Sontag, "Happenings"

[Jane Sweet]

"Judith A. Panetta" wrote:
> 
> My fellow contributors...why does it seem that you seem to
> be reacting to Mr. Pynchon's work vicariously through other
> writers. I'd be much more interested in how you feel about
> it.
> 
> Am I missing the point?
> 
> Thanks, judy



Let me get in touch with my sensitive side and my Feelings
about my reading. Enveloped now, I am a reader in the warm
embrace of the author and I in turn embrace the author's
text. In we go now entering my reading with no
preconceptions, we are open to whatever the text offers.
This Feel, this attitude combines an active form of desire
and passivity toward the text's message. The Feel, is a
respect for both text and author.  A co-operative
relationship between reader and author, with text as
mediary, underlies this respect. This Feel is not concerned
to be at odds with the more common and dominant
methodologies developed in literary circles over the past
twenty-five years, which have produced various strains of
resisting readership. My Feeling readership allows me to
meet the text, to merge with its horizons, even across
enormous chasms of time, geography, culture, and experience,
a meeting of minds and of hearts and of that Feel. But this
Feel is dependent upon a basic ideological position that the
human experience encapsulates certain fundamental undeniable
truths and that a certain fundamental oneness of humankind
is undeniable. 




Well there's one thing you can't lose
It's that feel
Your pants, your shirt, your shoes
But not that feel
You can throw it out in the rain
You can whip it like a dog
You can chop it down like an old dead tree
You can always see it
When you're coming into town
Once you hang it on the wall
You can never take it down


But there's one thing you can't lose
And it's that feel
You can pawn your watch and chain
But not that feel
It always comes and finds you
It will always hear you cry
I cross my wooden leg
And I swear on my glass eye
It will never leave you high and dry
Never leave you lose
It's harder to get rid of than tattoos


But there's one thing you can't do
Is lose that feel
You can throw it off a bridge
You can lose it in a fire
You can leave it at the altar
But it will make you out a liar
You can fall down in the street
You can leave it in the lurch
Well you say that it's gospel
But I know that it's only church

And there's one thing you can't lose
And it's that feel
It's that feel