re Re: SLSL language

[pynchonoid]

Doug:
>>Malign is just peddling more of the insulting,
>>demeaning views of African-American culture that
>>he/she has written here in the past. 

Malign:
>Please cite.

The garbage you have posted here speaks for itself,
it's all in the PYNCHON-L archives, search on
"MalignD".  

Doug:
>>If writers like Hurston, Ellison, etc. had followed
>>the kinds of prescriptions and proscriptions offered
>>by the likes of Malign, they wouldn't have produced
>>works that demonstrate the beauty and power of their
>>so-called "non-standard English", instead they would
>>have listened to unimaginative grammar teachers and
>>wrung the idiosyncratic magic out of their prose.>>

Malign:
>This is childishly stupid and utterly off the point. 

No, your dismissal is the non sequitur. If Hurston,
Ellison, and other novelists who write "non-standard
English" had followed your rules and shared your
detestation of Black English, they wouldn't have
written many of the beautiful things they wrote. Thank
goodness they had the wisdom and courage to persist in
the face of a mainstream culture that too often
dismissed them as Other in part because of language.

Malign:
>Pynchon's novels give copious evidence of his
>familiarity with, and mastery of, accepted rules of
>grammar.

...AND how to create beautiful prose by ignoring 
rules.  As davemarc illustrated in his previous post,
Pynchon celebrates many different ways of talking and
using English -- many of which would be forbidden
according to Malign's class- and culture-bound rules. 
Some of the most beautiful passages of Gravity's
Rainbow are extremely difficult to follow, for
example, and while I expect a good grammar teacher
could have eliminated much of the uncertainty, I doubt
 GR would be improved as a result.

davemarc:
>Note the Intro to Slow Learner, where Pynchon writes
>about the "exciting,
>liberating, strongly positive" effect of seeing how
>"at least two very
>distinct kinds of English could be allowed in fiction
>to coexist," citing
>Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul
>Bellow, and the voices of
>Herbert Gold and Philip Roth.  "It was not a case of
>either/or, but an
vexpansion of possibilities."  Note Pynchon's early
>desire to show off his
>"ear" as a dialect writer despite not yet
>appreciating "that in different
>areas of this real or civilian South, even in
>different parts of Virginia,
>people spoke in a wide number of quite different
>accents."

Pynchon is all about inclusion (both/and) and avoiding
the seductive but deadly either-or formulations that
are the hallmark of Malign's elistist pontifications
here.

-Doug


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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