Pynchon--glamour grudges? (fwd)

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 28 Jan 2000 JBFRAME at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > In a message dated 01/28/2000 11:23:18 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> > pmackin at clark.net writes:
> >
> > << This reminds me, there was something back in the 80s called the "grudge
> >  look" somewhat popular among teenager girls or thereabouts. >>
> > That was "Grunge", not grudge.
> 
> That was popular too :-)
> 
>                 P.




As Paul M. and I stumbled about trying to figure out what
"Grudge/Grunge Glamour" might have to do with VL, it
occurred to me that of all the intellectual virtues (As
Aristotle calls them) associated with our thinking brains,
the most passive is the virtue of knowing the correct
answer. "Correct answers may vary," Paul said, after writing
a brief but insightful post on utopia and dystopia. Knowing
the right answer requires no decisions, involves no real
risks, and makes no real demands. It is "automatic" and
rather thoughtless. None of us has the right answer when it
comes to TRP. That's as it should be, otherwise, what the
Hell are we wasting our time for. Moreover, knowing the
right answer is simply overrated.  If I have learned
anything in my too many years in classrooms, it is that Not
knowing is a virtue. Educators, Philosophers, Politicians,
we might add Literary Critics, Critical Theorists and so on,
sometime forget that the "right answer" is not worth nearly
as much as "figuring it out." "Show your work or you won't
get full credit," is what a math teacher might say to a
class today.  Father Fagan would jab his finger into my
chest, accuse me of cheating and then to add insult to
injury, he would press me with a Communion Plate--
rigorously iron out the creases his hammering digit had
raised on my cassock, not to mention the swelling on my
scrawny chest. Today, Father Fagan might be accused of
pedagogical malpractice, but if he could speak from the
grave, I'm certain that he would accuse today's test
obsessed education machinery of pedagogical paranoia.
Speaking of paranoia, in our current GRGR chapters, indeed
throughout the entire book, Pynchon applies (extending and
merging as is his bent) numerous clinical and
psychoanalytical concepts, adapting and imposing his own
creative patterns of these, in accordance with the
cultural-- historical, religious, sociological,
philosophical, literary, aesthetic-criteria he wishes to
emphasize. The most interesting, for me anyway, and I think
the most extensive, are the theological/paranoia(s). 

Grudge/Grunge? How was the word "Paranoia" used in everyday
language during the 1960s in the U.S.? 

Also, I think there is only one narrator of the Candy Drill
episode and I think that narrator dominates the current GRGR
chapters. Is this narrator more self conscious, perhaps more
paranoid than some of the others? 

Question: Last night I watched a British Sitcom on the Tube.
A Television repairman got lost and then warped back in time
(from the 1990s to the 1940s), or did he? He went into a
public bar, where he was accused of being a German spy by a
the bar-man. He nearly got lucky with the bar-man's daughter
and he was nearly killed by a German rocket. Can any one
tell me the name of this sitcom? After this program I
watched another, (my son loves these British sitcoms, "
'Absolutely Fabulous' Dad, it's ABFAB!") "Red Dwarf," in
which a robot defeated another robot by causing him to
malfunction due to a some "metaphysical dichotomy." It seems
the robots believe in a silicon heaven, where all the dead
calculators go when they die and where "the iron lies down
with the lamp." Funny stuff. 

"self-criticism's an amazing technique, it shouldn't work
but it does
"   GR.411


BY ERICA GOODE New York Times

There are many incompetent people in the world. But a
Cornell University
study has shown that most incompetent people do not know
that they are
incompetent. People who do things badly, according to David
A. Dunning, a
professor of psychology at Cornell, are usually supremely
confident of
their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who
do things well.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully
self-assured,
the researchers believe, is that the skills required for
competence often
are the same skills necessary to recognize competence. The
incompetent,
therefore, suffer doubly, the researchers -- Dunning and
Justin Kruger,
then a graduate student -- suggested in a paper appearing in
the December
issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
``Not only do
they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate
choices, but their
incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote
Kruger, now an
assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and
Dunning.

This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the
researchers said, helps
explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in
telling jokes that
are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the
market -- and
repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to
continue holding
forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign
strategy.