Why do you think so few artists attempt to create a magnum opus? It really seems most people who are good at something want to just keep making it in various forms, but don't try to make a single lasting great work, even when they're in a position to try.
As an example of what I mean, take Virgil who became well known for pastoral writing, but always had an eye on writing a national epic. A few people still read Georgics and Eclogues, but the Aeneid is the Opus.
Tolkien's another obvious example - lots of little stories and books and things, but his eye was on a grand English epic.
Art Spiegelman - did lots of weird alt comic, but then also made his massive glorious Maus.
Maybe it's always been unusual but I'm somewhat disappointed that you don't see more of this sort of thing. Like, people who make solid sitcoms for years but never even try to make a lasting glorious comedy.
Without saying any names, there are lots of living artists who I adore, and I always want them to stop and take out a few years to focus on create something really hard and strange and at least potentially monumental.
So it looks like a lot of remaining inflation is rent. In that case, wouldn't you want to lower rates to increase home-building and home-ownership in order to reduce rent pricing?
One of the weird things about writing a book called Bea Wolf is you discover the "Be a wolf" hashtag which appears to be a lot of large shaven men posting photos of themselves to each other?
So, after putting it down for many years, I'm back to trying to read HG Wells' corpus. Interesting thing: all of his famous, lasting, books were published between 1895-1899, when he was aged 29 to 33. There are other novels, lots of philosophical and political thought, but so far I would say none of it comes close to that first few years.
Having read lots of it my feeling is that he was very smart but used up his original ideas quickly and his political thought verged on silly.
As an example, at one point he proposes a Samurai class of government, which he understands to be a group of people who would forego privileges in exchange for power. He also has "philosophical" books which invariably feel like a sophomore college student paid by the word.
There should be a version of John Wick where, as in the Iliad, whenever someone is killed for any reason you get a story about where they came from, who their parents are, and how they'll never see their son again.
Garrison Keillor is really strange to me career wise. He wrote exactly one outstanding novel - his first. Then ever after he wrote the same novel, only worse, and with more weird sex stuff. He also wrote very good (really!) poems early on, and then over time what he counts as poems is just aw-shucks Minnesota stuff. It's like he noped out of a lasting literary career for kitsch.
@Flux But he's rich! He even came out of retirements to do his kitsch show! There are other authors who only produce one good thing, but that's because there other things suck, not because they (as far as I can tell?) chose to do something easier.
So, I was reading HG Wells and I noticed something I hadn't thought about. He writes in a style that's very weird, and but for the Victorian/Edwardian language might even be considered experimental now? Like, in The War in the Air, it regularly alternates between goofy comedic scenes and scenes of horror and violence. And in between THAT there are digressions about economics and engineering technology. (1/n)
But then it occurred to me that Dickens does this all the time! Both the alternation between serious and goofy, and the social level stuff. The closest modern writer I can think of is Steinbeck who in e.g. The Grapes of Wrath talks both about economic conditions, and real people, and is capable of doing silly comedy and reasonably good drama.
I'm sure I don't read enough to have an opinion, but my sense is you don't see a lot of this anymore? It feels very 19th century to me, in that way 19th century novel narrators often feel like some guy with opinions on everything sat down to tell you an anecdote. That is, the narrator often feels closer, more patient, less disembodied, happy to pass through the 4th wall gently than in modern literature.
On a vaguely more serious note, an ethicist friend told me that arguing future lives have at least some moral status brings out a lot of anger, and I didn't believe him! Maybe I'm being naive, but the slope between that claim and some sort of Handmaid's Tale hellscape doesn't seem so slippery to me?
(Nearly) done. The final tray is printed and looks good. Except I screwed up the internal measurement and the two trays of grad students don't fit.
Since the grad students are the cheaper thing to reprint, I'll do that. Alternatively I could also just put them back on the original plastic bag, it should work.