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waterdeep . . . exegesis

>np: waterdeep - sink or swim

I saw Waterdeep at C Stone last year and they drove me CRAZY!  
Aaaaargh!!!!  

1) Their lead singer is not their finest vocalist.
2) He talks too much.  Way way way way way too much.
3) Let that girl sing more.  IN fact.  Let her sing all the time.

These were my reactions.  I know a lot of people, actually, love this
band.  So.  I'll accept that I have an idiosyncratic position on Wdeep
for a lostee.  But.  Yeah.  I heard a little CD by them later where . . .
the girl; only got one song (I think, or none), and  . . . they actually
included large stretches of that guy talking.  aaaaargh!!  

I'm done now.


The B said:

>something like: 'wonderful things in the bible i see, wondrous things
put 
>there by you and by me.'  when interpreting literature like the bible, 
>plato, shakespeare, etc, it's easy to read in stuff that 's not really 
>intended by the author because it fits your fancy.  granted this only 
>applies with literature which was written with a specific argument or
with 
>something specific in mind.

Wouch.  (I just made that word up.  Anybody like it?)  Umm.

So, as I did yesterday, I'm recommending "Is There a Text in This Class?"
by Stanley Fish.

From one angle I thinnk Brian is totally correct here.  Especially if
you're doing something like trying to reconstruct an ancient religious
(or philosophoical) text, it's important to try to reconstruct the
cultural situation and come as close in to the intended meaning as
possible.  Now.  That will come from the text, which is the main thrust
of what B is sayin'.  But it will also come from our understanding of the
culture, the cultural impetus for the writing, the cultural screens for
interpretation.  Which B made room for,I think.  But that's not in the
text itself.  It's in our understanding of where the work came from.

But then:

> i think of shakespeare and the bible etc, and realize that the authors
were trying to >communicate something very specific. 

Putting Paul the Apostle and Will the Bard in the same same same boat is
prolly not something where I can zig with your zag.

I wd argue that Shakespeare, for certain, wasn't trying to communicate
something "very specific."  Because if you could have just said it, you
wouldn't have put it into poetry.  There is a tendency in some circles to
turn literature into a statement.  "Therefore Hamlet means ________." 
But Hamlet is nothing so specific.  It's incredibly multifaceted,
polyvocal, etc etc etc.  And so a million different people will have a
million different reactions to it.

Susan Sontag wrote an interesting article called "Against Interpretation"
in response to a period in lit crit where finding "the answer" was too
much of a fetish.  She goes rather too far, but she makes a good point
about, basically, our gut reaction to art being the most important thing.

And this is where I start with art.  What did it do to me?  Then I ask
why.  Otherwise, exegesis can lead me to conclude that a text does
something that it didn't really do.  Because the piece is more than the
the sum of its textual pieces.

Third article recommendation: "The Death of the Author," by Roland
Barthes.  He's French and eccentric and a little apocalyptic in tone, but
he makes good points about conntextuality.  Then read "Structure, Sign,
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and "Differance" by
Jacques Derrida, if you're up to it.  (These are primarily
recommendations for Brian, since he's interested in the interpretation
issue from an academic point of view.)

>   the same goes for MOST musical pieces.  when bob dylan wrote 'the
times 
>they are changing' there is a specific context which we must understand
to 
>really catch what is being said.

The specific reason for writing the song is one thing.  It is not the
meaning of the song, though.  That's why revolutionaries in different
situations will be able to identify with it later on.  Knowing all the
historical referents adds richness to your understanding of the song. 
But textual explication does not answer for the emotional impact pf the
song, and that emotional impact is what makes that song meaningful for
people who are not in Dylan's original context.

I wd prolly argue that the BIble has something like this going on, too. 
You can understand all the references, but there is an emotional and
spiritual reaction that completes the meaning.  (See doctrines regarding
faith and the holy spirit.)

Now . . . this is not the same as saying that whatever anyone thinks
about a text or piece of art is just fine and just as correct as what
anyone else has to say.  Certain versions of that drive me crazy, too. 
But, again, see Stanley Fish.

love and stuff,

Fred
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