Here are two posts I found interesting:
Death and Critical Transparency
Some Like It Hot
I commented on the latter:
"You can become immersed in something that is initially difficult to enter. Learning how to enter is what comes with more reading. You can come to love best the literature that excels in being both writerly and readerly simultaneously if you have loosened those barriers enough."
That is very well put. All I ask of the "difficult" work is that it provide *some* entrance for me, whether it be sarcasm, prosody, or beauty, or some undefinable thing. To pick up on Diane K. Martin's metaphor, if the text wants to seduce me, it has to offer me *something* that will get me interested in responding. If it just sits at the bar and nurses its difficult beer, I won't even notice that seduction is what it's after.
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3 comments:
well maybe seduction is not what it's after...
I mean, for seduction to work, you have to find it seductive, no? It's the feeling that, as the Firesign Theater say, "it was designed with your mind in mind." Some things just aren't designed with my mind (in any version) in mind. As I often say (watching some awful film trailer): "I'm so glad I'm not the target audience for this!"
Well, to continue the metaphor, one might find the figure sitting at the bar nursing a difficult beer seductive for reasons that do not have to do with the figure's behavior! :-)
Ah yes of course, but I responding to this comment:
"it has to offer me *something* that will get me interested in responding. If it just sits at the bar and nurses its difficult beer, I won't even notice that seduction is what it's after."
Which seemed to imply that the figure at the bar was trying to be seductive, but you didn't notice because it didn't offer anything to which you could respond. But now you seem to be saying that the figure at the bar may in fact be seductive EVEN if not attempting to be -- which is, I think, how some seductions work: passive aggressive?
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