curry and the ontology of literature

while gorging ourselves on indian food - me, chicken curry, keema nan and kashmiri rice; cameron, lamb pasanda and keema rice - we watched a stereotypical british expat - beet red, shock white hair, horrible french, highwaters and half-tucked t-shirt - hosting the first guests in his new b'n b in france. he killed a bee on the breakfast ham and just wiped it off, adjusting the ham back to a presentable shape. then it was supersize kids - about 2 horribly obese kids in england. i laughed my ass off when one kid said his dream was 'to be a footballer and make 400K a month, or a week, what-eva'. and then you see him kick a football. i've never seen a more disturbing gap between perception and reality.

then, somehow, cam and i got into a prolonged conversation about literature and art and the function of the artist. he was incredibly stunned, shocked into stuttering wonder, when he realised that we had totally different ways of reading literature, had completely different constructs about art. the low down: he views art as a communication between the artist and the viewer/reader. he also is of the cult of the author i.e. he reads very consciously aware of the author and believes knowing about the author makes reading a richer experience. i still refuse to give my definition of art but it resides somewhere between the art and the viewer and has little or nothing to do with the artist. when i read a book, i'm completely unaware of the author and he is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. i acknowledge that somewhere someone wrote the book that i'm reading but i could care less who that person was. the author is divorced from the text.