Novelists

[self_referent]

Unlike successful scientists, who often have impeccable biographies (e.g., started reading at 5 months, solved his first quadratic equation by 9 months, had read the [insert famous religious text] forward at 1 year and then backward at 2 years, was appointed Supreme Scientist of the Kingdom at age 20, etc.), many novelists have pitifully tragic

Comments

[fancybred]

There are those who say that novel-writing and messed-up lives are correlated---not in the parenthesized way, but in the sense that personal tragedy makes for great novel material. If that's true then state-sponsorship might result in happier novelists but also be a blow to literature. That happened in the Soviet Union for example. Sanctioned writers received many privileges from the government and in return happily churned out insipid novels of the "socialist realist" genre. (Unsanctioned writer Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Master and Margarita has an illicitly funny satirizing of these officially-approved writers and the perks they enjoyed.) Though to be fair, in the USSR besides positive reinforcement there was also a whole lot of negative reinforcement for writing outside the accepted dogma (thousands of miles of siberian railway of negative reinforcement

[self_referent]

I haven't read Under the Volcano, but I'm acquainted with several free-spirited artistic types, so I'm fascinated by the apparent correlation discussed above.

I should read Wittgenstein's bio, but I've indefinitely put off his philosophical work b/c I've been told by a friend who has read Wittgenstein that, at the end of his exposition, he says that his work has been merely a ladder and that if you've reached the top, it is useless now and can be kicked down. [Correct me if I'm wrong here.]

Can this be interpreted as meaning that Western philosophy is, in the end, useless; that it can be transcended?

Thanks for the recommendations! I'm currently hard at work on a project, though, and I'm trying to discipline myself to maximize output and minimize input.

[self_referent]

By "he" in the second paragraph, I meant "Wittgenstein".

[fancybred]

So W had a tendency to renounce everything he said/wrote very quickly after he said/wrote it. The bit about the ladder is actually in the tractatus, which W wrote when he was in his 20s, i.e. "early Wittgenstein". The "later Wittgenstein" (the blue&brown books, and philosophical investigations) was interested in different things.

I've only read some of the tractatus, and the blue&brown books, but the latter are definitely the most valuable works in philosophy I've ever read. Yes, much of what W was directed towards Western philosophers, basically telling them they were completely off track, that lifetimes had been spent studying "pseudoproblems" resulting from confusions of language. By way of aphorism:

A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room
who wants to get out but doesn't know how. He tries the window but
it is too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow. And if
he would only turn around, he would see that the door has been open
all the time!
And so his work is probably