douglas fowler

Otto o.sell at telda.net
Sat Mar 30 23:05:31 CST 2002


----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: cj hurtt <cj6 at casco.net>
Cc: Kyle Winkler <taos_hum1 at hotmail.com>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2002 8:27 PM
Subject: Re: douglas fowler


>
> Kyle Winkler wrote:
> >
> > hey i found it! i found one on the internet that is in good condition,
> > and a first print too. problem though: it's $100 clams. is it worth
> > that much? and what about other crits? like molly hite's or katharine
> > hume's? let me know...
>
> I wouldn't buy it. Not for $100 clams. It's difficult to give investment
> advice when I don't know your tax situation, but even if you are a
> wealthy person I would rather see you put your money in something that
> will yield less diminishing returns. If you  already own or plan to
> invest in the  Weisenburger Companion (a true blue chip and it's
> available), Fowler won't do much to diversify your portfolio. In other
> words, there is a lot of redundancy, the authors, not unlike p-listers,
> cross paths and dig up the same stuff).  I disagree with Otto,
> respectfully of course, I don't think Fowler's essays are all that good
> and I don't like the idea of GR being a War of the Worlds novel at all.
> Worse by far is the notion that Pynchon serves up an indictment of
> Western Christian civilization. An indictment? I doubt it. I'm glad
> that Weisenburger didn't include generalizations like this in his
> Companion. Even if I disagree with what W says in his book on satire
> called Fables of
> Subversion, I think the postmodernist approach that he outlines in his
> Introduction to that study makes him a much more objective Companion
> than Fowler.
>
>
(snip a very fine list of essays and books!)

Terrance, do you consider Fowler's approach not postmodern? He's been the
one that got me hooked on binary oppositions.

You may not like the idea but GR *is* structured the way of the War of the
Worlds, one of GR's theses is that the economy has become like something
supernatural that threatens "our" world (the core of all gothic).

Far worse you say, but I'd say that his whole genre *is* this indictment.
Not anti-American, not anti-Christian, not anti-Catholic, not
anti-Protestant, but an indictment that the way the world has been run
before and past WW-2 by Western Christian civilization will (maybe it's
still so, even after 1990?) lead to the end of all mankind.

By the way, I had to lend "my" Fowler from the University of Osnabrueck
officially, copied it and sent it back. I wouldn't pay a hundred bucks for
it, Kyle. It's still only secondary literature.

Otto
http://www.ottosell.de
(new url)





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