CLIMBING THE STAIRWAY TO VALHALLA. Rose at No Credentials returns from sabbatical.

"Stairway to Heaven," with its patchwork pagan motifs, stirred my twelve-year-old soul just as strongly as Siegmund's ode to his sister stirred my nineteen-year-old one...

There is a lesson, dear reader.

All of which makes me wonder if the vast amounts of attention today's crop of arts (especially literary) critics pay to the ideologies enmeshed in the works they study isn't, perhaps, a little misplaced. Alright, almost completely misplaced. Perhaps gorgeous art can put a few more rivets into someone's already-sealed-up ideology, but I think their thesis is that the ideology embedded in the music/literature/sheet-wrapped-building/whatever reproduces itself in the otherwise innocent heads of the audience. And I think that's flat wrong. It's not the ideology that's interesting: Ideology is relatively easy to isolate and describe. Ideology is a hitchhiker, a freeloader, a remora sticking gracelessly to the mysterious, dangerous shark of art.

Personally, I'm much more interested in the shark.

Sure. But as soon as you embark on a quest for symbolism, allegory, hidden meanings, what have you, won't ideology provide a template for organizing what you find?

Personally, I'll play the Ring -- although Bach and some Brahms goes better with math -- and scribble equations. (Granted, the CD player that comes with modern computers is great for doing the scribbling on Maple...) Work songs are good for working on the railroad.