6 John Leonard Quotes on Culture

John Leonard quotes on culture

2. For every wicked witch there is, in our cluture, a black magician, an alchemist, a Flying Dutchman, a Doctor Strangelove, a Vincent Price. The scientist, like the magician, possesses secrets. A secret - expertise - is somehow perceived as antidemocratic, and therefore ought to be unnatural. We have come a long way from Prometheus to Faust to Frankenstein. And even Frankenstein's monster is now a joke.

3. Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-eyed exploitation of their continent as a sort of compost heap of the libidinal and the symbolic? Aren't D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Paul Theroux imperialists? What do black Africans think of Conrad, Bellow, Updike and Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why don't the white guys look for the heart of darkness in their own bathrooms?

9. Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. 'I have never belonged to this race,' said Rimbaud.

13. The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is: it's not only sad. It's devastating. It's devastating because routine language means routine thought. And it means unquestioning thought. It means if I can't - if new words cannot occur to me and new image does not occur to me, then what I'm doing is I'm simply repeating what I've heard. And what we hear from an overpowering cultural force and the forces of homogenization, what we hear is sell, sell, buy, buy. That's it. That is the function.

18. My whole life I have been waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace. At an average of five books a week, not counting all those sighed at and nibbled on before they go to the Strand, I will read 13,000. Then I'm dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every month in this country. It's not enough, and yet rich to excess. The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them - not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agit-prop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff info-tainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.

29. In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.