Obsessions God knows I?d like to rant against M…
Obsessions
God knows I?d like to rant against Mark Steyn and his suicide-bomber-like lust for innocent blood, but I want to do so just to sooth an intellectual sore irritating the hell out of me. Why do people like him get paid to write such propaganda, while the webmasters of the almost-unbearably fair Medialens have to rely on donations? Steyn should stick to his other job covering the arts, which, while he knows fuck all about it, would at least relieve us of his Goebbels shrillness.
Of course, the contemptible publicity given to this evil little piece came from Arts & Letters Daily. They have yet to discover the decency of Medialens. Or ZNET's. Or CounterPunch's. Or John Pilger's. Or the World Socialist Website's. Let alone the damning story about the US government?s move to protect its oil interests at the expense of the most basic human rights.
In connection with all this, last week the BBC broadcast a programme called Obsessions featuring people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in many of its manifestations. One otherwise very sane man hoarded items in his flat to the point where he couldn?t see his TV anymore. In another case, a young mother developed a phobia about germs infecting her baby son. As she repeatedly washed her chapped hands under a scalding tap, the narrator said this behaviour was designed to deal with her anxiety. The action itself was, as her intellect realised, counter-productive, but the chemical make-up of her brain, so the programme argued, caused her instinct to demand effective action to quell the growing panic. The example struck a nerve with me. It got me thinking about my own need for literature. Could my taste be so different from the mainstream because the traditional kind of storytelling that doesn't satisfy me, in which character and plot takes one through a cathartic process as well as teaching one about life in another world, such as drug-dependency in Edinburgh, does not deal with my immediate needs, which is to soothe an ?intellectual sore?? Could, then, Bernhard?s narcotic and oddly affecting repetitions, or Dante?s allusive, allegorical hypostatisation of love, be my way of ?dealing with anxiety? as a reader, thereby making my obstinate critical stance a manifestation of my desire to deal in the most effective way with something most readers do not endure, whatever that is?
Perhaps. But what kind of balm is it?
