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PLEASURE_POINT

                                         December  4, 2012

Dwight Macdonald makes a point about the
irrelevance of fidelity in translation
to the quality of artwork:

    " ... the verse translations seem very
    good to me ...  I speak of reading
    pleasure, not of their fidelty.  But I
    assume, first, that a work of art is
    intended to give pleasure, and that if
    it does not, the fault lies either with
    the writer, a thought too unsettling to           To you and I, the
    be entertained in the Great Books, or             thought that the
    with the translator ... "                         cannon might deserve
                                                      to be fired is
                Dwight Macdonald,                     probably not so
                "The Book-of-the-Millenium Club"      "unsettling", but
                _Masscult and Midcult, p.141          then I suspect
                                                      Macdonald was being
                                                      a bit sardonic here.

    This may not seem like a stunning
    insight, but from a snob like Macdonald
    it stikes me as being awfully racy.
    Where will critical standards go if
    we start judging the words in front         Not that I disagree:
    of us without consulting with experts       I'll go with Fagels
    like himself?                               over Fitzgerald any
                                                day.

Pauline Kael also had some
things to say about "pleasure"...
from "Trash, Art, and the Movies"
(with some additional paragraph
breaks, and idiosyncratic quoting
rules, as is my wont):

    "Perhaps the single most
    intense pleasure of           Kael's affection for movies as a
    moviegoing is this            place of passive cessation of
    non-aesthetic one of          responsibilies is interesting:
    escaping from the             compare it to the modern
    responsibilities of having    obsession with the interactive.
    the proper responses
    required of us in our            Games are an obvious
    official (school) culture."      case, but even watching
                                     "movies" now is likely     A point Jana
    "Irresponsibility is             to be an involved          Prikryl raised,
    part of the pleasure             process of "surfing" a     I think.
    of all art; it is the            near infinite set of
    part the schools                 chanels.                   CRITICAL_TABS
    cannot recognize."
                                        And what would McCluhan
    "Does trash corrupt?                have said about
    A nutty Puritanism                  video games, anyway?
    still flourishes in
    the arts, not just in
    the schoolteachers'
    approach of wanting
    art to be                  Trash might or might not corrupt in some
    'worthwhile,' but in       fashion: it's a common enough suspicion
    the higher reaches of      that it's worth investigating the
    the academic life with     question.  Can you measure this
    those ideologues who       "corruption"?  What would the symptoms be?
    denounce us for
    enjoying trash ... "                      Myself, I would go the other
                                              way: my guess is that our
    "If we had to justify                     "trivial" obsessions are
    our trivial silly                         only apparently trivial, and
    pleasures, we'd have                      that they serve important
    a hard time."                             functions we don't
                                              understand very well.
    "The pleasures of this kind of
    trash are not intellectually
    defensible. But why should
    pleasure need justification?"

        If they need no justification,
        if they're just trivial and
        silly things that are beyond
        the proper domain of intellectual
        inquiry, we might wonder why
        one would write endless columns
        in _The New Yorker_ about them.




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