WHOA, LOOK OUT JAY! ANON’S GOT YOU THERE!!!!

So it is sexist to tell a story about a man?

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/02/how_gay_marriage_put_an_end_to_gay_sex.php

“I’m down for running up on them crackers in they city hall”

I absolutely love the song that the above lyrics are taken from (Dead Prez “Hip Hop”) but I can’t help but feel hurt by the idea that the people who make the music I enjoy wouldn’t want to be in the same room with me. However, I still listen to their music for the same reason filmophiles watch “Birth of a Nation”–because it has artistic merit.

Also, I think you have misinterpreted Pixar’s UP. The female character in the movie is presented as a strong, adventurous leader. The square headed man spends the majority of his life transfixed by the woman’s charisma and strength. Ultimately when she dies the story of the movie is how this man can learn to cope without the pillar that his late wife was. Yes it is true that females are absent for the majority of the film’s action, but one of the central themes of the movie is how strong, courageous and beautiful women can be (even when they are not fertile and don’t desire to be an accessory to their man’s ambition).

Ultimately, I accept any art that I find has merit but I feel no reason to use the merit of art to excuse bigotry.

What’s important is that having major biases tends to blind people. So, with a good writer like Virginia Woolf, she still writes great works, but they are limited. Many times, the works in question never really approaches her biases and retains a full palette of thought and emotion. If jewish elements never comes up, or aren’t conspiciously absent from the narrative, then there might not be a problem, and her anti-semitism largely affects what projects Woolf decides to take up rather than the quality of said projects. No consumer, but a writer herself with great talent, can imagine or write a Woolf-like novel with an interesting element of jewishness.

Everyone has these blindspots, but what makes a genius truly a genius is his or her ability to translate a vision in the mind to another mind–gears all atrembley, pistons pushing, platonic goo that pours in and crystalized soul comes out. So when a piece of art lasts the years, decades, and centuries (a few, millenia), it is because the artist saw. The artist had more vision and less hinderances than the people around him/her. The greatest will have had more vision and less hinderances in their moments of realization than even people living among artists standing on these giants.

We can forgive much of the worst elements of Shakespeare, because we see and feel more as a result of reading him. The Matrix, on the other hand…well Shylock could never be the hero of the tale. Mr. Smith, by a reasonably objective analysis, is the *hero* of the first movie, even though that’s not really supposed to be the case. It works out like that because the creaters cannot see through and translate their creation well in large part due to glibertarianism. The Matrix will not last nearly as well as the original Twilight Zone episodes.

If the art is great, it will forgive the crudeness of the maker, and there is no fucking need to forgive the maker. That is arrogance.

Still, I have been oddly personally disappointed when finding out certain things about my favorite authors–that Nabokov cheated on his wife, that Woolf was an anti-Semite, etc. I think when you invest a lot of time not only in a work, but in the works of a particular author, it can become more problematic as we move farther away from pure criticism of the text itself and closer to biography, frankly.

Just to note, though–if I am reading something for pleasure rather than work, I’m much more likely to put it down if I encounter enough unpleasantness.

Song of the South … Now, I saw this movie in theatres when I was, well I can’t even remember how old I was. Younger than Middle School definitely, and probably closer to grade 2 or 3 but I might be wrong. As an adult, I couldn’t really remember the movie except that it was about Brer Rabbit and had a bunch of songs that I loved (I still hum Zippity-Do-Dah when I’m in a good mood), and while I knew there were ‘racist overtones’ intellectually, I honestly couldn’t remember the film, all I remember was loving it as a small child.

I recently found a copy of the film and ordered it on DVD for my granddaughter (age 14 mos). I watched it all the way through, and cried through most of it. It was HORRIBLE. And as much as I remember loving it then, now I can’t even love it for the nostalgia. It will be relegated to a bottom drawer somewhere and never again see the light of day if I have any say in the matter. And it especially won’t ever be shown to my granddaughter except as an example of what not to do.

So while I do still indulge in my guilty pleasures from above, I can say that there are some things that are even too horrible for me to gloss over and love just for the sake of nostalgia, in spite of their inherent problems.