Paleface Pynchon?

[Seb Thirlway]

From: Dave Meury <dmeury at lioninc.com>
To: 'pynchon-l at waste.org' <pynchon-l at waste.org>


Pynchon Pale-Red definitely

>, many writers in that era became minimalists, withdrawing,
turtlelike, inside their own homes and heads. >Their characters
tended to speak in grudging nonsequiturs, and their spiky,
anorexic narratives

Spiky, anorexic: the last words you could use to describe GR or
M&D

>Music-inspired strategies surface in many pale-red works

If I could write as fast as I can play, I might thank my lucky
stars and realise (after the event) that I'd come up with
something a hundredth as good as GR.  Which is a jazz solo - one
of those ones by Coltrane that somehow manages to have form as
well as content.

Great link, thanks Terrance

>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?


A few good examples from Britain: a documentary on the woman who
had sex with (I can't remember, but it was over 200) men
contiguously and gained her place in the Guinness Book of
Records.

Another effort by the programme-makers "TV's Naughtiest Blunders"
will answer you "a-nd what" question satisfactorily.  (One of the
items on this was original footage of a football (soccer) match
with a streaker running across the pitch - ooh, that's really
redefined my sexual boundaries, and how).  Not that I'm
suggesting you actually watch it, assuming you're blessed with
reception of UK Channel 5.  Cruelty to strangers isn't my thing.

It's just the title: why that use of the word "naughty"?  This is
a British but not just British word, and in its definition you'll
find the answer to your question: Pynchon, Chaucer, Rabelais,
Shakespeare vs Naughtiness.  Not that I've read Rabelais, but
from Chaucer: it's all about a great belly laugh.

whereas "Naughty" is all about sniggering on the sofa - ooh we'd
never do that, would we darling, we're normal.  Fucking
adolescents.  I got a strange response the other week to
mentioning that I like Pynchon: "oh so you're a coprophile are
you?"  totally missed the point.  Not that you could ask for any
Yes answers, but how many on the list WILL and DO walk through
the White Visitation to eat shit (Pudding), play cross-dressed
Hansel and Gretel (Weissmann) "fuck the boy" (that discussion
about Weissmann and Enzian) or fall in love with a 12-year-old
(Tyrone on the Anubis - if that isn't some kind of falling in
love I don't know what is)?

(as if these precis's approach what those passages are about)

how many on the list are disturbed by these passages,
specifically by "I'm not into that, but... I could be...."?

sorry, your post struck a chord, and I've just seen
"Shakespeare's Birthday" on BBC1, a really great piece of film,
if you're not in the UK do watch it if it gets sold abroad - just
a short two-part drama, but it has that excluded middle.  So...
be a neurotic prude, get that razor out and tell the difference
between a belly-laugh and a teenage snigger, and enjoy all you
see.  BTW Private Eye which I think is on-line is one the finest
bullshit-detectors in the UK...

>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?)


Immanuel, your On-Line Guide to Wisdom, replies

This is all in a book I have to plug: Ray Monk's biography of
Bertrand Russell.  Never liked the guy when I had to study him,
seemed very much an ontological concrete facts sort of guy and
nothing else.  This book is beautifully written by a philosopher
who knows how to write (?que?). Someone who can finally give me
an inkling of what Principia Mathematica was all about while
being an entertaining read at the same time has to be worth a
mention.

Russell emerges as an incredibly complex character - not always
attractive at all - and I think always slightly scared of "the
word as experienced", looking to find the transcendental unity
wherever he could, or invent it where he couldn't.  Until he gets
involved with the anti-conscription movement during the 1st World
War, but that's as far as I've got.

So you have Bertrand Russell (world as ontologically concrete
propositions - or facts, so he thought, but then he realises,
with a respect for the truth as he sees it that has to be
admired, that Wittgenstein had gone further than he ever will -
and the account of their relationship is another wonderful bit of
the book - BTW I think Monk has done a biography of W as well)
pitted against

Ottoline Morell - world as experienced.

and, in a plot turn that I didn't know anything of and which
couldn't have been better if it had been written deliberately: DH
Lawrence.

The basic existing thing in ontology is the proposition
vs.
There will always be hate and conflict: it is a principle of
growth.

read it... reminds me of that Nietszsche bit where he accuses me
of throwing "grey conceptual nets" over reality - philosophers in
general are accused of dressing up a passing feeling or an
underlying obsession in technical terms.  here it's obvious
exactly where Russell's philosophy came from, and it doesn't
diminish him one bit.

(c) Ask Immanuel
http://www.konigsberg.com/immanuel
(I did make this up, but it'll probably be a real link by the
time I post this)

(by the way has anyone seen a PC version of the Kant Generator?
Great program, you feed in any text you like and it re-writes it
in the style of Our Immanuel.  There's a Derrida version as
well).

>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
nhabit  -- "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).


that this inkpot is on this table may symbolise that I sit on
this chair

actually I haven't read any Tractatus but would like to, as the
following may make clear to anyone who has read it, so don't jump
down my throat now....

that a farting contest occupies your TV screen for half an hour
may symbolise... anything you like.
meaning is certainly not fixed, and the obvious "this is really
the sort of stuff you want to watch, or at least someone thinks
so" is not the only meaning.

So, feeling vs intellect, and obviously I've given myself away
with that W. word - elitist arsehole, can't even decide whether
he likes a farting contest without bringing Wittgenstein into it,
right?  Wrong.  Just thought up that Kute Korrespondence for fun,
since, as TRP says, fun is good, control is bad (credit whoever
wrote that).  Farting contest?  might be in the mood for it some
days.  For W. and Russell frying their brains on the ontology of
logic was fun and more than fun   But they were both also
unbelievably moody and might have indulged in farting contests
when they were in the mood, though the details are lost to
history.  Maybe Russell got his victory, his "feeling of being
useful".  It's a nice thought.


>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 . . .
>
send.  glad you did





seb