Attack on Pynchon!

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Jbor of course:
> I think the way that Bush/the U.S. acted
> with the restraint they did, ensuring that there was full and unanimous
> international assent to the *necessary* military operation against the
> Taliban before proceeding with it, is something that wouldn't sit too
badly
> with Pynchon at all.

something that wouldn't sit too badly
> with Pynchon at all.

something that wouldn't sit too badly
> with Pynchon at all.

something that wouldn't sit too badly
> with Pynchon at all.


ARE WE GOING TO LET HIM GET AWAY WITH  THS BLASPHEMY!?


"...Between two station marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and
passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this
part in?] We drank the blood of our enemies.  That's why you see Gnostics so
hunted.  The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the
enemy.  The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle.  Why else guard it
so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a
splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it's only for the touch
of sweet lips on a humble bowl?  No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to
swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be taken in by all the
cells.  Your officially defined 'mortal sin,' that is.  A sin against you.
A section of your penal code, that's all. [ The true sin was yours: to
interdict that union.  To draw that line.  To keep us worse than enemies,
who are after all caught in the same field of shit--to keep us strangers."
(GR 862)

"...What more do they want? She [Katje] asks this seriously, as if there's a
real conversion factor between information and lives.  Well, strange to say,
there is.  Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department.  Don't
forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.  The murdering
and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals.  The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.
It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War.  It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be
taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more
prepared for the adult world.  Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just
ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while
they're still here to gobble it up.  The true war is a celebration of
markets.  Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals,
spring up everywhere.  Scrip! Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe
as classical ballet inside their antiseptic marble chambers.  But out here,
down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being.  So, Jews
are negotiable.  Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey
bars.  Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which
operates, natch, in favor of the professionals..."      (GR p.122)

"He is the father you will never quite manage to kill.  The Oedipal
situation in the Zone these days is terrible.  There is no dignity.  The
mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest
to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of
lust that are 40 years out of date.  The fathers have no power today and
never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned
now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in
secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of
power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and
fail....So generation after generation of men in love with pain and
passivity serve out their time in the Zone silent, redolent of faded sperm,
terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them,
however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by
men whose only talent if for death." ( GR 871)


There's another one too, but I can't  find it--something about some asshole
with a penis and a name who wants to chuck 300 lbs of Amatol in the air for
reasons relating to his bigger-than-life ego. That one would fit in
excellent here too.

Take it back, Jbor! Read closely and take it back!

And how dare you say Pynchon doesn't offer his public opinion!  You're maybe
too blind to see it, but he offers it.  He offers it over and over again!

I'm not laughing tonight, Jbor! Don't fuck with the WORD of Pynchon!

Barbara




----- Original Message -----
From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 1:23 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon, The War, and Doug. What else is there?


> quail at libyrinth.com wrote:
>
> > And by the way, I have little doubt that Pynchon deplores this war,
> > and probably has an opinion closer to Doug's. Which is fine with me.
> > I can still learn a lot from his books, even from the parts I
> > disagree with.
>
> Hard to guess, and whatever his personal opinion is he doesn't appear to
> feel it is qualified or authoritative enough to warrant offering publicly.
> Perhaps he's simply happy to let Doug speak for him. But I doubt it.
>
> I think that the comment in the _SL_ 'Intro' about "the Bomb" and that
> "succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945,
> including the power to do something about it" (18) is not simply an avowal
> of pacifism but also an admonishment about the wise and responsible
exercise
> of "power" in the global context. Pakistan's and India's nuclear
> capabilities come to mind -- it's an incredibly volatile and delicate
> geopolitical environment -- and I think the way that Bush/the U.S. acted
> with the restraint they did, ensuring that there was full and unanimous
> international assent to the *necessary* military operation against the
> Taliban before proceeding with it, is something that wouldn't sit too
badly
> with Pynchon at all.
>
> best
>
>