Luddites revisited 2

[Dave Monroe]

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine
anybody these days wanting to be called a literary
intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you
broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and
think." Being called a Luddite is another matter. It
brings up questions such as, Is there something about
reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a
person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?
And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

... Thomas Pynchon, who has crossed the Snovian
Disjunction more often, with more expertise and more
confidence, than any literary figure alive .... One of
the first inferences he draws from his aghast
rereadings of his early stories, as recounted in the
introduction to Slow Learner, is the fruitlessness of
adherence to canonical literary values, such as
conscious allusion to recognized and academically
sanctioned precursors: in "The Small Rain," he
confesses, "I was operating on the motto 'Make it
literary,' a piece of bad advice I made up all by
myself and then took" (SL 4). Though he would never
shake his allusive habit, he has aggressively expanded
it into nonliterary realms, following alternative
versions of that motto to make it technical, make it
mathematical, make it chemical, make it musical, make
it historical, make it cybernetic, make it cinematic
and even televisual, make it mass-cultural, make it
critical-theoretical, ad infinitum. Literary
references remain part of Pynchon's enormous database,
but only one of many parts; the privileged position
implicit in the slogan "make it literary" was one of
the first stages to be jettisoned as the multistage
rocket of Pynchon's career lifted off. (By 1984, in
the Luddism essay, he would note that American culture
at large treats "literary intellectual" as a term of
opprobrium, half-apologetically adding that "it
doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to,
say, 'people who read and think.'")

http://www.columbia.edu/~wbm1/snovian.html

A-and maybe see as well ...

Thomas Pynchon: The Techngnostic Prophet of Paranoid
Literature

by Douglas McDaniel (dmcdaniel at AccessMagazine.com) -
November 13, 2000 

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id541/pg1/

--- Joseph Tracy <brook7 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> I. THE REDE LECTURE, 1959, C.P. Snow
> 
> I
> 
> THE TWO CULTURES
> 
> [...]
>
> I believe the intellectual life of the whole of
> western society is increasingly being split into
> two polar groups ... at one pole we have the
> literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no
> one was looking took to referring to themselves as
> 'intellectuals' as though there were no others....

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