COL49: The beginning is the beginning is the end

[Doug Millison]

And that's the second time you've missed the point about irony as a
rhetorical device -- that may have something to do with your antipathy to
using definitions to clarify points in these Pynchon-L conversations. You're
entitled to your opinion about what Pynchon might be thinking, of course, 
andI applaud your mind-reading skills.


 Malign:
"This is the second time at least you've made this point and it seems you're

not following it through.  If Pynchon is being ironic with his
sneaker-scuffing self-deprecation, that 
would suggest that his real opinion is that these stories (which, in fact, 
aren't all that hot) are of such a high standard that to put them down in 
that way is an irony the reader will get and enjoy--a fairly repulsive bit
of 
egotism--or that the reader will not get the irony, which would be pointless

and perverse."


And what leads you to believe that Pynchon is not egotistic or that he would
not perversely needle his readers? If anything, his writing leads me to
believe he's a trickster and game-player par excellence.


Malign:
"Far more likely, it seems to me, that he finds these mostly mediocre
stories 
mediocre."

I find that unlikely, vis-a-vis the stories he collected in Slow Learner.
Perhaps, in the case of Mortality and Mercy which he chose not to include,
but then we don't really know why or how that story was excluded, do we.

By the time he writes the Slow Learner intro, Pynchon had received a
warm,enthusiastic critical reception.   It's not credible that he remained
unaware of this fact when he wrote the Slow Learner intro. The obvious jokes
that P does include in the Slow Learner intro makes it difficult to know
where he might be pulling our legs -- more of that "irony" that you seem to
have a hard time understanding.