I am sitting in this waffle house listening to a line cook in her 30s or 40s talk about how she was in debate team in hs and essays she used to write and how she loves poetry and I hate that we dont nurture these things. We HAVE a thousand mozarts theyre just trapped in capitalism

Did you ask her why she was working as a line cook?

When I went back to school for a second undergrad degree I came in a little arrogant. I had a degree from a great university and been places and done things and here I was in COMMUNITY COLLEGE. "Heh." But y'all, there was such genius and talent in that school. Genius and talent that deserves more.

Was it Susan Sontag who said that only the rich can be true artists bc they don’t have to worry about making money from their art?

100. The talent is there. Barriers are set up to prevent that talent from being nurtured. Insecure people with power keep other people down so as to not have to contend with their insecurities directly. It is pathetic and cowardly.

I think about this, it feels intentional.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain, than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweat shops.” -Stephen Jay Gould

If you're interested in anything related to the arts or the humanities there is an entire technocratic capitalist class devoted to telling you you're wasting your life. It's extremely depressing

And that’s always the pro-life argument, too—“you could be having the next Einstein!” Not without better opportunities!

I recall being accused of plagiarism on the early 00s internet because a high school drop out construction worker couldn't possibly write like that We don't know what we've lost

Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" imagines Shakespeare's sister, trapped in the same way by sexism.