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TOUCH

                                             February 3, 2014

  Any attempt at talking about                               DEALING_THE_DECK
  literature-- or human life in
  general-- always seems to devolve        style
  quickly into poorly defined              soul
  abstractions.                            edge     just to list some
                                           touch    of the shorter ones.
  At the moment I want to say
  something about "touch" as in a                   Touch is one of the
  phrase like "That movie has the                   more interesting
  Lubitsch touch."                                  names-- it suggests
                                                    something concrete,
  Here "touch" is invoked to explain                and yet it's used to
  an ineffable difference between                   indicate an ineffable
  two artworks.  Why is one comedy                  quality.
  funny and another irritating?
  Don't they all revolve around the                      And my apologies
  same basic elements?                                   if you came to
  Misunderstandings, wordplay,                           this page expecting
  slapstick and pratfalls-- literal                      something else.
  or symbolic.
                                                    I would guess it was
  Actually, the first question is,                  originally an analogy to
  is there anything, anything at all                crafts and fine arts--
  that *can* be said about "touch"?                 some delicate tasks
                                                    require "just the right
  If we were going to look for                      touch".
  something to say, what angle of
  attack, what method would we use?                 Great pianists are commonly
                                                    praised for their "touch":
    I'm inclined to go at it by example             physicists objected this had
    and introspection, though that                  to be an illusion, piano
    obviously has it's limits:                      design deosn't allow for any
                                                    such phenomena--
    Consider "Doonesbury" and "Bloom County":      
    many people found them to be roughly                I once read of a later
    equivalent in quality, but while Bloom              study that concluded
    County might've had it's moments, I thought         they weren't taking
    the style of it's art was horribly                  into account the sounds
    derivative, and worse it's style of humor           a piano makes that
    seemed forced and shrill.  Someone goes off         don't involve the
    the rails, starts screaming something               strings.  E.g. the keys
    weird, stops suddenly realizing that                hitting the pads under
    they've lost it, and mutters something              them is certainly
    contradicting what they just said.                  audible in an unstrung
    Over-and-over, nearly every strip...                piano...
                                          
        But then, sniping at it's repetitive         
        quality is an easy shot to make, but what 
        *isn't* repetitive?  If something           
        *doesn't* have a degree of repetition    
        going for it, would it work at all?      
                             
        So: how much, what kind, what works?

        And on who?

        When and for how long?




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