. . . that I interpreted as being about privilege. One group of people was “all right”, the other group couldn’t win for nothin’. Rained on, pushed aside, not ignored exactly but not acknowledged.
NPH told me about privilege when I was in my early teens, as I remember. She quoted someone, Ingrid Bergman perhaps, who said “they won’t tolerate our privilege and their lack of privilege forever”. A long path to that reality, gaining speed in the present because of communication and recording.
Paco, what do you think of the image that all the artists have of you? You’re practically a god in flamenco.
Well, it’s something I got used to. Because it’s always been like that, ever since I was a child I think. When I was small people praised me and they’d say “oh, the kid, how the kid plays!… the kid …the kid…” So it’s something you get used to and it’s more a pain in the ass, if you pardon my language, than anything else. Well, you enjoy it but the responsibility of being there is huge and every time you make a record you get obsessed and you want to do it better. It’s very nice, I can’t complain, but sometimes the responsibility overcomes the pleasure of doing things, having to do things well can at times cancel out the pleasure of doing them.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James Thurber
Asked if he grows tired of talking about ecological stewardship, digging in, and coalition-building, the poet Gary Snyder responds with candor: “Am I tired of talking about it? I’m tired of doing it!” he roars. “But hey, you’ve got to keep doing it. That’s part of politics, and politics is more than winning and losing at the polls.”
–Steve Silberman, in Lion’s Roar
From Gore Vidal‘s memoir Palimpsest:
Recently [1994], a television interviewer quoted me as having said, “I seem to have met everyone, but I know no one.” Grinning like a tiger in anticipation of antelope, she leaned forward, gently salivating, eager to hear a tragic sigh, see a tear of self-pity. Plainly, due to my high and solitary place in the world—am I not the Living Buddha?—and to my cold nature and to my refusal to conform to warm mature family values, I am doomed to be the eternal outsider, the black sheep among those great good white flocks of folks who graze contentedly in the amber fields of the Republic.
I told her briskly that I had never wanted to meet most of the people that I had met and the fact that I never got to know most of them took dedication and steadfastness on my part. By choice and luck, my life has been spent reading other people’s books and making sentences for my own. More to the point, if you have known one person you have known them all. Of course, I am not so sure that I have known even one person well, but, as the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.
“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.”
In You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, W.C. Fields tells a customer that his grandfather’s last words, “just before they sprung the trap” were, “You can’t cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump.”
