Dear Editor,
I use some of your articles in some of my English classes because you have some very creative ways of expressing things.
One of our more interesting discussions resulted from whether the government should support starving artists. Your last issue had a letter which asked about some of the great composers and artists of the past, such as Van Gogh and Stravinsky, and advocated that the government should fund the arts.
One of my students asked this question: "Are they assuming that Van Gogh and Stravinsky lived off government support while they did their work?"
One of the observations made was that it seemed that the most creative artists and writers were ones who struggled for their own existence rather than lived with the security of the government dole.
Bill Baker
Košice
