Ezra Pound - On types of writers

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

1. Inventors: Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
2. The masters: Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
3. The diluters: Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
4. Good writers without salient qualities: Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.
5. Writers of belles-lettres: That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
6. The starters of crazes

Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old. He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer.

Orwellian

    All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage - torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians - which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

The Newsroom - The show so far

There is no denying that Sorkin is a talented screenwriter. I am a big fan of The West Wing and there are moments in that show that is pure genius. So, obviously the expectations are high from 'The Newsroom'. And man! does it fail.

For starters, the newsroom in this show is anything but cutting edge; they have not even dipped their toe outside the mainstream. This is not the Jed Bartlet administration. They have not questioned authority except pile up on Tea Partiers. Don't get me wrong- the Tea Party and Koch brothers and Rick Santorum are all deserving of skewering but my point is that Will McAvoy is doing nothing different from the real news programs of Rachel Maddow or Olbermann. This is not some pie-in-the-sky idea of a great news network going where no one dares go. If Sorkin had shown one character, just one character, question if the Obama administration was right in invading the airspace of a sovereign nation (and an ally) or to ask why an unarmed terrorist was shot and not captured alive, I'd have had more respect for the show. The show waves the flag as hard as the ones it mocks. At least the chest-thumping sycophants at Fox are honest.

And the personal dramas happening in the show are distracting at best and pathetic at worst. But I'll let that one slide.

And I have another bone to pick with Sorkin; his consistent and continued scorn for bloggers. Be it Josh Lyman in The West Wing complaining about "Nurse Ratched" of the internet or Danny Tripp complaining about the pajama people in Studio60. And now Will.  I don't know how much of his characters are stand-ins for his own views but one would presume that they are. Sure, there are terrible comments on the net and there are trolls and people who can't spell, but to bundle all the internet people as basement dwellers who eat cheetos and type ill-informed opinions is a true failure of the imagination. Are there no staff writers under 30? Is there no one capable of convincing Sorkin that the internet is not a big bad thing out to get him? Granted that nobody likes criticism but did the internet hurt poor Sorkin's booboo? Why this kolaveri?