Reply #15: yeah, I know [View All]

[RainDog]

..and he hated those dirty hippies who thought he was a role model. And he was a raving alcoholic and he had a thing about his mom and lived with her as an adult... (with his wife of the time...) --how many times was this conservative catholic married?

He was of his time. As were the hippies, imo. I wasn't part of those times so to me it's possible to look at his work from the point of view of writing.
I can also like his writing and Truman Capote's...even tho Capote was a self-promoting star-f-er lush. Their writing was diametrically opposite... but both were stylists according to their beliefs about writing. I like them both.

If you read Milton's Paradise Lost, you will dislike his misogyny intensely (or I did). But he also wrote amazing, life-changing work. In the century after he lived, he was an inspiration for the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft ... even tho his writing revealed that madonna/whore all women are evil because of Eve Ur. Lord Byron had an incestuous relationship with his sister, but that doesn't make Don Juan a bad poem. It is possible to separate someone's work from their life, esp. over time.

A recent example: I really, really detest what Woody Allen did -- married someone who was, basically, his common-law child. I wish he would stop making movies and move to Dubai with Michael Jackson or something. However, he made some great movies that I can appreciate for their art...he wasn't "himself" in those movies. He was a persona.

As a female, it would be hard for me to like most all historically interesting males because most all of them had whacked views of women...even Da Vinci, for example. and he could prove that women were "nothing" by his anatomical drawings. that's one area in which he was not forward thinking. in fact, he was down right stupid. but that doesn't negate his other work.