Like the political discourse, the cultural conversation is increasingly dominated by horse-race reporting, which, entertaining though it can be, ultimately threatens the only force able to preserve the always precarious artistic quality of movies, music and all our other down-and-dirty and exalted pleasures: an independent audience.
As he carried her upstairs to bed her face had a queer, exalted look of pleasure and of triumph.
But it's also because, from the moment the show begins, with a salutation to the working day by the employees of a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest, "She Loves Me" is a sustained reminder of the pleasures of exalted ordinariness.
Designers from Dolce & Gabbana to Trussardi have exalted healthy living and celebrated the pleasures of abundance by heaping their runways with fruits and vegetables.
Such practitioners as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, to say nothing of the highly commercial Edgar Wallace and Mickey Spillane, have given much pleasure and offended only the most exalted literary canons.
If nothing else, diners will have the pleasure of knowing that their next meal, however humble or exalted, will taste terrific and seem like a bargain.
He replies that the pleasure of salvation that Pascal's Wager countenances is "of the most exalted kind", and that if seeking it counts as greed at all, then it is "the manifestation of a noble greed that is to be acclaimed" (85).
Some of the pleasures of the film, directed by Eugène Green, are undeniably touristic, but this is tourism of an especially exalted kind, saturated with literary and historical references and infused with a melancholy intensity that is both seductive and strange.
They repudiated most French movies on the grounds of taste; they were exalted cinematic hedonists for whom film was a kind of primordial rock and roll, a secret code of ecstatic pleasures that defined their very generation.
