Kate asks: > I got that part-that Beth. Ninth was more than nice by you but William > is right, can you remember and recount a rather tepid reaction to > something generally accepted as deserving a more vigorous aesthetic > reaction? and not Godot or other play part of whose structure is > to bore the audience silly before making its point. > > I was responding to this by William: "If Cheerskep can discuss why he only finds Beth. Ninth "nice" then he will partly explain the aesthetic experience. WC"
I confess I did not construe William as asking the same question as you're asking. Every genre has instances of works esteemed by some others that left me cold. Any time I've tried spelling out the failings FOR ME, I haven't liked my sound. Once when I was fundless in college, a well-to do couple gave me a ticket to an evening of Richard Straus tone poems, saying they couldn't make it that night. I thought it very kind of them -- until I was about twenty minutes into listening to the program. I found the music, call it, "unrewarding" (it did not include 'Til Eulenspiegel'.) As the drab evening wore on it became not a little agonizing for me because I felt I couldn't leave since the ticket was a gift. By the end I was quite angry, convinced they gave me the ticket because they knew they wouldn't enjoy this stuff either. "Let's give it to the kid who never gets to hear a symphony orchestra. He'll think it's grand." This season I went to see THE GLASS MENAGERIE because I heard Cherry Jones was great as the mother. I do think Jones is almost always very great, but in this one I thought she was non-credibly histrionic, "acting" every single minute. I think Wallace Stevens's SUNDAY MORNING is among the most over-rated poems of the twentieth century, pretentious, self-important, and ultimately tiresome: "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice..." If I ramble on about why I find the poem repelling, I'd sound repelling myself. I dig no Rothko painting that I know of. What can I say beyond I contemplate them and feel only a kind of boredom, certainly no "aesthetic" ecstasy I thought SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE had some funny moments with Geoffery Rush, but I didn't for a minute believe Joseph Fiennes as W.S., and I thought the Academy's decision to give it the Oscar over SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was hideous. But, for me, the question is not nearly so much Why do I dislike something, than it is Why do I feel great ecstasy when the thing is great? There are countless Japanese illustrators, but why does Hokusai reduce almost all of them to vaudeville? If I expound on why I feel Messenger, Shirley, Middleton, et al are tripe it wouldn't clarify why I think Shakespeare's gifts are inestimable. I can talk about the former, but I want to talk about the latter. But I find that when I try to praise great creators I simply want to POINT: Read this! Look at that! Listen here! Which delivers the what but not the why.
