2 posts tagged “poll”

Question:

Could you read, and love, a literary work by someone whom you personally know to be a crappy human being?

I'm just wondering how the numbers will break down, so please answer, however briefly.

Two potentially biasing facts:
- I get an impression from most people I know that their answer, with very few caveats, is no;
- I'm not sure what my own answer is.

One more twist:
- he was an antisemite and owned slaves and beat his wife and made enemies everywhere, but these passages are immortal,
vs.
- he treats his MFA students like shit -- you should ask X about it sometime -- so every time people praise him I shudder.

So?

A poll.  (You can respond by email; I'll post the data here.)  There are more bad bands in the world than we can count— indeed, they are constantly forming and dissolving— but each of us has, I think, one or two bands which serve as private nemeses, which can make us shudder and weep and run out of restaurants into the road.  Which are they for you?

Paul has repeatedly volunteered the Steve Miller Band.  Good, but I think I hate Queen more— although I was just this morning recalling the worst excesses of the Doors: another proof of the theory that you need talent to be truly awful, to move beyond bathos into wholesale perversity.  I emphasize the personal nature of this matter so it isn't just an exercise in prolix hate: I'm not sure "When the Music's Over" could give anyone but me the same aesthetic migraine.  But as Kant observed (well, kind of), we seem doomed to talk about taste in universals: when I hear bad music I don't think about the particularity of my own reaction, I just think about how far I am from the sink.  Have at it!