re P's intentions

[Can't Wait]

Yes I agree with you "Doug".  I was reacting primarily to a notion I
thought I grasped a glimpse of in your post, something about the
possibility of a Necessary knowledge of the artist and his intentions
for the sake of a True, more-correct-than-all-others, interpretation,
not too much knowledge or too little knowledge but just the right
amount of knowledge.  Okay I can see now that me 'glimpsing' that was
absurd...?  I am the last person on earth to knock mindless
pleasures, even mindful pleasures, hell even good ol fashioned plain
pleasures, especially where ill-mannered cranks (I prefer smug snots)
are concerned, who never cease to knock my brain flat to the floor
with the irony of the SERiousness with which they groove into a
masterpiece originally titled, for God's sake, Mindless Pleasures.  I
don't even Remember the book, my interpretations are based soley on
what I pick up here (today I've thrown in cocaine-residued Tarot
cards) and what I throw in mindlessly, carelessly, violently,
mockingly, and my interpretation (whatever the hell an interpretation
is, after all) are globs more interesting than the scholars', and
every bit as right.  At least I think my interpretation of the
Rainbow is more interesting (though I have one at the moment only in
theory) than professor Monroe's (whom by mentioning I certainly am
not implicating as a smug snot, necessarily, because I enjoy his
style).  He probably has a quite contrary view on the matter.

m



--- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> wrote:
> Couldn't agree more when "MichaelB" says that knowing about the 
> artist and the artist's intentions gives "pleasure to the process
> of 
> interpretation, as hobbies do." I'm certainly not into this Pynchon
> 
> reading thing for the money; maybe some of the people who do make a
> 
> for-profit career of it -- or who would like to do --  are the ones
> 
> who get so uptight about foreclosing the amateur's pleasures, or 
> maybe they're just ill-mannered cranks. It's also true that more
> than 
> one esteemed literary critic has devoted considerable time and 
> effort to understanding a favored artist's life and work, I recall
> as 
> I look at the copy of Jean-Yves Tadie's biography, _Marcel Proust_
> on 
> my bookshelf (I just saw a copy of the English translation in Black
> 
> Oak Books over in Berkeley yesterday) next to his masterful Pleiade
> 
> edition of _A la recherche du temps perdu_, and manage to work a 
> knowledge of the artist into ther appreciation of the work.  If you
> 
> want to put the artist and the art in "different worlds, different 
> galaxies, different universes" -- a proposition that seems absurd
> to 
> me, unless you have some kind of special definition for "world," 
> "galaxy," and "universe" -- go for it, but that doesn't mean that 
> other readers have to follow your lead.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n 
<http://www.online-journalist.com>



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