Weekend at Charles Foster's...

Jim,

You write:

"So the "pleasure" (and I agree this word needs to be developed a lot more)
we get from CK is of a much different kind than the pleasure we get from WB,
and perhaps more "important"  to us."

More important to you, here, now. Perhaps. Not necessarily more important
to most of the Freshmen sitting in my class at any given moment -- not more
important to me (or you) on a drunken Saturday night with the Dominoe's guy
knocking at the door -- not more important to the primary demographic target for
contemporary Hollywood films (males 14-21) -- not more important to distributors
and producers of those films either -- not more important to lots of people I
can think of who would rather laugh in their seats than lose themselves in
speculation on the fragmented and incomplete nature of both narrative and
experience and for whom the development of depth-of-field photography doesn't mean
shit. More important to me sometimes. Not more important other times. So
what?

Still, Jim, there are too many options and too many cases and too many
possibilities to make pronouncing such a thing in any "primary" or final way
worthwhile or anything other than a pretension.

And why would we want to anyway? What's gained by it? Who cares, really, if
the whole world decides that in some way that the "pleasure" (whatever that
means) provided by CK is somehow "more important" than that provided WaB (which
it would never do in any case)?

What are we really after in such an argument -- to me it seems either a
colossal case of egotism (our decisions matter, we know, we can establish with
authority the good and the bad and extend that decision to be "primary," we are
the arbiters of "greater worth," goddamit!) or it's a case of simply wishing our
desires and our opinions to be more than they are. In either case, such a
claim wouldn't change very much, would it?

I still don't believe that for me such claims are what dealing with these
texts or with art in general is all about. It is certainly not the nature of my
own aesthetic experience.

But you already knew that and we're still going around the track.

Enjoy the evening,

--John

PS: We really aren't that "important." Also, you know that it's a stupid
comparison, right? They are utterly different sorts of projects.

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Received on Fri Dec 19 17:28:36 2003