Julien Sorel: Every Artist With a Pure Spirit Turned (Red and) Black in the 21st Century Genna Rivieccio
I
t used to be that you could, if you really wanted it and had some modicum of talent beyond the basic ability to craft a sentence, break into the VIP area called “literary success” without having to rely solely on money. Just look at Allen Ginsberg. But those days (mainly the 1960s-1980s in San Francisco and New York) have long dissipated into the ether like the U.S. presidency. For every artist requires a wealthy family or the rare bestowment by fate and fortune of a patron usually seeking an even higher emotional cost than the one an artist might pay financially—if she actually had the means, that is. A running theme throughout the history of literature has been our collective ability to romanticize the
“profession” (except use of that word would entail actually getting paid for one’s painstaking and fruitless labors, and, yes, in the true spirit of embodying the hypocrisy of Julien Sorel, The Opiate is a party to not paying its writers...one requires a patron for that). But what is romantic about dying in poverty? Most especially as a woman, who, unless she’s as committed to her art as Valerie Solanas, tends to exhaust a large portion of her already scant budget on toiletries. With this in mind, is it any wonder that someone as faint of heart and malleable in character as a man would fall prey to the post-Napoleonic era called the Bourbon Restoration and all of its urgings to rise through the ranks by any tactless means
107.
