Clay Feet

One day down and only three more days of work this week, as I am off on Friday. British Gas are coming round to give me a quote for a boiler and I have a whole list of other things that I also need to get done.

My interview next week keeps crossing my mind and when it does I then think that there’s no way I am going to get through the interview. I just keep doubting myself, even though I have experience that is entirely relevant and am usually pretty good at interviews and have been doing my prep. I just need to have a bit more confidence in myself, I guess.

Something else keeps going through my mind, which is entirely unconnected to the above. One of G’s friends was over last weekend and when we were having some cheese after dinner he licked his knife and then put it in the butter spread that on a cracker and then sliced some cheese with the knife. He’s a really nice chap and I get on with him well, but somehow I just struggle with someone licking a knife (I’m not keen on that in and of itself, but have sort of got used to that as G does it sometimes) and then dipping it into a communal product. Ick.

Anyway, I read this article on the BBC and thought it was quite interesting. Should the personal life or views of an author influence whether we read their books? It’s an interesting dilemma. I’m certainly not of the burning books type (oh the horror!), but if someone held views that I found abhorrent would I decide that I should not read their books. I guess I might choose not to buy them so that I did not line their pockets – but what if I borrowed the book from a library or the person was dead so they did not really personally benefit? Is there work somehow devalued or should be ignored because of extreme or unacceptable views? I don’t know.

In the comments on that article someone mentioned that Roald Dahl was anti-Semitic and yet that wouldn’t stop me from reading his books, but perhaps that is because I am not Jewish. Is it somehow more acceptable as long as you are personally not threatened by that person? That seems like flawed logic to me. We can find things unacceptable that don’t directly impact us and would be pretty selfish if we only measured things by whether it affects us as an individual. But banning authors or blacklisting them seems a worrying thought to me, but maybe finding out things about the author can so taint their work for us that we choose not to read it anyway, even if those views are not themselves apparent in their books. But having that choice does in itself seem an important thing. I will end my somewhat incoherent thoughts with something someone said in the comments on the BBC article:

“One of the biggest dangers of meeting your heroes is discovering they have feet of clay.”