gender and VINELAND

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Thank you for your decent, if Canadian response, Vaska.  I know all about your 
*Thanksgiving* up there.  Hope it was a good one.  I will try to point out your conceptual 
blinders when I have more time.  I strongly agree w/ you respecting the difficulty of doing 
a stylistc capture of VINELAND.  Maybe after the holidays we can pick up this idea.  No ad 
feminum/hominum.  I like all you Great White Northerners ('cept the one I used to be 
espoused with--another tale for another time).  And I enjoy snide but not unfriendly 
jabs.(I accidentally wrote *habs*--a Canadian joke!)  Your riposte was pretty funny.

john m


>
>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
>
>