perspective detective

[Dave Monroe]

... well, spent a couple of days in the Second Windy City of Big
Shoulders book-buying (the three Powell's stores in town have all sorts
of sales going on these days--me, I hit the Thursday Night 5:00-8:00
p.m.  40% percent off @ the Wabash store, though I did drop in the Hyde
Park one on my way to the Seminary Co-Op), film-going (not only have
they added extra, extra-creepy footage--e.g., that "spiderwalk" [why was
that cut in the first place?]--to The Exorcist, but the sound's been
redone as well, and it's absolutely terrifying--whole theater jumped to
a telephone ringing, everyone looking around wondering, where are those
voices coming from ...?  Also, that new Brazillian Orfeu, but I had to
leave before the weekend Cocteau fest), club-hopping, vodka-drinking,
and, neither last nor least, Grandma-visiting.  But I thought I heard my
name called here (Terrance F. Flaherty wrote: "The Both/AND reading that
I want to get to ..."), so ...

It's all slowly coming back to me now ... rescued Kathryn Hume's
Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow, from a sale
table at (of all places) Barnes and Noble (hey, sometimes you gotta play
the ball where it lies, okay?) a while back, and, revisting, I am
reminded of the following: "Pynchon does not abolish the extremes in
order to exalt an excluded middle.  Rather, he implies that we must
somehow strive to integrate, or at least accept all the possibilities:
and/and rather than either/or" (p. 120).  Not unlike that both/and of
Deleuze and Guattari's I alluded to a while back (see The Big Fake Book,
a.k.a., A Thousand Plateaus [and note that a big fake book, far from
being negatively inauthentic, can be a very useful thing to have, esp.
if one is gigging out, riffing on the uncertain, the unknown ...]).
Think Hume might even have set me off on it ...

Reminds me as well of Alec McHoul and David Wills' Writing Pynchon:
Strategies in Fictional Analysis (which I don't have at hand), and of
how they, in contrast to Hume's dismissal of deconstruction as, say,
merely reversing the polarity of any given binary, claim--and rightly
so, methinks--that Pynchon('s texts) reinscribe those binaries as yet
another term in yet other binaries, "tak[ing]," as Michael Berube
recounts it in his Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon and
the Politics of the Canon, "the new right-hand term as the vantage point
from which the 'differences' between the two left hand terms may be
found not to signify" (p. 229), e.g., in one of McH & W's examples,
"us/Them//Slothrop," or, in one of B's suggested additions,
"elect/preterite//cultural artifact." (A perhaps simple, "everyday"
example might be "black/white//grey," vs. "black/white//red"?)  TRP, GR,
et al., hardly merely reverse such valorizations, think McH, W, B, H, et
al., are on to something here ...

See also Hume on "immachination" (pp. 91ff.), recall "Is it O.K. to be a
Luddite?" on the various waves of Luddism, the various nostalgias
involved, and postwar science fiction, I recall suggesting that perhaps
Pynchon sugests there that, as first wave Luddites reacted to modernity
whilst looking back nostalgically on the medieval, on unreason (the
gothic), whilst second wave luddism in turn looked back nostalgically on
the Enlightenment, on reason, perhaps TRPs own luddism looks back
nostalgically on the precybernetic, on that man/machine binary, on when
it might still have been taken as an opposition.  Whenever that was
(post-Descartes, post-La Metrrie, et al. ...).  Something like that.
Hume also plays up that grail thing, grail as code to be deciphered,
that profiles/grail optical illusion, and so forth ...

Some titles I've been trying to find, acquire, read, reread, whatever,
that might yet bear on recent discussion in re: romanticism 'n' death.
If anyone has the time, the inclination (the latter I have; the former,
well ... and I still need the Krell book) ...

--Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature
and Contemporary Culture

--Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Feminity and the
Aesthetic

--David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease and Death in German
Idealism and Romanticism (and thanks for mentioning Krell, you know who
you are, send current e-mail address ...)

--Maria M. Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany

--Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2: Psychoanalyzing the White
Terror

In the meantime, my copy of Dwight Eddins' The Gnostic Pynchon has
arrived, so ...