Paleface Pynchon?

[Dave Meury]

>Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 05:51:01 -0500
>From: Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
>Subject: Paleface Pynchon?

>http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/042200modern-novel.html


Concerning pale-red Pynchon:  It does not surprise me that M&D has been 
remaindered even if it weren't for the accounting constraints pointed out 
by "Dudious."  I have bought more used copies of GR than I can remember 
exactly (always looking to share with friends, though I regret having given 
away a couple of first-edition hardbacks).

But I think Pynchon is still a little too demanding for a culture that has 
resurrected professional wrestling and roller derby, that thrills to 
perversion du jure topics on talk show / chair-throwing exhibitions, 
political debate represented by ad-hominem shouting matches, TV 
documentaries approaching the level of snuff films, Howard Stern's farting 
contests,. . . it goes on-and-on.  Of course, citing such identifies me as 
a neurotic prude and, anyway, doesn't Pynchon's work have its share of 
crudeness?  A-and what about Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, among dozens 
of other culturally renowned authors one could name?

But it seems to me that this problem of rejecting the excluded middle 
covers many subject areas.  The truths of the world as ontologically 
concrete facts versus the world as experienced are often seen as contraries 
like light being either particle or wave -- can't be both, can it?  Maybe 
someone can fill us in on the transcendental unity of apperception. 
 (Terrance?)

Ironically, attachment to one side diminishes it, certainly from our unique 
vantage point.  " About which one cannot speak, one must remain silent." 
 True enough in the context of the neat philosophical landscape as laid out 
in the Tractatus but impossible in the morass we really inhabit  -- "not a 
disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into."

All feeling versus all intellect.  Low culture versus high culture (how 
could we identify either without the other?).  Howard's "end" versus 
_Howard's End_  (actually, I haven't read Howard's End but I couldn't 
resist the kute korrespondence).

Pale-red sounds like "half-baked" to me, caught in that middle ground, a 
zone neither fully Apollonian nor Dionysian.  Nonetheless, it's in that 
no-man's land where we all find ourselves to have been all along, a mixture 
of the mechanical, conceptual, design-making "realities" with the 
biological, emotional, organically-branching ones -- some of which we 
pretend not to acknowledge.

Before the flames begin, ("you elitist asshole, blah, blah, blah") let me 
say that I don't particularly care what people want to consume as their 
entertainment as long as I am free to choose my own.  It's O.K. to be a 
couch potato -- or not.  And, anyway, I admit to watching my share (hell, 
more than my share) of mind-corroding TV and movies and to reading my share 
of formula fluff.  But thinking is a temptation I try to indulge now and 
again, however short my efforts fall  -- premature Brennschluss, you know.

Let's see, now: delete or send?  delete or send?  uh-oh . . .