Pynchon, Status Quo, Love on a desert island

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

Andrew raises a point of interest---
>
> 	What mythologies, I wonder, does Pynchon prop up?  Why have
> literary Americans, for instance, so readily elevated him to the status of
> Great Author?
>
>	Let me rephrase myself.
>	If some works of aesthetic distinction survive, and others vanish,
>surely those that last do so, in part, because they conform to one
>dominant ideology or another.  Obviously, Pynchon has established his
>credentials as a critic:  we personify the powers he questions as Them.
>But what Yes (in a whisper) balances his No In Thunder?  I assume he would
>not enjoy the acceptance he does -- from universities to popular culture
>-- if he did not prop up something.
>
>				Andrew Walser
>			

Andrew,

Perhaps, rather than proping something up, he disturbs something,
or balances something else. Or maybe to see the action clearly, we
might have to work through all these metaphores. Bloom, of course,
has one kind of answer about this sort of thing. 

Personally, I think I like to play Desert Island Disks once in a while, 
in my head---you know, which five books, records, pictures, 
whatever, would you take to a desert island if you had to be stranded 
there for a long, indefinite period of time. My lists change upon my 
mood when playing, but TRP is usually on the book list (in my case 
often with Whitman, Joyce, Blake, Dickens, Proust, Stevens, Shelly, Keats,
Tolstoy, Gaddis, Horace, Melville, Dr Johnson and Ovid. But 
who wants to know my booklist? We've all got our own.)

 From an academics point of view, okay you have to teach a 
fairly broad spectrum of people a few times a year each , but 
basically most people fall in love with a few books or authors 
or perhaps a movement, and concentrate their time and energy
there. We become mavens of her poems and his editing and
his novels and her stories. For each of us, maybe half-a-dozen
people if we're lucky are truly near to us, at the core of 
what we can teach, the core from which we learn.

I mean, life is not long. No one wants to put too much energy 
into projects that they  don't believe in: it becomes a pointless, mindless
 vaccum. So you choose. You choose what you love, and whom.

Now, why one or another person may love a work, 
an author, a movement---
there is a series of questions! 

And why one generation finds solace where
another finds repression---another series of questions. 

And these things are not static. Many authors thought of as
cannonical thirty years ago are barely read now; some which
 are read everywhere now may disappear in or near our lifetime.
Within our own lifetime we fall in and out of love with authors,
 and in and out of love with aspects of ourselves.  

At the moment, I am reading the works of Thomas Pynchon, and
do so with enourmous delight, confusion, discovery, excitement.

Yours, 
Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk