Ah, well, I'd agree with Heraclitus there too, but I can go back to
that writing, or that recording of that music, or that thing on the
wall, & if, of course, my experience is always changing it still has
something to do with what went before...?
Now knowing a thing about cricket & not having spent much time with
baseball, I can't speak to those. The sports I do watch, sometimes
with pleasure sometimes not, well, I think the kind of surge of
wanting one team or person to win is different from what happens with
various arts. I wont say these emotions are lesser, on some 'hierarchy
of authenticity' but will suggest that they aren't exactly the same
(which might also be 'Heraclitan' of me). or example, the tension I
felt watching, say the diving the other night, & hoping that the
Canadian could pull off all his dives, is perhaps analogous to a
tension thriller authors would like to conjure in their readers, but
I'm not at all sure it's the same thing, the investment, etc, however
constructed...
Doug
On 19-Aug-08, at 3:44 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Hi Douglas - Well, I'd get all Heraclitan here and claim that you
> can't return to any poem, since it will be different next time! But
> I've argued this in depth before, in my poem _On Lyric_.
>
> I'm not sure how you distinguish between different kinds of feeling.
> It sounds like a kind of hierarchy of authenticity to me (art produces
> real feeling, sport produces the illusion of producing feeling). If
> meaning is what distinguishes sport from art, how is Swan Lake more
> (or less) meaningful than a game of cricket? (This is a real question,
> not a rhetorical gesture) - I have to say that the more I think about
> it, the less clear it seems to me -
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
A little planet blues, for the
deathwatch.
A season of rictus riffs.
Dennis Lee
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