Pirate's batman

[Paul Mackin]

By 1973, 'stupid' jokes and 'awful' puns were nothing an over-40
critic--not to say an over-40 general reader like me--would have
had to be ashamed of 'getting'--even without extensive exposure to
Finnegans Wake.

As to the danger of calling P's seriousness into question, the sure
sign of a lack in _that_ quality is when things start seeming 
'serious'. This rule applied in 1973 and was understood by
people born many long years earlier.

It takes time for names like postmodern, etc, to get attached to
what had been lurking there for some time.

Anyway . . 

					P.

On Sun, 22 Sep 1996, Jeffrey Meikle wrote:

(cut)

> What do you do with an author who writes such
> moving, evocative, heartrendingly serious prose and then immediately
> undercuts it and calls his whole enterprise into question with such utterly
> stupid jokes?  Clearly his seriousness must be a put-on as well.  That's
> why so few people who were over the age of, say, 40, when GR was published,
> have ever been able to read it.  They were born on the wrong side of the
> great 1950s-60s cultural divide (which goes way beyond a "generation gap").