Watts article

[jbor]

on 24/9/04 9:03 AM, jbor wrote:
>> 
>>> The shifting second person pronoun in the Watts essay preempts its literary
>>> usage in GR. Pynchon's article aligns most notably with 'The Secret
>>> Integration', not _Lot 49_, and I'd say it's that story that prompted
>>> Kirkpatrick Sale to ask Pynchon to write the piece.
> 
on 24/9/04 9:35 PM, jbor wrote:
> 
>> I also think that Pynchon -- contracted in advance to write this piece and
>> thus knowing full well where it would be published -- had a pretty good
>> handle on who the actual readers of the article would be, and of the fact
>> that it was destined to reach a far wider audience than anything he had
>> written previously. It's fair to say that he wrote the article fully
>> realising the way it would colour the general public's perception of him, of
>> his work, and of where his sympathies resided in regard to the Civil Rights
>> debates of the day.

on 26/9/04 10:04 PM, jbor wrote:

> It's not a simple-minded judgement about the comparative worth of different
> texts to point out that the potential "galvanising" effect of the 'Watts'
> article in the NYT Magazine in 1966 on the general public's attitudes
> towards contemporary political and social issues is far in excess of that of
> a comic story excerpt published in Esquire or Cavalier, or of a 760-page
> novel about WWII. No reasonable person would seriously contend otherwise.

I'd still argue that the potential "galvanising" effect on public attitudes
of a short story in the Post is less than that of the 'Watts' article,
regardless of whether the Post had a wider circulation and/or readership,
which I don't know. I've been making the point all along that there is a
direct relationship between 'The Secret Integration' and the 'Watts' piece.
Subsequent back-pedalling aside, the counter-argument or flamebait being
advanced in response to the above was that the story excerpts in Esquire and
Cavalier, and the novels, reached as wide an audience as did the 'Watts'
article. 

best