"A note to Pound in heaven: Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women" --George Oppen, _Twenty Six Fragments_

Saturday, July 08, 2006

for students and interested others, from Michael Chabon * :


. . . The original sense of the word entertainment is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void . . . . I can't think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful exchange, of reciprocal sustenance, of welcome offered, of grasp and interrelationship, of a slender span of bilateral attention along which things are given and received, still animate the word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests, ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.

At some point, inevitably, as generations of hosts entertained generations of guests with banquets and feasts and displays of artifice, the idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word. And along with pleasure (just as inevitably, I suppose) came disapproval, a sense of hollowness and hangover, the saturnine doubtfulness that attaches to delight and artifice and show -- to pleasure, that ambiguous gift. It's partly doubtfulness of pleasure that taints the name of entertainment. Pleasure is unreliable and transient. . . .

The other taint is that of passivity. At some point in its history, the idea of entertainment lost its sense of mutuality, of exchange. One either entertains or is entertaied, is the actor or the fan. As with all one-way relationships, grave imbalances accrue. The entertainer ballons with a dangerous need for approval, validation, love, and box office; while the one entertained sinks into a passive spectatorship, vacantly munching great big salty handfuls right from the foil bag. We can't take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us. But somewhere along the course of the past century or so, as the great machinery of pleasure came online, turning out products that, however pleasurable, suffer increasingly from the ills of mass manufacture -- spurious innovation, inferior materials, alienated labor, and an excess of market research -- that intention came to seem suspect, unworthy, and somehow cold and hungry at its core, like the eyes of a brilliant comedian. Lunch counters, muffler shops, dinner theaters, they aim to please; but writers? No self respecting writer literary genius [!] . . . would ever describe [the writer] self as primarily an "entertainer." An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing "She's a Lady" to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underpants up onto the stage.

Yet entertainment . . . remains the only sure means we have of bridging . . . the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-[or more]way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection. . . .

(xv-xvi)







* in the introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2005: Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines eds., Michael Chabon and Katrina Kenison (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)