blurbs for what?

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

I wrote:
>Some of the first books I was led towards by virtue of an "endorsement" by
>TP were 1970s works by Mary Beal and Marge Piercy.  It seems to me that
>there is very little of formal interest in these works.  So why would TP
>write favourably about them?

Richard Moorman responded:
>Define "formal interest."  What gives?  What about informal interest?

I also wrote:
>the obvious pattern that emerges is that TP is writing blurbs for
>books of a certain political complexion.

Richard Moorman responded:
>Is "political complexion" just typical British understatement or am I being 

>snitty?

I'm tempted to reply: define snitty.  But that would be a mite puerile of 
me, and kinda ironic, given my position on all of this.

My "formal interest" is, at bottom, a baiting of contemporary litcrit and 
the way it has rendered it possible to expend masses of energy on textual 
analysis whilst simultaneously impossible to engage in any political 
discussion which is not either: a) obvious; b) anaesthetised/rarefied out of 
existence.

And as for "political complexion", well, I've been sufficiently goaded: 
Beal's "Amazon One" is about a young countercultural group who engage on a 
bombing-of-Their-buildings spree (it's that ol' Weather Underground link 
again); Beal's "Angel Dance" is a pretty good "Lot 49" type book with 
FBI/CIA drug experiments as its starting point; Piercy's "Dance the Eagle to 
Sleep" is also about the 60s counterculture growing up and exploring its 
contradictions, and ends with Their bombs falling on Manhattan; Shetzline's 
"De Ford" is a journey through a hidden America, explicitly contrasting the 
streets and the country (and makes me think of the DT sailor in "Lot 49"); 
Matthiessen's relationship with nature shines through all his work; the 
protagonist of John Speicher's "Didman" has fought in WW2, Korea and Vietnam 
and finally decides to shoot up the New York Stock Exchange - an act 
ostensibly terrorist and which for some reason always reminds me of Mexico 
pissing on Their meeting.  I could go on...

But I shall limit myself to a brief discussion of Sale's "SDS".  Sale 
explicitly talks of discovering hints of what he calls a "second 
government", a "very important nexus of power behind the acknowledged 
civics-text book instiutions", at work in Washington.  Indeed, he says 
"there are important operations going on beyond the reach of ordinary 
citizens or of party politics".  He also documents FBI and CIA infiltration 
of sixties student organisations, and Their lovely dirty tricks campaign.

As Bob reminds us, Sale was a friend of TP's at Cornell.  Sale also 
commissoned Pynchon's Watts piece, when Editor of NYTMagazine.  [For those 
who've asked me for references: "A Journey into the Mind of Watts", NYT 
Magazine, 12/6/66; "Is is OK to be a Luddite?", NYT Book Review, 10/10/84].

Finally, on another aspect of all this, I wrote:
>I love the
>notion (which Paul Maliszewski reminded us of) that Barthelme was able to
>sneak stuff from his dreams past customs agents to the other side, a
>challenge which  Pynchon suggested few other writers were rising to.   For
>me, this ties in to recent comments about Pynchon's attitude to 
otherworldly
>phenomena being more far complex than most of the litcrit is able to 
permit.
>

To which Richard responded:
>Cool.

This being digital, it's hard to know how to take this.  Except to opine, as 
I have several times on the list already, that TP's knowledge and use of 
Golden Dawn and Tarot material is far more complex than the litcrit I've 
seen suggests.

jan

PS Oh - a-and it isn't a Resistance, it's a War