now reading...

[pynchonoid]

...Jan Swafford's biography, _Charles Ives: A Life
with Music_, another Yankee genius who managed to
break out of his milieu's cultural expectations box. 

"Creative artists were something that, for the most
part, old-fashioned Connecticut Yankees notably were
not," Swafford writes. "Practical musicians they
were....The rare composers of concert music, however,
had to justify their profession to dubious
countrymen....Connecticut men of letters were less
likely to write imaginative fiction than to be
teachers, such as Yale's Timothy Dwight, or
nuts-and-bolts scholars like Noah Webster, the
dictionary man....Born both a Yankee and an artist,
Charles Ives was predestined to a divided nature."

Pynchon's not from Connecticut of course, but he
shares  Ives' Congregationalist roots, and as I've
been reading this biography I've wondered if Pynchon
might also have had to overcome a similar cultural
predisposition against art for art's sake.  Another
similarity between the two artists: Ives mixed popular
American and high European culture elements to create
a native American music, just as Pynchon combines pop
and high culture elements in his work.




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http://pynchonoid.org/


		
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