MDDM Washington

[public domain]

Otto asked, 

What should that be? 

Not that TRP is Doug or Jbore, but an American author of American fiction. 

Certainly not that I am Monica or that I ever wrote an off-list post to either Kai or Jbore. Both lie. Certainly not a Post worth our time from Weaver or the other jackasses here who only call people names. As Jbore, sitting on a cornflake, says, it�s sad and pathetic. Send me the bill Doctor Jbore, you can�t keep me from jumping out your window. 

While Marx and Hegel may be read in TRP, they are ridiculed. Like Nietzsche and Emerson. Dialecticians, like Norman O. Brown, are important to Pynchon, but only as crank theories. 

 

It�s in the tension dear King. 

--Lear�s Fool 

 

 

 

 

In their Decadency these Virginians practice an elaborate Folly of Courtly Love, unmodified since the Dark Ages�

--The RWC, SDB, Pynchon, M&D.275

Rather reminds me of the narrators in V. (Stencil)

In all likelihood, courtly chivalry was never more than an ideal. The earliest writers to mention it commonly lament its decay, but in doing so they overlook that in the form which they would like it to assume it has only just come into existence in their dreams. It is the essence of an ideal that its decay should be lamented in the very moment it is clumsily striving for fulfillment. Moreover, to contrast the fiction of some ideal of living with tyrannical reality is precisely something possible in romance. 

 

 

In the early days of colonization, every new settlement represented an idea and proclaimed a mission. Virginia was founded by a great, liberal movement aiming at the spread of English liberty and empire. The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea. No such character belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in long, unbroken line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forests with the energy of so many beavers, and with no more express moral purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried with them was rarely illumined by an idea; they sought room for no new truth, and aimed neither at creating, like the Puritans, a government of saints, nor, like the Quakers, one of love and peace; they left such experiments behind them, and wrestled only with the hardest problems of frontier life. No wonder !
that foreign observers, and even the educated, well-to-do Americans of the sea-coast, could seldom see anything to admire in the ignorance and brutality of frontiersmen, and should declare that virtue and wisdom no longer guided the United States�To a new society, ignorant and semi-barbarous, a mass of demagogues insisted on applying every stimulant that could inflame its worst appetite, while at the same instant taking away every influence that had hitherto helped to restrain its passions. Greed for wealth, lust for power, yearning for the blank void of savage freedom such as Indians and wolves delight in, -- these were the fires that flamed under the cauldron of American society, in which, as conservatives believed, the old, well-proven, conservative crust of religion, government, family, and even common respect for age, education, and experience was rapidly melting away, and was indeed already broken into fragments, swept about by the seething mass of scum ever rising in !
greater quantities to the surface. 

 

--Henry Adams, American Ideals 1800

For him our Revolution was in vain; to him our Declaration of Independence was a lie." 

--Melville, White Jacket

But the treatment of flogging in White Jacket is not quite as uncomplicated as it might appear at first. Oh no, Melville, like Pynchon and the great Americans, is never uncomplicated, but is playing that unique American role, the Confidence Man and projector of tall-tales that might amuse us out of folly. 

 

  Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote: ----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Mackin" 

To: 

Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2002 10:35 PM
Subject: Re: MDDM Washington

>
> Otto quoting a couple of critics contributes what will no doubt be grist
> for the p-list mill. Thanks, Otto.
>

Hi Paul,
I can detect Irony when I smell it . . . but I don't fight Windwills.

It would have not been a very scientific attitude reading the Essays,
finding the Quotes, regarding them as (somewhat) fitting & maybe helpful and
*not* posting the snips & urls to the List for Discussion just out of
personal and/or ideological Reasons.

Play the Ball, Paul, and not the Man.

Nice Monday Morning & I'm beginning with the Work on my new Flat. I'm
moving, just one Story down, but:

"O, my back, my back, my bach! I'd want to go to Aches-les-Pains."
(JJ, FW 213)

Otto


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