffaut and Fellini and was picked up in the United States by people like Scorsese and Altman.

More recently, we have had the revolution in low-budget independent film-making, which survives even as more and more people attempt to take advantage of it commercially. I am too old now and have too much intellectual baggage from the past to appreciate the most exciting areas of creativity today, but I would mention punk rock, rap, acid rock, as well as comix, zines and, of course, the web itself.

I would say to look at those areas which almost everybody (i.e. the Establishment) calls superficial and immature. This is what people said about Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Picasso, Allen Ginsberg, and many others in their time.

-- Lee Lady