Of course, I'm thinking again after Dr. Sexson asked the class what is the role of the artist in a world gone mad?  The question of the role of the artist is certainly an interesting one.  In American Literature I, our class read "Bartelby, the Scrivener" by Melville.  One interpretation of this story (I say one because there can be many) is that society doesn't have a place for the artist.  (For those of you who haven't read Bartleby, it's about a lawyer/narrator who hires Bartelby, a very strange man, as a copyist.  He works well for a while but then he refuses to work.  He takes over the lawyer's office, forcing the lawyer to take extreme measures.  He has Bartleby removed forcibly to the prison or an insane asylum.  Bartleby refuses to eat [the food which the lawyer/narrator pays for because he feels sorry for Bartelby and feels tha the owes him something] and consequently, Bartelby dies).  This story could be seen as saying that society has no place for the artist.  Society isolates artists and geniuses becaue they don't fit into the system.  They don't follow the rules and they don't take care of themselves.  Another answer to this great question of the artist's role is that the artist is the one who interprets the world.  Without the artist, people would be unable to make sense of the craziness in which they live, damned to confusion and anarchy.  But I waver.  I like to think of myself as somewhat of an artist but it isn't my art that supports me and I doubt very mcuh that I could make a career out of my writing and my drawing without becoming homeless first.  Our society doesn't seem to support certain kinds of art and I believe to some extent that it does force them (if not to live together: communes, Greenwich Village) into an isolation.  So society doesn't support the artist enough to let him interpret the world.  Look how many people told Joyce not to publish Finnegans Wake and how many people think that Ulysses is a book of sheer madness and confusion.  His view of the world definitely changed the way that I look at the modernist movement and how the normal world can be just as interesting if not more than the weird chaotic world.  His place in the world is revered today, but was it so in his own time?  But I think that the artist's interpretation of the world, that anyone's interpretation of the world is important.  I'm just not sure to what point we say that it is art that makes everything make sense.

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A Few Good Puns (Okay, Not Really Good Puns, Mostly Here to Take Up Space Puns): 'Nsync with the group, this is pun-ishment, litter-ature (in reference to the works Joyce used for Nausicaa), and "A prude is always afraid she may fall" from Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos

Writing in Pen (A Continuation of the Artist in the World question): I found this pen in my backpack and due to lack of pencil lead, I was forced to write with it. (Okay yeah, I know this is the internet and a webpage but I actually did write this out in my notebook with a ballpoint).  I don't like writing with pens.  You can't erase ink (well except for those erasable ones but because they don't write very smoothly I don't carry them on my person) or delete text (especially accidentally when certain people close browser windows that they're not supposed to...grrr.....long story, don't ask).  The pen led me back to the question of the artist and his responsibility towards his creation (just being grammatically correct, not trying to by sexit).  I like writing in pencil because pencil isn't permanent.  It can be erased.  The words that form the WORLD (ha ha Ulysses ha ha) of my imagination can be changed.  I like to think that my responsibilty towards my creations is to make them the best they can be - especially if this means changing and revising.  I like to echo Degas and his opinion that a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned.  I also feel that there comes a point when the artwork abandons the artist.  When art enters the public sphere, the artist has little responsibility for the work (or at least, they may feel as though they have little responsibility).  The artwork becomes an entity in itself - something alive.  Just remember "The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet.

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"The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet