nohead

[Paul Mackin]

Yes I agree we must resign ourselves to the fact that Pynchon will never
reach down to the masses. Or ever reach up to the movers and shakers
for that matter. However it's also my observation over time that the
p-list itself is exceedingly egalitarian. Any other stance would quickly
be laughed into extinction, wouldn't it? A fair number of
participants show definite signs of having spent time in graduate
English departments or the equivalent. However actual disputes and
unpleasantnesses when they pop up seldom are over intellectual
matters. It's more often than not a question who can out emote the next
guy over various justice matters (race in American and the Holacaust to
name a few) and what Pynchon "obviously" stands for. This can get quite
violent and for the wicked like myself not entirely unwelcome but the
price to be paid to one's dignity for forgetting to take one's  thorazine
that morning can be quite high.

			P.

On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Jeff Lawshe wrote:

> >  [D]oes it ever seem like maybe Pynchon, and Gaddis, and
> >deLillo never seem to trickle down to "the masses" *shudder* at the 
> > >shotgun spread of generalization- because those 'in the know' have a 
> > >tendency to hold these books over their heads?
> >   This is purely personal experience, as someone who didn't benefit >from 
> >college (didn't attend), and was tarred and feathered out of high >school, 
> >but whenever I've brought up Pynchon with the educated folks, >I feel 
> >awfully
> >patronized.  As if to say that since I never read these  books in a >class 
> >with 20 other people, I didn't really get it.
> >   Reading as recreation is becoming more and more infrequent (it >seems), 
> >but the hyper literate folks don't seem to be very encouraging.
> *************************
>    I am pretty much a part of academia, though I would never, ever, not 
> through any probability-enhancing extension of time or space call myself 
> hyper-literate, or even sortof literate.
> 
> I would like to add, though, that esotericism is not only a function of 
> higher education.  Someone mentioned earlier that a reader must be bonded to 
> the demands of the material world in order truly to understand Pynchon (a 
> paraphrase).  The claim is admirably heretical given the more or less tired 
> debate over the reader's influence on text formation.  Perhaps I am too much 
> of an old-fashioned post-modernist, but I balk at the idea that "Pynchon," 
> (in whatever sense we mean that proper noun, since we know next to nothing 
> about the man) or any author, really, is accessible only to a privileged--or 
> underprivileged--few.
> 
> Jeff L.
> 
> [Disclaimers for the above comments include exhaustion, drunkenness, 
> newbieness, and any other stereotypical states I might have overlooked]
> 
> By the way:  in the spirit of blatant ignorance that is the only innovation 
> I have found I am capable of introducing to my chosen profession, I have 
> never heard of Gaddis or deLillo, and wouldn't mind a private message 
> informing me of their relevance to T. Pynchon.
> 
> 
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