My old colleague at The Oregonian, Marty Hughley, who now sits in the theater critic chair, posed the following question to his Facebook friends:
True or False:This is from Vonnegut's minor novel, Bluebeard, and I suspect that Vonnegut himself would vote "false." It's more the lament of a "moderately gifted" person than a serious social analysis, and that is the main character's self-description in the novel. (Vonnegut could do social analysis: he studied and abandoned anthropology at the University of Chicago, though he was awarded an M.A. long after he'd left for his novel, Cat's Cradle.) Vonnegut's politics were far from elitist.
"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Still, I think the position probably has some support, simply because so many of us feel moderately gifted, especially when it comes to the arts. We'll never play like Lang-Lang or write like David Foster Wallace (or Kurt Vonnegut), we couldn't possibly distinguish ourselves as photographers or painters, we just don't have the right DNA to be a famous dancer. Believe me, I get it.
In the comment thread for Marty's question, another theme suggested itself -- the best writers don't rise to the top, really. The best self-promoters do. I get that one, too. So, let's see: I couldn't possibly write as well as Peter Carey (I'm reading Parrot and Olivier in America now and loving it), and even if I could, I'd be aced out by some aggressive mediocrity with better connections than I have.
But I don't want to get into all that. I want to argue against the very idea of categories of this sort.
