Pleasure is not guilty
While Oliver Burkeman's column today appears to be about the canard that denying oneself small treats in the presents means that Some Time In The Future you will be able to afford to buy your own place, it's actually and more interestingly about the value of small pleasures, and that thing of things that promise to be indulgent pleasures but don't actually follow through.
I'm not saying it's the saddest story I know or anything as morbid as that, but there is something very lowering about deciding upon some small self-indulgence and then finding that the delicious dessert-thing is in fact rather dry and stodgy, or the frothy reading is unreadable.
And more on the problem of pleasure and how it is seen as less, and how writing about it with any personal application is liable to be seen as smug: as expressed by Adam Gopnik in this interview: [I]f you write about your desperate desire for the forbidden, well, that’s literature. But if you say we have basically been going pretty well for 30 years it is not. It’s partly because happiness is a hard thing to write and unhappiness is easier to write.
Alas, I cannot find online the interview with Peter Bradshaw that is in the print edition of today's Guardian, in which we find he had never reviewed a film before falling into the job, had read English at Cambridge in the days before film studies (I rather doubt this, but concede that this field of study was probably unknown on the banks of the Cam), and we feel that this explains a lot. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2697402.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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