Keeeeeesy now, foax....

[Andrew Dinn]

Jan Klimkowski clambers through the wreckage:

> "Notion" is a wonderful book to read, in the way that Stone's "Dog Soldiers" 
> engages and makes you keep turning those pages, and in the way that "The 
> Recognitions" doesn't. [...] As has been mentioned, TR is not a pleasure to 
> read first time.

Sorry to disagree, Jan, but I loved every line of Gaddis 1st time
round and am just as happy on my 2nd run. And I ain't no academician.

[preference for unreliable critics acknowledged, agreed, and
hell... recommended]

> [...] I prefer their opinion to that of some AssProf 
> trying to think up a way of integrating Kesey into a grand and marginal 
> tradition of American literature in order to extend his tenure by a coupla 
> terms which the only Kesey litcrit I've read really stank of.

Whatever the motive, taht's not to deny that there may be some value
in integrating author X into a grand and maybe not so marginal
tradition of American literature. For example, I'd recommend anyone
reading Pynchon to go back to e.g. Melville's `The Confidence Man'
(never you mind what Wanda said, read between or beyond her lines, as
necessary). The important point (which I think you are making) is that
such comparison should not be used to marginalise and trivialise
authors like Kesey or Pynchon. Any comparison should be because it
serves to amplify the virtues of their writing, not because it is an
entrance requirement (lit-critters are supposed to disseminate
authors' insights not vet them). There are too many virility tests
already for aspiring authors to include becoming a DWM amongst them.

> PS re Pynchon and sf, it has of course been rumoured that, immediately 
> post-GR, TP was writing an sf novel as well the Mason-Dixon book.  And in 
> the 1984 Luddite article he writes that the next great challenge will come 
> "when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, 
> molecular biology and robotics all converge".  TP also seems to have read 
> quite a bit of sf.  However, my sense is that the incursions from other 
> worlds in his works have at least as much to do with surrealism, the 
> blurring of lines produced by the Tube/popular culture, and the various 
> western mystical traditions whose legacy can be seen in Kabbalism, the 
> Golden Dawn and the Blandian fate of Masonry.

The thing about Pynchon is that he doesn't try daft tricks like
twisting one of the laws of physics or assuming some close, but not
there yet, technological breakthrough and then speculate about the
*future* consequences for `our society'. He puts his knowledge of
science to the service of *past* or *present* social and political
analysis - past or present in place, as is. It's this localised
bending of specific rules contrasted with the utmost rigidity in
rendering the remaining topology which makes most SF so naff. I mean
once you've thrown one law out the window you might as well have fun
with the others too. But old SF tries so damn hard to be serious about
everything, so it tinkers with every little consequence and derives
every detailed, dreary, ludicrous conclusion. Is this maybe where
cyberpunk has scored over previous SF in that it doesn't waste so much
time doing scientific and technological bookkeeping and works harder
at presenting a distorted view of the present than a potential view of
the future? Just wait 'til SF catches up with the past then!


Andrew Dinn
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O alter Duft aus Maerchenzeit / Berauschest wieder meine Sinne
Ein naerrisch Heer aus Schelmerein / Durchschwirrt die leichte Luft