vv2

[Otto Sell]

>What is the art that the SICK Crew produces< was exactly the question which
kept me from posting this earlier.
One is the song of being born and dying and the war. Not the worst topics of
songs and novels.
Being "the exact opposite of Dewey's Classical extrapolation" is very good.
But Dewey's first chapter is a complaint about the "museum character" of
"fine arts" in the 19th and early 20th century too. This is 1934:

"The arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things
he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the
comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper accounts of love-nests, murders,
and exploits of bandits." (6)

Meanwhile we've learned to take all this for art, but the problem remains:

"(...) defining the nature of the problem: that of recovering the continuity
of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." (10)

According to Dewey there are two possible worlds where art would not appear,
"a world of mere flux" and "a world that is finished" (16-17). Can we see
Profane and Stencil as representatives of this two worlds, in technical
terms entropy versus paranoia. In the entropic world "change would not be
cumulative," in the paranoid concept "conditions could not even be struggled
with." (17)

just a thought

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: Otto Sell <o.sell at telda.net>
Cc: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>; pynchon list <pynchon-l at waste.org>; cj hurtt
<cj6 at casco.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: vv2


>
> >
> > Is this a simple sailor's party or is it more to be seen as something
like
> > "rites and ceremonies in which the meaning of group life was
consummated"  -
> > in the classical sense where our arts derive from? (words by John Dewey,
The
> > Art of Experience, p. 7) - it's group life and Benny doesn't really
belong.
>
>
> Seems like the exact opposite of Dewey's Classical
> extrapolation.  What is the art that the SICK Crew produces?
> Also, Parties in TRP's fiction are surely not "rites and
> ceremonies in which the meaning of group life [is]
> consummated", are they? The group? What group? These guys
> are connected by Benny, not the best way to reach out and
> touch some one, I think.
>
>
>
> Then old Nobodaddy aloft
> Farted & belchd & coughd
> And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering
> Every bit as well as war & slaughtering
>
> Blake