A great quote from the inimitable and permanently pissed off Juan Manuel de Prada:
Today, a transgressive writer is not one who delights in invoking demons, but the one who dares to pray to the saints; it is not an activist of unbridled excess, but an apostle of temperance; it is not a shrill bard of freedom, but a discreet minstrel of tradition. A true rebelliousness today is not practiced by a spoiled, self-destructive, nihilistic child whose antics are applauded by the system, but an artist who dares to take subversion to the point where the system begins to foam at the mouth, like the girl in The Exorcist: to the point of scorning its democratic religion, to the point of denouncing its empty platitudes and pomposity, to the point of execrating its murky ideologies, to the altar where God becomes flesh.
Juan Manuel de Prada, Weirdos Like Me
I was in a seminar with Prada once, and dude, is he permanently peeved or what. I feared he was about to catch a stroke the entire time because of how majorly miffed Prada was. I don’t necessarily blame him because in every interview the writer gives, he has to answer the question of “why are you such a fascist?” Which he is most definitely not but he is openly conservative, and we all know how that goes.
Based on his girth and what I know about his life from the gossip circuit, Prada is not who one imagines when hearing about apostles of temperance but, boy, does he know how to write.
The quote is from Prada’s book on écrivains maudits, and he proposes his own definition of who the accursed authors of our times really are. I translated maudits as transgressive but I fully understand why the word I use is stupid. “Cursed authors” is not instantly recognizable in English as the expression is in the original French.
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