Re: A Sensibility of Worth

Sure, Jim,

You can offer up yet another limited and specific stipulative context, and we
can go 'round and 'round again asking whether this or that text is worth more
than the other within the new one on the list. (Are Sade and Celine worth
more than Keats or Shelley, to offer random examples, in terms of how they
display ranges and depths of feeling through facility with language?) And we'll
get more unanswerable questions that to me still seem pointless to ask. And
we'll have to follow each attempt at an answer with "To whom?" -- because that
question won't go away.

And the toolbox model once again asks us to quantify an unquantifiable. (How
many tools are in Godard's Lear versus Shakespeare's, for instance?)

Why bother?

And, besides, it all leaves out so much.

There's a scene at the end of *Hannah and Her Sisters*, where Woody's
character is, as usual, despondent and even suicidal, afraid that he is terminally
ill, and he wanders the street a psychological mess until he stumbles into a
movie house. And he goes up to the balcony and sits down and starts watching the
people on the screen. They are singing and dancing. And he starts to feel
better. And he thinks about it, thinks about why, thinks about what the movie
does for him in terms of putting his own life and problems in perspective. I
don't have the script, but in general it restores his mental health a bit.

What's he watching? The Marx Brothers in *Duck Soup*.

That's a tool in that box we might not have listed. And there are countless
others, because personal and historical experience is so complex and
heterogeneous. Indeed, perhaps because the boxes are always bigger than we think, than
we can know. (Perhaps because the number of tools in the box actually
depends in large part on the imagination of the bricoleur.)

I think it's not a choice we have to make, not a determination we have to
quantify, not a decision that is in any way compelling for us in order to do what
we do and to love what we love.

And I think attempts to do it are destined for soft vagaries at best and sad
reductivism at worst.

And in the end, I'd rather respect the unique possibilities built into acts
of reading.

"We are not," a famous writer once said, "bound to decide."

Refusing at least this form of bondage, I wish you all the best,

--John

PS: You write: "I can look to Shakespeare to teach me about language more
effectively than I can look to a television ad."

Don't be too sure of that. If it's a question of "effective," I can offer
some conflicting testimony from the classroom. But, in any case, even if this
is true, I still don't understand the need to draw the lines, to say "more" and
"less," as if this was a competition between texts, an aesthetic sport. It's
a game I'd rather not play, I guess.

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Mon Dec 15 12:07:42 2003