> > i wouldn't know a Proyectite if it hit me in the ass with a
> > banjo
>
> What about a ukelele? Or a zither?
if a zither hit me in the ass with a banjo? or a proyectite who hit me in the ass with a zither? really, you people need to be clearer!
> Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 10:47:45 -0500
> From: Michael Yates <mikey+ at pitt.edu>
> I don't make any claims as to the goodness of the soviet union. However,
> there was a lot of new and good work done in the arts in the USSR in the
> early 1920s. Perhaps there was a flowering, all the sadder in terms of
> what happened later. BTW you might want to read some of the things Louis
> Proyect has written on the subject. He is certainly not a Stalinist if
> that is what is being implied.
i'm not implying anything at all about proyect (though i will say on record--fwiw--that his last name is pretty stylin'). i doubt i'd be much interested in what he has to say on the sub- ject, though. one needn't be a crazed ideologue or a mindless dupe of same to question categorical claims like 'human creat- ivity flowered in the USSR'; but there's a pretty good chance that anyone who's devoted him- or herself to apologias of the thesis is a countercrazed ideologue.
i should bloody well hope that there was lots of new and good work done in the USSR. however, to invoke that as vague proof that the cultural-intellectual environment was free is simply ludicrous, and in a particularly pathetically unreconstructed way--about on the order of a herculan defense of the cultural flowering in the milieu of rabid anti-communists in the US.
cheers, t