[michaelsmanley]

"All art is ultimately about the creation of art," was the kind of reductive thinking that made me drop any pretense of continuing in academia after I finished my MFA. While I thought that was a marginally better stance than taken by the folks who insisted that all "texts" were fungible (which led to one student, when we were assigned to write a review of a short fiction collection published in the last year, instead wrote a scholarly paper covering his thesis chair's years-old volume of television criticism, which the professor accepted as equivalent), the whole discussion put me off literature for years and I scuttled back to programming, where at least when things didn't make sense there was some chance of fixing them.