Is P's foreword a "shitty essay"?

[pynchonoid]

You seem to be splitting the hairs finer and coming up
with a different count of the angels on this pinhead,
s~Z -- "shitty writer" doesn't show up in the
archives, but PYNCHON-L remains the only venue I know
of where "shitty" is used to describe something
Pynchon has written -- accurate enough if applied to
describe the parts of his work where he writes about
shit, but inappropriate if "shitty" is supposed to
mean anything like "excrement to be flushed down the
toilet". 

Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 12:04:47 -0700 (PDT) 
From: David Morris <fqmorris@[omitted]> 
Subject: Re: Orwell & Nineteen Eighty-Four 

[...] shitty essay [...] 

I prefer what David Kipen had to say about the
Foreword in his SF Chronicle review the other day: 
"For the 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' intro, Pynchon returns
to his signature nonfiction voice: postdoctoral yet
cheerfully sophomoric, sad yet undespairing, as
expressive in its alternation of long notes with short
as an SOS. It's an instrument tuned and retuned in
more than 40 years of occasional essays, reviews and
liner notes -- forming, incidentally, one of the great
uncollected anthologies in American letters." 


 

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

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