gender and VINELAND

[Vaska]

Mascaro strikes back:

>Vaska firmly distances from my attempt at concurrence.  I love it when you 
>think you're agreeing w/ somebody and they come back and say, you know,
>*that is not it at all/that is not what I meant at all* or something.  I
>was pretty fuzzy in my comment, granted, but please, no lectures about
>incubating daddy frogs or smart eggs that do the choosing.  I wasn't
>talking at all about biology.  I was talking about difference.  

I know; I just couldn't resist throwing in that bit about some particularly
"maternal" male fauna.  I still part company from you on the
assumption/claim that "masculine" and "feminine" are terms that denote
difference as such.  

>I should have used yin and yang or some other duality. 

What on earth for?  After all, you brought up a whole list of adjectives and
verbs in your previous posting that do describe different qualities/states
of being/actions with a great deal more distinctiveness and nuance that any
yin/yang pair could.  Which is part of the point I'm trying to make.  Also,
the traditional split of qualitities along the yin/yang lines, although
purportedly transcended by the overall Taoist scheme, fully plays into the
sexist worldview characteristic of most non-Western cultures and amply
represented within several Taoist schools of thought.  For an inside look at
this, how about LiYu's 17th-century classic _The Carnal Prayer Mat_.  Or am
I lecturing again?


"And don't imagine for an instant you have escaped your own dualistic
blinders in your conceiving of the problem." 

You'd be doing an act of favour to me to point out where exactly you see
those in what I've said so far.  No need to turn a disagreement into an ad
feminem/ad hominem sling match.  

"What I also realize is that I misread your VINELAND remark--you were
talking about content and I was talking about style (another double-bind!);
you were talking about specific statements, dicta, theories presented by the
text and I was talking about the flavor, the motion the surface 
feel of the text."

True enough: I did not respond to that point at all although I do agree
(see, we concur on something, after all!) that the very writing in
_Vineland_, the rhythms of its prose, the complexity of the syntactical
arrangements, the sinuousness of Pycnhon's thought in many parts of the text
marks a development from what we find in _GR_.  I've been looking at the
novel's linguistic texture very closely and, stylistically speaking, it
pretty well defies any kind of totalizing analysis.  

"I can see how this misalignment could put all further talk between us at
cross purposes."

Hope not.  Sincerely.

"Anyway, chide on, as long as you continue to be *snide but not in a 
seriously unfriendly way*; but please warn me if you decide to become 
seriously unfirendly.  Happy Thanksgiving; enjoy pulling that poor old Tom
Turkey leg."

We had our Thanksgiving here in Canada a few weeks ago, actually, so happy
holidays to you and all the other list members in the States.

Vaska