John Berryman, in an interview with The Paris Review from 1970:
Something else is in my head; a remark of Father Hopkins to Bridges. Two completely unknown poets in their thirties—fully mature—Hopkins, one of the great poets of the century, and Bridges, awfully good. Hopkins with no audience and Bridges with thirty readers. He says, “Fame in itself is nothing. The only thing that matters is virtue. Jesus Christ is the only true literary critic. But,” he said, “from any lesser level or standard than that, we must recognize that fame is the true and appointed setting of men of genius.” That seems to me appropriate. This business about geniuses in neglected garrets is for the birds. The idea that a man is somehow no good just because he becomes very popular, like Frost, is nonsense, also. There are exceptions—Chatterton, Hopkins, of course, Rimbaud, you can think of various cases—but on the whole, men of genius were judged by their contemporaries very much as posterity judges them. So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.
Take heart, Kollektiv.
A Little Something for Korrektiv’s “Lives of Famous Catholics” Series
This week, the New Yorker gets around to gushing over the Wachowski siblings’ cinema adaptation of Cloud Atlas. Would you believe it features Hugo “Agent Smith/Elrond” Weaving as a genderbending Nasty Nurse? Not that you’ll read that here. What you will read here is some account of Lana (nee Larry) Wachowski’s transgenderism.
The betwixtness apparently came to a head during the filming of the Matrix sequels.
Okay then! But there are a couple of things that nag at me about this very friendly profile. They don’t mention the whole S&M thing, and they don’t mention the hot mess that was Speed Racer. If you’re going to do a piece that explores the subject’s sexuality and also discusses past work, you can’t just leave whole sections out. It’s not like there are dozens of Wachowski movies, and it’s not like S&M isn’t a key part of Lana’s romantic history.
(I link to the HuffPo piece because the original Rolling Stone article is subscriber-only. Love the author’s indignance: “You could also read this article and wonder at the point of it. Why are we interested in Larry Wachowski’s sexual proclivities anyway?” Well, maybe because he/she is throwing them up on the screen, and making questions of perceived vs. actual reality central to his/her films?)