I'm surprised to see a serious, engaging and informative defense from Cheerskep regarding our posts on Mamet. My fantasy is to spend a whole afternoon with Cheerskep in a good wood-paneled NYC hotel bar discussing art and literature, accompanied by two or three very beautiful, smart, adoring lit-crit art historian co-eds from Barnard, or one silent, pouty actress would do. I'd even pay the bar tab and bring my best cane. Incidentally, does everyone here know that Mr. Chris Miller, former distinguished aesthetics lister is now one of Chicago's admired art critics, publishing reviews in the local press. Lovely Miss Alice of Wonderland told me that.
Proust, in Within a Budding Grove, said the biggest impediment to art is habit. That's quite a shocking notion since habit has long been regarded as the basis of all skill and excellence in the arts. Happy New Year! wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, January 1, 2013 12:10:09 PM Subject: Re: degraded aesthetics William writes: > Re Cheerskep's comment below, agreed. But if we agree with Cheerskep, > then his > ornamental words, meant to convey his disparagement and authorial > superiority, > Disparagement, yes. But "authorial"? I feel less authorial there than editorial. Though I concede that if I knew I were writing for a sizable public readership (which, say I, Mamet did know) I'd have avoided the fatuity of his "THE job", and "Everything". William writes on: "[Cheerskep's words} such as 'fatuous' and 'careless', are themselves improper and too limiting." I won't pretend I know what William has in mind here, but I think he could have been pointing rightly at a kind of lazy sprawl of my own here. What I mean is this. When I write, "Here are two mistakes in those few short lines", I'm criticising both the lines and the writer of those lines. William adds: > ". . . once Cheerskep expressed his pugnacious judgment with the word > fatuous, he was on a roll, as theater folk say, and soon felt compelled to > add the word 'careless' in case the reader skipped over 'fatuous' without > being tripped." Don't forget my disparaging word 'dim'. I'm asserting the > lines and their writer display fatuity, carelessness, and dimness. > But I do not mean my indictment of Mamet applies to everything he says or does. At the time he wrote these lines, he was not at his best. William asks: "After learning that Mamet is a > very smart guy (Is that because he is a successful guy?)" > No. In England, I once saw Mamet be very smart on one of Clive James's chat shows. Also on the show was Jeanette Winterson, a writer whose lacerating tongue was much sharper than her intellect is. You could tell from minute one that Winterson came cocked and loaded, craving this opportunity to destroy that male chauvinist Mamet. (Another image that came to my male mind was that of a defensive lineman in football, coiled in a three-point stance, raring to flatten the opposing quaterback.) Within a very few minutes, Winterson had been easily confuted again and again by an unfailingly cool Mamet; she was heatedly sputtering, contradicting herself, and looking thoroughly out of her league. > William recites my remarks, and comments: ". . . all of which > enables us to raise Cheerskep'sperspicuousness above Mamet's which , of > course, is the real purpose of Cheerskep's comment." > No, that's not right. I really did attack Mamet's statements because I think they're damagingly wrong in the disdainful, too-quickly dismissive way that can characterize Mamet at his worst. (My evidence comes in part from having once been his publisher. I ran the joint, but I was not his editor. I saw the editor make a number of justified recommendations for reconsideration of faults in the script -- and Mamet conveyed he was not about to look again at this thing.) In truth I'd hate to find myself in a live one-on-one debate with Mamet, especially now, in my shuffling later years. However, depending on the subject, I wouldn't flinch from a correspondence debate with him, by which I mean one that would give me time to consider at length my own remarks as well as his. > > Mamet wrote: > > - The job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter > consumers > > to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that > their > > tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of > the > > purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a > > second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's > > reexamine it. > > > > DAVID MAMET, *Salon* interview, 1997 > > > Mamet, a very smart guy, is nevertheless often deeply full of it. And I've > had evidence that he is loathe to reconsider anything he says once he's > said > it. He is not an expert on "Reexamining" his own pronouncements. Once he's > said it, thou shalt be satisfied with it. Here are two mistakes in > those > few short lines: > > It is fatuous to assert what "THE" job of either the 'artist' or the > 'mass entertainer' "IS". > > It is both careless and dim to assert that "EVERYTHING" we have thought -- > no matter how narrow the subject -- is ever wrong.
