John Bailey's very good V.V. (10) stuff (was Re: ...

[jbor]

Thanks to John Bon for the very good notes and comments, of course. I think
one problem was that reading half a chapter, or only discussing half of it,
didn't work, and so the discussion during Michael Perez's host slot sort of
crept into the second bit. No reflection on John or the reading I think.

I have to admit I'm having trouble fitting the two Walts, and both Sal and
Leonardo into the current sequence. Is the Benjamin essay online?

I don't think that Pynchon is anywhere near the art expert that a writer
like Gaddis shows himself to be in _The Recognitions_. However, Botticelli's
'Birth of Venus' is still a very good choice in terms of the themes of the
chapter and the novel as a whole. Venus is the goddess of love, and like a
Siren she has entranced Mantissa just as old Godolphin was seduced by
Vheissu (also personified as a woman at 171.7). But Botticelli's depiction
is also "all surface": there is very little perspectival depth or fleshing
out of the human forms in the image. It's a very flat and linear painting,
almost like a cartoon: but it is dazzling in its colours and symmetries and
patterns.

I don't quite know why the "hollow" Judas tree in front of the painting is
the last thing in the chapter, although that hollowness, and the themes of
love (man-woman, father-son, brotherly equally) and betrayal, do seem to
have loomed large in what has come before. It's a fitting denouement in the
context of the section as a self-contained, short story, a feature of
textual structure many critics have observed w/r/t this novel.

The frightening truth of the spider monkey buried at the Souht Pole is that,
not only did the Vheissuvians have the technology to get there first, and
with ease it seems (perhaps through those "hollow earth" systems, but even
so ... ), but they *knew old Hugh was coming*. Spooky.

But I'm not sure what to say about Botticelli's 'BoV' in an Age of
Mechanical Reproduction, or that this is what Pynchon was getting at. If
anything it is Pynchon's text itself which is the work of art in the age of
mechanical reproduction imo.

best


----------
>From: jporter <jp3214 at earthlink.net>
>

> If anyone else wants to pick up the thread, and discuss Walter Benjamin's
> ideas, re: the aesthetics of power and the politicalization of art, and how
> they might apply to judging Pynchon's political v. literary correctness, not
> to mention the cryogenic spider monkey, please, by any means necessary, jump
> in.