{"id":1698,"date":"2009-05-19T18:20:28","date_gmt":"2009-05-20T01:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/2009\/05\/19\/the-idea-of-a-muse-might-be-sexist\/"},"modified":"2009-05-19T19:59:21","modified_gmt":"2009-05-20T02:59:21","slug":"the-idea-of-a-muse-might-be-sexist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/05\/19\/the-idea-of-a-muse-might-be-sexist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Idea of a Muse Might be Sexist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Lee Siegel<\/em> has written an article in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> called Where Have All the Muses Gone?<\/em><\/a> Huh.\u00a0 Well, let’s see if we can make a half-hearted stab at figuring that out.\u00a0 Where have they all gone?\u00a0 The first important thing to realize is that muses are female.\u00a0 Apparently.\u00a0 I’ve read through Mr. Siegel’s article and find it loaded with male artists who seem to require the subtle services of female muses.\u00a0 Some of these men are even married to wives who are actual female artists but who function for Mr. Siegel and his article as ‘muses’ for their lucky men.<\/p>\n

So it would seem that if you want to find out where all the muses have gone you would simply need to figure out where a woman would go who might be fed up with dragging her artist boyfriend or husband through the jagged ravine of his writer’s block.\u00a0 I don’t know for sure but my guess is you might find her down at the municipal court house filing divorce papers.<\/p>\n

Honestly, reading through Mr. Siegel’s article just makes me laugh.\u00a0 Why doesn’t he have a single example of a female artist with a muse of her own?\u00a0 It staggers the imagination to think that the world has not known a single woman artist with a male muse.\u00a0 And Dante didn’t have a muse for goodness sake.\u00a0 Beatrice?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Dante was a nasty little Italian man with a bone to pick with every passerby he ever ran into.\u00a0 Reading Inferno<\/em> is like reading through a litany of every petty wrong Dante felt he had to hold onto and seek literary revenge for.\u00a0 This guy would have driven any kind of self-respecting muse straight into the nuthouse.\u00a0 If I were Virgil I would have ditched him around the corner on the third level down.<\/p>\n

You know who my muse is?\u00a0 It’s Mick Jagger.<\/p>\n

The illustration is Carl Wilhelm Friederich Oesterly’s<\/em> portrait of Dante and his supposed muse Beatrice Portinari<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lee Siegel has written an article in the Wall Street Journal called Where Have All the Muses Gone? Huh.\u00a0 Well, let’s see if we can make a half-hearted stab at figuring that out.\u00a0 Where have they all gone?\u00a0 The first important thing to realize is that muses are female.\u00a0 Apparently.\u00a0 I’ve read through Mr. Siegel’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,163],"tags":[396],"class_list":["post-1698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-opinion","tag-dante"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1698"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1704,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698\/revisions\/1704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}