meshugginah posts

[MantaRay at aol.com]

Just to finish up:

>Despite what you say, historians do use fictional works as descriptive of a
>time.

Descriptive yes, not authentic representations of....

>Fiction is often political propaganda.

Exactly, so it's hard for it to be purely historical. Its tainted with the
biases of the age.

>It affects the way people think
>about real-world issues and how they act on them. 

All texts do this...

>Pynchon's works do provide
>a very accurate description of certain states of mind that were and are
>typical of our time. 

No, Pynchon's works provide accurate descriptions of states of mind, period.
That's why I read him. I could give a fuck less whether the 60s, WWII, or
Mason and Dixon are accurately represented. I'm looking for the thought
processes, the criticisms of organizations, the interactions, etc. Yiddish
dialect goes right out my ass, could care less. 

The rest of it is not very accurate in a historical
>sense. Some of it is even damaging, as in his drug gluttony scenes in
>Gravity's Rainbow. Mascaro took me to task for even mentioning drugs when
>talking about Pynchon's work. He felt this was politically uncool from the
>drug using perspective. But it's OK for Pynchon to draw these absurdly
>skewed and often ugly caricatures of drug users that have less merit than
>Cheech & Chong and none of their warmth?

Mascaro was wrong, who cares? Damaging? I don't think so. Drug gluttony is
hardly inaccurate. Who's he supposed to be responsible to here? You? Drugs
are fair game, like anything else. If TRP thinks they were damaging, then so
be it. I think you're guilty of confining him to the 60s, Jules. Just because
his attitudes toward things does not reflect the period in which he was
writing (as you suggest) does not mean his works are damaging.

>You're quite resentful about us Sixties types telling you that we tried to
>change the world and failed. How do you think we feel when someone like
>Thomas Pynchon is included among us? 

Well, I never did include him among you all. And if other people do, real litc
rits will laugh them off the stage. Any person wih a brain in his/her head
knows that writing transcends time, that's part of its appeal. Confining
writers or filmmakers to periods negate half of what they were trying to do
in their works. 

>He's not even as close as Joan Didion
>or Tom Wolfe, 

Two self-absorbed writers who bore the fuck out of me, precisely because they
are trying ONLY to capture those times, leaving nothing for the rest of us...

>I am not criticizing Pynchon as an artist. 

Yes, you are. Whether you like it or not. You said that the case could be
made for him being a "bad" writer, whatever that means.

>I am informing those who consider
>him some kind of historian that he is a primary source only sui generis,
>that is of himself and not of the world he portrays. 

Jester himself, or was it Doug, said he grew up in similar surroundings and
Vineland was totally accurate. So its your word against his, and now the
point is lost among all of this. And you're not informing anyone of anything,
you're basing your judgment of a work on a personal experience, without
conidering the work itself, what it does, who it critiques, which is usually
the reason I give a student a C over an A. 

In a Shakespeare class last semester, some idiot wrote a paper saying that
Shakespeare misappropriated Christian beliefs in the Merchant of Venice. I
gave him a D. He said real Christians would never have been mean to Shylock,
so Shakespeare got it all wrong. He missed the point entirely, as I think you
are. 

>In these novels and
>short stories he captured some of the spirit of our time at the expense of
>its historical reality. 

Here we go again...

>You don't think that matters because you weren't
>part of that historical reality. I was.

For the last time, Jules, this is not the issue. The mere fact that I don't
care about the 60s historical reality means that it's not bad writing.

>You don't like what People magazine
>does to people. 

I don't think People mag does anything to people that they don't do to themsel
ves. Morons buy it, morons read it. I don't do either, therefore it's none of
my business what morons do with their money and time. 

>To me, Thomas Pynchon is the literary version of People and
>uses pretty much the same techniques. People is exquisitely well done from a
>technical sense. That doesn't mean it can't be criticized for what it does
>in a political sense. The same goes for Thomas Pynchon.

This is an empty criticism; give me some specifics. I hate when people do
this, throw out a criticism with no support. 

MantaRay, who's done with this thread