MMV

[Ghetta Life]

>From: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
>
> > though there is a sense of smug self-satisfaction in the way that 
>Pynchon has Siegel leave the shallow and selfish pseudo-bohemians to their 
>supposed just deserts at the close.
>
>
>In this I disagree. I don't share this sense and I don't think that the 
>story has a morale like "they were so shallow they deserved to die" or 
>"they looked too weird, it served them right."

But this is precisely what the story communicates.  And I completely agree 
with robert's comment below.  It's almost as if Pynchon is describing 
himself and his own chosen world and wishing to destroy it all out of a deep 
sense of disatasfaction.  At least in his later, better works he develops 
some sympathy for the world as it is and the characters who occupy it.

> > Comment:
> > With its ostentatious and often gratuitous references to Shakespeare, 
>the Bible and gnostic Apocrypha, Jewish funeral traditions and Catholic 
>church rituals, bullfighting, Dada, Goethe, Eliot, Conrad, Albertus Magnus, 
>Santayana, Gaugin, foreign language phrases, Ojibwa culture and 
>psychopathology, and more, the story suffers from precisely the same 
>pretentiousness that it satirises in the shape of the partygoers babbling 
>on about "Zen", "San Francisco" and "Wittgenstein" -- perhaps 
>self-consciously and self-parodically, though, if so, not overtly enough.

Bingo!  All these references with no point or payoff.  No synthesis

> > but what is particularly jejune is the way the narrative ultimately 
>resolves itself in a blood-bath: it's a species of that characteristic and 
>supposedly shocking "and then the world exploded" climax ending written by 
>barely-pubescent prodigies ("a pose of ... somber glee at any idea of mass 
>destruction or decline" as he describes it in SL:13).

As I said earlier: hamfisted.

>Otto sez:  So concluding from this I'd say our discussion here already 
>proves that it's a good story.

No.  We are only discussing it because it was written by Pynchon.  Otherwise 
we would never have looked at it twice.

Ghetta

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