Creation, Not Confession

Blogging with a deadline has its merits, but I often find myself slipping into the all-too-dangerous habit of reading behind the lines of other students' blogs - is the writing self-initiated, or does it only feign sincerity out of last-minute deference to the minimum course requirements? Do the writing constraints ensure a steady stream of concise and thoughtful blogs, or do they produce a sort of quasi-blogosphere that trades a high mark for written artifice? At the heart of the art, it really shouldn't matter, nor should we read each other's writing any differently than we would an onerously wrought life-work from a classic master. It may do us well to embrace Gautier's "l'art pour l'art" (if we can stomach, by correlation, the effusing pomposity and devilish style of Oscar Wilde) as an adequate mantra while critiquing blogs and all other "art forms". Although we all remain cognizant of the pressure evenly laid upon us by the syllabus, we should keep in mind that any external audience, as in all blogs, has only the current product to view and will judge accordingly. As a class, we have the impediment of communal responsibility to make us overthink each entry. Most English majors, writing at least four times a week for a grammar-obsessed and highly opinionated professor, will think more than twice before clicking "publish post" and will read an entry more than once before attempting a thoughtful comment. And this is not a bad thing, unless we let the knowledge of personal circumstance cloud our experience of others’ art. In the same way, I do not care that Nietzsche was read by the Nazis or that Foucalt was a sado-masochist or that Freud took cocaine or that Van Gogh went loony. These are not reasons to disregard their work as mere glimpses into troubled and dysfunctional lives. Art is creation, not confession. Art is art, ideas are ideas, and each should be treated with reverence.