So much boring

ink has been spilled about this Dr. Seuss business, so I will try and keep this entertaining. Perhaps just to start off we should get one thing clear; all this has nothing to do with race. Seuss’s drawings may or may not be politically insensitive now, or anytime. That’s not the point.  I say this not because racism doesn’t matter. But the standards that one applies to ideas -- to a rational reasoned discussion -- are not the same standards one applies to art. Art must have a special place, if it doesn’t then you are a book burner, period. What I mean to say is that if — for you — art is not another reality, an illuminative paradise, one you must visit occasionally, or perhaps you fantasise that one day you might leave this world and enter there, forever — if art isn’t that for you, then you don’t understand art, and you are just as bad as Hitler (who —remember — burned a lot of books, don’t forget). I honestly don’t bring up Hitler often (at least I don’t think I do). If you want to read a really interesting biography of Hitler, go to Mein Kampf. No, not Hitler's book, silly -- I’m sure it’s a boring, ill-conceived piece of bird do-do. I mean My Struggle (Min kamp) by Karl Ove Knausgaard — the brilliant Norwegian novelist (whose six volume series regretfully came to an end in 2011). Did you know that Hitler was not a house painter, but an actual painter of paintings? That he wrote operas and symphonies and aspired to be a playwright before he started burning books? Hitler was a failure as a human being and as an artist — and only failures as human beings and artists burn books, so don’t do it. And please don’t start with Dr. Seuss. So in case you’ve been living under a rock, Dr. Seuss Enterprises has stopped publishing six of his titles (because of his politically insensitive drawings) including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street — which I remember my father reading to me, and I don’t have many fond memories of my father so I’d like to keep that one sacred if you don’t friggin' mind. Okay, that is not censorship -- but it’s the principle of the thing, alright? And here is the principle -- which has been stated quite blatantly by the fascistic (oh dear this has set me off, hasn’t it?) numnuts who have dedicated themselves to defending the Seuss cancellation --i.e. Rebecca Onion -- whose name I admire very much —  I wish I could say it was made up, but I fear her name is simply a dull reality (like her). She has written: “Well, of course nonsense and the avant-garde are both ideological…I think people don’t always recognize that a fantastical or surrealist or nonsensical imagination still grows out of the very same culture that everyone else's does.” I get what you’re saying Rebecca Onion of Slate magazine, and it terrifies me, for it misapprehends the difference between art and ideas, in fact it implies they are the same thing. I’m not saying that art doesn’t have ideas in it, and can’t be parsed into ideas. But if it is art, and not a political speech -- or I should say -- even if it aspires to be art, it must not be parsed, analyzed, ripped apart, in order to find out what it means. Art does not mean anything. It is an experience. It is not a notion of any kind. It could be a bunch of notions that all add up to confusion, or nothing, or everything, or a giant paradox. But art cannot be summed up or whittled down into one idea, and if it can be, you have raped it, yes raped it Rebecca Onion -- done something that should never be done. Those who find it necessary to pick art apart and figure out what its ‘ideology’ is, do not understand the nature of it. Art is not a reflection of your life, or anybody else’s life. It is made up. It is fake. It is a product of the imagination -- as such it follows its own rules and exists in its own reality. Scaligero thought the characters in poetry and myth had really lived. I believe they did. I believe that Holden Caulfield lived. I loved him so much that I became him when I went to my Aunt’s house in New Rochelle in 1966 (she was not my real aunt, but my mother’s adopted sister). Her name was June, and I was a little in love with her son, my cousin Stephen, and he got us into a car accident, and we had to lie on the insurance forms and say he wasn’t speeding. And the two of them (Stephen and his sister — the bewitchingly beautiful Melinda) were completely freaky kids. I don’t know what happened to them. If they had any sense at all they would be dead, for they stayed up all night and slept during the day. And it was there that I read The Catcher in the Rye. For the first time I met a character in literature that I wanted to call up and have a chat with, and I was afraid the book would be over and I would have to say goodbye to him. I would never read The Catcher in the Rye now, because it might not live up to the experience I had when I was 14 years old. Because The Catcher in the Rye is a homophobic book. Yes, in the end Holden spends the night at his teacher’s place — Mr. Antolini — and Mr. Antolini caresses Holden's hair, and Mr. Antolini is called a ‘flit.’ I have now raped that book. I have treated it as an ideology -- and if I listened to Rebecca Onion -- then I could never enjoy it again. I blame you (and Rebecca Onion). Don’t you see, that’s not what art is? If you insist on treating poetry as ideology then you might as well burn books, because you hate art, and I hate you. Sorry, I had to say it. (I’m just so upset!)