READIN

🦋 Sweet Like Sugar

So here are two things I read recently and a chain of thought they have prompted:

• I've been reading Patrick Kurp's blog Anecdotal Evidence for the past few days, since Levi Stahl linked to it from his Twitter feed with a pretty beguiling quote about the ghostly presence of books; and yesterday I looked in Kurp's archives to read his first post.

  More than 30 years ago, at a state university in Ohio, I briefly shared a dorm room with a French horn player. ... I entered our room one day and found him sitting in the corner, cackling over one of Shelley's verse dramas and eating confectionary sugar from the box with a long ice tea spoon.

  Well: I'm chuckling as I read this and picturing myself as the roommate; but in the next paragraph I see that Kurp is setting up his former roommate as a representative of the "misuse of books", for which he feels a righteous distaste. Hm: I read the rest of the entry and go about my day, not sure how I feel about this.

• Later on (at another newly discovered blog), I was reading Robyn Hitchcock's notes from the release of Moss Elixir 13 years ago. He had just left A&M, and was dissatisfied with the music he had recorded there; and here is how he expressed that dissatisfaction:

  I always associate the word "production" with some kind of sheen--a sugar buzz patina that has the listener lying on their back, almost licking the record.

This is kind of troubling to me. Much of my relationship to books, to music, to movies is dilettantish -- I consider much of what I write on this blog to be the moral equivalent of cackling over Pamuk's prose while I eat spoonfuls of sugar, of licking the inexhaustible candy coating off of Robyn Hitchcock's music -- having to think about Patrick Kurp (for whose writing and thinking I have a great deal of respect) sitting in judgement of me is bad enough, but thinking about the musician I love taking offense at my manner of loving his work -- well, it gives me pause.

Is dilettantish enjoyment of art worthwhile? Is it reprehensible? Will it interfere with my development into a thoughtful human being? Does it make me a moral monster? I don't have an answer to these questions. My immediate reaction is "no" to all of them -- OTOH much of what I write on this blog seems worthwhile to me, and I would have a really hard time separating out what is "worthwhile" from what is "dilettantish". I was trying to figure out this morning how the sugar-buzz reaction to art could be seen as reprehensible, as morally negative -- all I could come up with was a vague sense that it befouls the intellectual space around the work of art in question, makes it more difficult to respond to the work in a valid way -- but there are tons of unexamined assumptions underlying that vague sense.

So: not sure what to make of this. I am going to muddle on listening to music, reading books, writing my blog, and much of that listening and reading and writing will be done from the standpoint of a dilettante. I hope some worthwhile thought will come out of it.

posted afternoon of Saturday, March 21st, 2009

'Dilettante' is not the right word; it implies affectation, and believe me, Jeremy, just from reading your essays on authors, they are genuine. Some go through life trying to learn---some go through life trying to enjoy. And not just through the arts. I try to combine the two.

(Alas, some go through it purveying misery.)

Have started on Goodnight Oslo. It's pretty good.

posted evening of March 21st, 2009 by paledave

they are genuine

Thanks! I was sort of operating off of Kurp's description of his roommate taking a manic, superficial pleasure in his reading. I do a fair amount of that and I was put off by Kurp's dissing it -- I guess the point I was trying to get at was that I can't see getting any of the genuine reaction to the art without some of the manic, superficial reaction -- and that I enjoy the mania and don't really see any reason to curtail it.

Glad you're liking Goodnight Oslo, I think it is some of his best work since the Egyptians. I should write a post about that record sometime soon; but right now I am going to bed.

posted evening of March 21st, 2009 by Jeremy

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