Singular (Blazing) moments

[Dave Monroe]

All we are saying ...

--- Paul Nightingale <paulngale at supanet.com> wrote:
> I've always resisted Mel Brooks' films, I have to
> admit, but Blazing Saddles was maybe different ...

... is give Mel a chance.  The Producers, Blazing
saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, er, well,
taht's enough of a chance, I believe ...

> Perhaps, if the 1970s was a time of singular moments
> with regard to cultural production, this is because
> it was a time of transition. The rules were being
> broken; the point of the exercise was to break as
> many rules as you could. The cultural masterpieces
> of the time were iconoclastic. A masterpiece at any
> time has to be iconoclastic, but these singular
> moments challenged the very idea that icons were
> possible, or necessary or, indeed, desirable.

Well, this is the arc of much (though hardly most,
much less all ... of much of the most visible of) twen
cen cult prodct'n, isn't it?  But things do take a
particular turn for the weird ca. 1970 +/- a few
years, don't they?  Vietnam, psychedelia, the space
race ... an intensification, at any rate, a plateau,
perhaps ... Godard's moment here, by the way, is, I
think, Weekend, but, of course, he'd hit it early ...

> GR is the novel it is because Pynchon's timing was
> right. 

It was apparently a long time coming, but it came out
the way it did by vrtue of when/where it did, no
doubt.  Looks like much perhaps only crystalized (or
did precisely the opposite ...) in those last few
years (again, note that letter rept. in Seed) ...

> Something of a heresy to say that, of course -
> don't I have any respect for the Great Man!

Well, obviously, I'm all for contextualization.  A
sort of New Historicism of the recent, the
contemporary, even.  Note, say, that trajectory of the
increasingly cynical to absurdist war
novel/film/whatever in the age of the Cold/Vietnam
Wars, Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, The Great Escape,
Slaughtehouse-Five, The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes,
M*A*S*H ... which is hardly to slight either Mr.
Pynchon or his GReat book which trumps them all ...

> I've said before that he wanted to produce a novel
> that made novel-writing impossible, just as Godard's
> films made (radical) cinema impossible: 

I'll be back on this ...

> one of the ironies is that p-list discussion of the
> P-Man's work has often leaned towards deification.

But this is why the complaints of some in re: the
alleged "postmodernism" and/or "poststructuralism" of
others here continues to confuse me--I so rarely
actually read any of it ...

> One of the reasons I think M&D is a better novel is
> that breaking the rules is no longer enough; you now
> have to consider what you're left with when the
rules
> have disappeared.

Well, "better," I don't know, given a choice, given
the criterion of interest, I'd take GR, which seems
ultimately an order of infinities more fascinating,
but ... but Pynchon seems indeed to have come out the
other end of something with Vineland and M&D ...
 
> Which of course is where Foucault comes into it but
> ...

Although note that, even as MF was reasserting the
subject and/or subjectivity, he had his own sex 'n'
death thing going, and putting his practice where his
theory was, at that ...

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