The Last Word on Vidal

[Murthy Yenamandra]

Paul Mackin writes:
> Aside from Vidal for a moment, has anyone besides me (and Rodney
> obviously) been troubled by the fact that so much of our own
> discussion is a little on the order of fan-club-type stuff and not very
> . . .er . . . critical?

As Salinger said somewhere, all you need in the way of literary
criticism is to list your favorite books - I guess we all know what we
like!

> I devoutly beleive that what Pynch (and the rest of us) need is a
> little bit of criticism from the OTHER direction.

There have been occasional attempts to criticize Pynchon's books that
were not the standard fan-club-type stuff (about the women in Vineland,
for instance), but they didn't lead to all out wars, partly because TRP
is hip and ironic enough to avoid overdetermination of his purposes.
What we don't need is pseudo-criticism on the order of
I-am-just-a-regular-guy-who-doesn't-understand-this-complicated-shit.
There is enough boring stuff on this list about Real Guys Vs. Academics.

Murthy

-- 
Murthy Yenamandra, Dept of CompSci, U of Minnesota. mailto:yenamand at cs.umn.edu
    "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time can not decay
     I'm junk, but I'm holding up this little wild bouquet
     Democracy is coming to the USA" - Leonard Cohen