culture

//"Well, I like a great many writers; I have a considerable . . . catholicity of taste, if I may say so."// — "Peter" in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story

My "eclecticism" is not a consciously cultivated breadth, not something striven for to maintain the prestige of erudition, but actually more of an epiphenomenon; it is a consequence of my determination to vigilantly acknowledge each source, each contribution to the development of my ideas. It is natural, i think, that scrupulous attention to tracing and retaining a thoroughly detailed record of one's intellectual debts should result in an occasionally awkward, improbable or idiosyncratic structure; i believe that "eclecticism," in this sense, would be recognized as the norm and not the exception if it weren't for the regular affectations of disciplinary or paradigmatic purity that follow from various social and institutional pressures. In any case, it matters to me that i make an effort to give credit, as consistently as i can, for every drop deposited into the ocean of my thoughts.

Le Guin distinguishes between "early" and "enduring" influences... Acknowledge both, but recognize the difference and its implications.

The effort to include all influences does not imply uncritical evaluative agnosticism: while i might derive useful insights from Proust or a commercial for Pizza Pops, this hardly suggests an equivalence. But i do find there are tensions sometime between the search for excellence in art and the insistence that meaning is where we make it...