thotz

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Yo,
                 Well it seems I've attracted a lot of static, like a 
lightening rod.  Some of this has been posted on list, and some off-list.  I 
don't see anything personal about any of it, so IMHO it would not be a breach 
of trust to post all of my Thoughts on the list proper.  So I will.
                  Rob Jackson (rj) takes me to task for not providing a "key" 
to TRP's writing.  I have already stated that there is no one overarching 
method, that there are many shifts in tone, techniques, point-of-view, 
satire, naturalism, etc. etc. that each five or six page section, like the 
candy drill, should be examined as a case unto itself.  I wish I had a recipe 
for you, like McHale, but alas I don't, Rob.  As to the licorice bazooka, I 
can only answer as Freud answered when he was queried about whether or not 
his chain cigar smoking was symbolic: "When you dream about cigars they are 
penises.  When I smoke 'em, they're cigars."  If you can make a case that 
Slothrop's sleeping with Darlene in the Candy Drill section proves that he is 
an "in the closet" gay man with his fears of asshole penetration signified by 
the licorice bazooka, have a try.
                Jody Porter.  What can I say Dude?  you got me there.  I 
guess I'll just have to give up my well-endowed faculty chair to win your 
respect.
                Paul Mackin, who, I assume from his postings is a good and 
just man, assumes that what I write about Pynchon assumes some sort of 
conspiracy theory.  He seems to feel that because he is a good and just man, 
and he has worked for the government, that every branch of the government is 
good and just, all the time.  Well, only this morning there was an article 
about how the U.S. government has admitted after fifty-five years, that the 
workers who assembled the early atomic bombs and became ill and died, were 
the responsibility of the government.  How many people knew about that, Paul? 
 Would you define that as a conspiracy?  How does a cover-up, or stonewalling 
differ from a conspiracy?  Would you say it was a normal event?  Like the 
file sipped in between the filing cabinets?  You know, a bureaucratic 
fuck-up? Well, maybe you'd be right.  And of course Pynchon never writes 
about anything like conspiracy, so I must have made it up.
                Paul, do you know that the politics of great writers are 
often written about in dissertations?  Folks like Dante, and Melville, and 
the Irish dramatists at the time of The Trouble.  Pynchon, whose work drips 
with political references has very few scholars who write about his politics? 
 Why is this?  Why is it a forbidden topic (Well, not actually forbidden but 
discouraged.  "If you write about that you'll have trouble with funding.  It 
will adversely affect your career.") in American scholarship.  I think that's 
odd.  Anybody agree? Disagree?
                Yeah, Pynchon likes to flex his literary muscles, write stuff 
to entertain and instruct us, to make us alternately laugh and be 
uncomfortable.  But I think the telltale datum in the last couple of days was 
your quotation from Pynchon's blurb for DeLilo's _Mao II_.  In it Pynchon 
praises DeLilo's work on three fronts.  First, he has a knack for looking 
behind the official history.  Second, he understands the business of 
identity.  And finally, he has good moral focus.  These are points I've been 
making for some time about Pynchon.  That he recognizes and praises them in 
others suggests those are his values, too.  Otherwise, he is conning 
everyone.  
                I think he offers us avenues of approach to hidden histories 
if we track down as much information as we can about each of the proper nouns 
he uses in the text.  Rob, I know you were surprised when you found out that 
TRP was a "Huge Monk Fan."  It was only then you were willing to concede that 
just maybe McClintic Sphere had some (not strict one-to-one) connection to 
Thelonious Sphere Monk.  Of course you didn't want to open the testimony on 
list to the Baroness, that she was a Rothschild.  We don't want to allow that 
TRP's preoccupation with the Rothschilds is continued if you do a search on 
the Thurn and Taxis, which is much mentioned in Lot 49.  And is the name of 
one of Mrs. Quod's "wine jellies" in _Gravity's Rainbow_.  It also doesn't 
bear mentioning that when the stock brokerage, Pynchon and Co. failed, in the 
financial disaster following the stock market crash, the New York Rothschild 
banks tried to help the Pynchons out.  Because that is where such threads 
lead.  Better to debate at the level of Ornette Coleman or T.S. Monk.  No one 
on the list will bother with that.
                So I will stand by my earlier assertions.  Pynchon is a 
satirist.  He has a firm moral center.  He is often dissing those he sees as 
the villains of recent history.  He wants us to look for the hidden histories 
beneath the "official versions."  He thinks that if we know what systems are 
controlling our lives, even if we disagree with them, we may be better 
citizens with more fully realized identities as individuals.  But we readers 
have to want it. Otherwise we fall into the traps set out for us.  Pynchon 
may be a Bodhisatva.
                Max