Feelings shmeelings

[koganbot]

Tom asks over on Blue Lines "Why don't reviewers write about how they feel?" I don't necessarily buy that they don't, but here's my response:

Shortage of adjectives, with the available ones lacking precision; and the experience itself lacks precision, with "feeling" itself not being any more precise than other broad words - such as "influence," which you recently disparaged on another tumblr. "Feeling" may not be the correct word, anyway. E.g., hearing a melody as "sad" does not necessarily mean that it made you feel sad. "Feeling" is actually something of a buzzword. Also, feelings are - incorrectly - considered private and supposedly carry the supposed ineffability of the private; whereas what play socially in one's interaction with others are one's opinions. And expressions of "feeling" play as opinions in the social world, anyway.

I wrote about these concerns back in The Rules The Game #3. A moral of that piece is that we should, indeed, talk about "feelings" (or whatever) but, in doing so, should examine them critically, with a mind towards when to change one's "feelings," rather than taking one's feelings as inalterable bedrock.

[Martin and Don and I discussed that column a little bit here. The column is one of my favorites, by the way.]

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I have a similar problem with talking about abstracted "feelings" as I do talking about abstract "taste" -- everything can be better understood, regardless of how seemingly personal it is, and more often than not "taste" AND "feelings" are invoked as conversation-enders -- or, perhaps more recently, as sly conversation diverters, so that we can talk about Taste or Feelings without having to talk about taste/feelings as it applies to X.

Anyway, most reviews I read have feeling dripping off the page/screen, even if the reviewer isn't saying "I felt ____," or if you have to do a lot of parsing for subtext (I'm not convinced that subtextual feeling is any more or less valid in writing than textual feeling, though).

Here are a few last sentences of the Jukebox track up right now (for Alien Beat Club).

"If the music was less bland, this might actually be great instead of the good end of tolerable."

"That’s a really dumb attitude to have in a relationship: no compromise, ever! Hope you enjoy being single."

"But while this is pleasant, underneath the Stargate-by-the-numbers, there’s not much going on here. 'We both know that, so why should we stay?' Exactly."

Etc. All of these are written in descriptive terms, but I get feeling(s) from each of them -- boredom, anger or frustration, mild pleasure. And in each of them I could dig further into the feelings and I could always ask why they felt this way (maybe getting "deeper" feelings or changing them entirely or not modifying them fundamentally at all); just depends on which exploration yields the better analysis. I imagine it would be more interesting to ask Martin why this attitude in pop is so repulsive to him than it would be to ask why Stargate-derivative production makes for mild pleasantness, say, but that depends on what the writer does next.

It's not so much that no one talks about their feelings (though perhaps it's not explicit), it's that when we (rockcrit types?) talk about feelings -- like when we talk about taste -- it can be easier to divorce those feelings and that taste from the object of our critical attention, sort of ironically underlining a belief that feeling or taste as expressed personally or privately is somehow divorced from criticism, is free-standing "inside us" until we make the conscious choice to use it for analysis (which just isn't true). Usually this just sucks all the real feeling, and all the interest that genuine tastes might generate, out of the conversation.

[koganbot]

Thank you. This puts into words my whole impatience with this subject - well, not with the subject, whatever it is, but with how it tends to go nowhere.

[koganbot]

Also, the Martin I refer to (Skidmore) is different from the Martin you refer to (Kavka).