Review: The Decline of Pleasure

The Decline of Pleasure by Walter Kerr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

May I make a small, possibly prejudiced, exception of chess? Chess moves quietly and gently a few squares away from the insistent abstraction of cards. Its pieces are not only dimensional but often different from one another: one can feel a knight in his hand, and know it for a knight, as he cannot the ten of clubs. The enemy is downed not by a count but by a physical presence that whisks him, physically, from the board. The contest is spatial and deeply satisfying; it is fought visibly on a terrain. One does not tally in his head alone the possible threats to his victory; he looks at them on the board, using first his eyesight and then his imagination. Luckier still, the game is complex enough to require quite a long time to play, long enough in some instances to encourage forgetfulness of demands lying in wait on a desk. Chess is also quiet, encouraging silence around it. A degree of surrender is implicit in its ivory bones. One cannot but be sympathetic to Gerald Abrahams' claim, in The Chess Mind, that "whereas in many intellectual processes the mind is assisted by conceptual methods-i.e. by abstract ideas-in the mental activity which is Chess such assistance is at a minimum... In Chess the mind comes as near as possible to pure vision, to that spontaneous act of intuition which apprehends and controls processes and relationships without being forced to do so."

Kitsch
https://share.google/aimode/Kujl5VZjp...

One of these is the prevalence of kitsch. We have all heard, and often lent our voices to, the cry that has gone up in the second half of the twentieth century lamenting the omnipresence of the second-rate. And we know what we mean by kitsch: brightly-colored magazines that are all eye-catching pictures and easy-to-read captions; digests of digests; films as synthetic as the celluloid they are printed on; television that has been described as "chewing-gum for the eye"; music that fakes a sentiment buried with Franz Lehár or fakes a folk-song beat in the guise of creating something contemporary, indigenous, and appealing to teen-agers. We sometimes conceive that we live in the land of the blob: blobs of color, hoots of sound, zoom lenses, what the comedians call "grabbers." Surfaces leap at us like babies begging to be picked up; when they are picked up, they have no weight and no conversation, only a smile....

The Voices of Silence https://share.google/WEy0Tajd9ytvTd14D

Adam and Eve lost for themselves and all who preceeded them the great gifts which God had blessed them with. One of these was the throne over the animals. How can we judge their sense of communication with other animals. Most certainly they were able to conferse with these lower creatures. Then we must be aware of a degree of inttelligens to which these animals were capable of inhabiting. This is necessary before we can continue in this saga. Refering again to the Bible we aknolege that God banished Adam from the Garden of paradise. Now here we admit the only flaw in our tale. I am unable to explain the manner in which Adam managed to secure such inteligent but monstorus creatures. There were five of them and their names were such: Zeta, Balt, Nappricondos who was the strongest, Lestar who was the craftiest and Bareen, leader and oldest. Some prefer to associate them by initials though I will continue to use there full names. To return to Adam we find he has lost his great knowledge and also his great memory...."

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