He also was mad...

Today I learnt that in order to have a great, a new or revolutionary thought you also have to be mad. I learnt this at university, in a Cultural Studies class, so it has to be true.
This is a great shame because I've always wanted to be an inspirational and revolutionary kind of person.

(I've not really thought about how I would actually go about that, but meh, details)

It is also a little scary because when i was in my teens and early twenties I had this rather odd desire to be labelled clinically insane, because "it would explain alot"

(I dont think I ever really thought that one through either)

... moving right along ...
We were looking at Avant-Gardism. Yes, Avant-Gardism, its very, very cool, to just stick "ism" on the end of things in order to avoid a slightly more complicated sentence, such as: We were looking at aspects of the Avant-Garde movement in art and literature.
(As a side note, yesterday, when discussing Avant-Garde literature, linguistics and metafiction with my mother - and no, we aren't nerds at all! - she came up with the term "Hornyism", which I find highly amusing)

Anyway, we were looking at Avant-Gardism, and it turns out that every influencial Avant-Gardist (thats my word), was also mad.

First to be put on the list was Ezra Pound, "the contraversial American poet because he was a fascist .. and also insane."

Next we skipped back to de Sade, as a Forerunner of Avant-Gardism (an Avant-Garde Avant-Gardist?), we were given this introduction:
"What can we say about him? He was a late 18th century aristocrat who was also a bit of lunatic"

and then there was Nietzsche who was "hostile to the church and morality [and] he also went mad"

I actually felt kind of let down when Freud, who was the next person referred to, didn't have his sanity called into question. But that is ok, I already knew he was a madman.