Personal Scatologies

[David Casseres]

That Henry sez

>Maybe the problem isn't too many academics. Maybe it's too few 
>blue-collar working class stiffs like Steely and me. 

Could be.  But you know, I've railed for years about how our literature 
has been taken over, to its detriment, by the academies.  However, 
reading this list -- the only reading of literary criticism I've done in 
thirty years outside of book reviews in such venues as The Nation -- has 
made me put a finer point on it.

Academics on this list have given me an awful lot of good new insights 
into Pynchon and into other writers too.  After all, people who get paid 
full-time to read, and think about it, and talk about it, and teach about 
it, and write about it, are going to come up with some stuff that 
blue-collar stiffs wouldn't, or tech weenies like me either.  And vice 
versa, of course, but no one would dare to say right out loud that 
working stiffs and computer jockeys should shut up about literature.  
Think about it.

So actually I think there's nothing wrong with literary criticism living 
mostly in the academies.  That's where the funding is.  When there's 
another venue for critics to make a living in (might be the internet, 
some day, some way) then things will be different.

The thing that troubles me is the capture of the novelists, poets, etc. 
by the academy.  It, too, is forced by our economic system, and the 
20th-century spectacle of novel after novel after novel *about being a 
university professor* is truly one the more hideous effects of 
capitalism.  For most of them, it's that or Hollywood.  Feh.  Only a tiny 
few manage to live outside the Grove and outside the whorehouse and still 
write books for a living, and even for them the day-job is a part of life 
-- didn't Pynchon write Lot 49 while working as a tech writer for Boeing?

Speaking of The Nation, check out the current issue.  Inside front cover 
carries an extremely relevant cartoon with *direct reference to Pynchon!*



Cheers,
David