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Libby Larson

@libby-larson.bsky.social

230 followers 340 following 23 posts

Environmental/climate scientist, but mostly here on my personal account to explore other interests: art, crafts, history, linguistics, local (DMV) politics.

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Libby Larson

@libby-larson.bsky.social

I borrowed this from the library and it's so good I think I need to buy it for myself. Moss interviews artists of all kinds-the excerpts here are from the chapter with Tony Kushner, who wrote Angels in America. Love what he says about art, and his take on far-right thinking seems particularly apt.

Photo of the cover of the book "The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing" by Adam Moss.

Photo of book section with text:
All Art Fails Eventually, inevitably, we got around to talking about failure. It had been a long conversation, and it would soon be time to go. Tony was so forgiving of himself-and others. I couldn't help but think that his an- alysis had worked "All art fails," he said, "because all art is essentially Orpheus. All art is meant to resur- rect the dead, and it will not succeed in doing that. The great model for all artists is Orpheus and in his greatest work he bombed. He didn't get her out. "Almost all playwrights are like physicists-we do our work from our late teens to about thirty-three. And then we're kind of garbage. We may generate some interesting things after that, but for some reason it seems to go that way. ""There are flaws and problems and failures in every work that I love. A lot of people feel that the epistle is the big mistake in Angels "

Photo of book page with text:
WRITING ROY
Tony said that a particularly tough part of these first pages was writing a scene he knew he needed:
the conversation between Roy and the doctor when the doctor tells him he has AIDS.
"The last thing I wrote in act I was Roy and his doctor, because I knew that's how I wanted to end
The scene didn't work. I struggled for weeks. Then, for some reason, I reread Billy Budd. And I
came across this line about Claggart: he had perfected the use of the rationale as an ambidextrous
instrument for effecting the irrational. In other words, a great order is a disorder and a great disorder
is an order, these things are one. It made me realize what I was getting at with Cohn, which is true of
right-wing thinking in general--that reality is an activity of the imagination. They're fundamentally
idealists, they believe that the idea precedes matter.
They reject the notion that you begin with material reality. You just demand that reality obey your
fantasies. "Then I called my friend Kimberly and said, I think Ive just written the best scene that
I`ve ever written.'"

April 5, 2025 at 11:52 AM

Libby Larson

@libby-larson.bsky.social

I have been thinking a lot about resilience lately. When I was younger I thought (though maybe only subconsciously) that people had a natural well of resilience that you could discover when it was needed. 1/n