Maddox, Chomsky, TRP, & LeCarre

[Steelhead]

Here goes.

hg dismisses Tom Maddox, thusly: "read a story called "Snake-Eyes" recently
- pretty boring, pedestrian porridge, full of prime time TV cliches, I
thought; maybe there's better stuff out there."

Hey, hg, mail order a copy of Halo, right now. Or there's a great short story,
that's been widely anthologized (perhaps even in Cybershades, can't
remember) titled Love Among the Robots (or something like that). Maddox's
prose has a purity and intelligence to it that makes some of Sterling's and
Gibson's best stuff look trite and contrived by comparison. Maddox also
wrote a kickass dissertation on Gravity's Rainbow, titled Rocket Blues, if
I recall. Out of all of the sadly named cyberpunks, only Maddox and John
Shirley seem destined to write "big books."

Incredulous, hg exclaims: "John LeCarre? r u serius??"

Of course I'm serious. I can't think of more than 5 or 6 contemporary
American writers who are in LeCarre''s league. You pomo heads ought to
give the "popular" writers as much respect as you give "popular science"
(like chaos theory), "pop philosophy" (decon, semiotics, on and on) "pop
art" (Warhol and Lichtenstein), and "pop music" (Lotion, Pearl Jam--at
least they rock, Portishead).

hg PS's: "I may be way off, but it seems to me that you are under the
impression that TRP has some kind of obligation to produce a certain
kind of work; also, that you are labouring under the Chomskyan
illusion that there is some kind of truth out there that is being
kept from us, and that writers such as TRP should help us find -
correct me if I'm wrong...."

You're right, sort of. I don't believe Pynchon is under any "obligation"
to produce a certain kind of work, one that would--you imply--please
my own radical political and aesthetic sensibility. The only obligation
he has is to the integrity of his own work. Let's face it Vineland--which
has wrongly been interpreted as some sort of thematic deviation from
past works (especially off-base, in my view, is the lunatic idea that VL is
more hopeful than past writings:  this reading can only be true if
TRP has completely lost his sense of irony, which even I don't believe has left
him yet)--doesn't live up to the standards of his past writings or the
promise of Vineland itself. Vineland aspires to be the NoCal sequel to
CoL49 (hinted at in TRP's intro to Slow Learner, where he tries to disown
that troublesome story). But it's nowhere close. Indeed, it is just more
confused, more sluggishly written, more superficial, more in need of a
serious editor,someone (obviously Ray Roberts ain't that man) who would be
willing to tell the master that he outta go back an take another crack or
two at this thing.

Of course, I'm a devote of Noam Chomsky. So is Pynchon (do a close read
of the Tinasky letters, Vineland, and GR--Chomsky's stuff is embedded throughout
each.) Indeed, it can easily be argued that Chomsky and Edward Herman are
as much an influence on TRP as McLuhan and Norbert Weiner. More, I'd wager.
Pynchon's no relativist when it comes to politics, economics,
human rights, the environment. I know where his sympatheties are; indeed,
they're crucial to his work. Of course, many of the most prominent pomo
critics (Frederic Jameson, excluded), try to strip this out of
Pynchon-crit, perhaps because so many of the wretched pomo/decon crowd
were/are Nazi symps
and closet fascists (LeMan, Derrida, Heidegger, etc...).

Do you deny there are secret histories out there, truths that are being kept
from us by the thought censors at the New York Times (not to mention the
smug Peter Jennings or the mumbled-mouthed Dan Rather)? The Times knew, for
example, that Allen Dulles was importing Nazi war criminals (rocket
scientists, "geneticists," SS officers, architects, munitions experts,
intelligence oerpatives, u.s.w.) to the US. The Times didn't report it. The
Times knew of the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia--Kissinger convinced
Scotty Reston not to publish the reports. They knew Reagan had alzheimers,
JKF and Bill Clinton were screwing around, They knew our boys offed Patrice
Lumumanda of the Congo and Allende in Chile (and why), knew of our
involvement in the genocide occuring in East Timor--mostly on behalf of US
corporations). Didn't make the papers when it would have mattered. Hell,
half the US foreign correspondents are CIA informants. Wake up...this kind
of sophisticated thought control by the powerbrokers of this country is
vital to any understanding of  Pynchon's writing.

Geeze, that's what makes TRP America's most important writer since
Faulkner, perhaps since Henry Adams (whose history of how Jay Gould
cornered the Gold Market--never mind his almost unread Chapters of Erie--is
a sadly neglected niche of Pynchon scholarship.)

Pynchon, like his intellectual soulmate Peter Mattheissen, writes about
things that matter, (love, nature, death, community, betrayal, promise,
oppression, dogs, rebellion, survival, rivers, addictions, redemption--the
shared epistemologies of everyday life, the ways we form, what the great
Levi-Strauss called, tiny solidarities to resist, create, connect, and
endure the baroque, mundane and often horrific the rhythms of history,) to
real people, That's what saves Pynchon--even at his worst, as in Vineland--
from the obscure academic fate of a Ronald Sukenik, Robert Coover, or
Gilbert Sorrentino (whose parodies of everyone from Joyce to Raymond
Chandler I quite like. But what the hell ever happened to Sorrentino--hey,
Kraft, are you out there? do you know?)

Oh yeah. You, like George Bush, Tipper Gore, and Bob Dole before you, take
a pot shot at Oliver Stone. Besides Scorsese and Coppola (Kubrick having
expatriated), name another contemporary American director who has even
dared to interpret recent American history. Stone's the Norman Mailer of
the American cinema, and I, for one, am damn glad he's making films like
JFK, Heaven and Earth, Nixon, Born on the 4th of July, Talk Radio, the
Doors, Salvador (who else would have touched that one, eh?) and even
Natural Born Killers.

Steely