What interests me now is that I was no longer an American in quite the way one is supposed to be in order to paint like an American. You simply can not look at Spanish and Mexican painters, read French and Russian novels, and look at California through those eyes and still be an American. Maybe the rightwing is right, California isn't really part of America.
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Perhaps. Yes. I can see this.
I first read Dostoevsky's “Crime and Punishment” at around 18 years of age.
Of course, it was a translation (with all the problems of lost nuance and missing information that entails) but even so, the novel's scale, and strange ambitions infected me with that mind-virus which seizes you when you fall in love with large ideas.
There was no turning back.
Many people's definition of what it means to be an American closely orbits around a tightly packed sphere of vague concepts: idealized simplicity, anti-internationalism, very basic religiosity, de-ethnicized Whiteness and oceans of sentimentality but almost no melancholy of the contemplative sort (and when the human situation is considered in full, surely some amount of laughing sadness seems required).
To the extent a person strays from this behavioral template they are, maybe, something else besides an American in the usual way that label is used.
.d.
--------- "If human beings had more of a sene of humor, things might have turned out differently."
Stanislav Lem