Hitting Below the Mason -Dixon Line

[Ya Sam]

Harvey Pekar's reaction to Mason & Dixon is the same as Karl Radek's to 
Ulysses which this narrow-minded excuse for a scribbler opposes to Pynchon's 
ouevre. At the Soviet Writers' Congress Radek called Ulysses " a dung-heap 
swarming with worms, photographed by a moviecamera through a microscope". 
Calling M&D "a load of crap" is not far away from the above-mentioned 
evaluation. Trying to bite the genius' arse is one of the most wide-spread 
ego-boosting exercises for the likes of Harvey Pekar. I feel sorry for him.

>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Hitting Below the Mason -Dixon Line
>Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 12:39:11 -0700 (PDT)
>
>The recently issued Mason & Dixon, like all Thomas
>Pynchon novels, is a load of crap. He has nothing to
>say and often says it clumsily. His sense of humor is
>lame and sophomoric. He writes to exhibit what he
>thinks is his erudition and cleverness, but is a
>boring clod. Yet Pynchon's among the most highly
>praised writers of our time by academics and other
>literary pundits. How can this be? Why do people rave
>about this guy's sodden, turgid books?
>
>Well, for one thing, he writes long novels. Critics
>often equate lengthy with profound. Like the first
>Pulitzer Prize in music granted to a jazz-related
>person went to Wynton Marsalis for a three-hour long
>piece that a friend of mine saw people walk out on.
>The recording hasn't even been released yet. In any
>case, Marsalis is an imitative, reactionary composer
>and improviser. To give him the first jazz-related
>Pulitzer is a slap in the face to great composers,
>living and dead, including Duke Ellington, Thelonious
>Monk, Tadd Dameron, Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, and
>Herbie Hancock. It's comparable to choosing the
>trivial, sentimental, manipulative, pseudo-profound
>Forrest Gump as best film of the year. The people who
>vote for these awards are middlebrows with delusions
>of grandeur. Think I'm kidding? James Joyce didn't get
>a Nobel Prize, but Pearl Buck did.
>
>Anyway, the longer Pynchon's novels are, the better
>critics like them. The 887-page Gravity's Rainbow has
>gotten the most praise, followed by V. at 463 pages,
>Vineland at 385 pages, and the slim The Crying of Lot
>49 at 138 pages. Quite possibly, Mason & Dixon (Henry
>Holt, $27.50 hard) at a hefty 773 pages, will supplant
>V. in second place.
>
>Another reason academics are so crazy for Pynchon is
>that his work contains so much obscure information,
>like about World War II weapons technology. (Pynchon
>had a background in science, worked for Boeing prior
>to making it as a novelist and contributed a piece to
>the December 1960 issue of Aerospace Safety.) He makes
>a lot of references to pop culture, which endears him
>to readers who believe that even though he's got an
>immense store of knowledge, he's no stuffed shirt.
>Like, doesn't he write about rock & roll? He throws so
>much shit into his novels that people don't know what
>he's trying to do. But they love to speculate.
>Academics are crazy about interpreting his work. To
>accommodate all the factual data he wants to stick
>into his novels he devises labyrinthine plots
>involving conspiracies. This fires up university
>teachers; they get a huge kick out of referring to the
>"paranoia" in his writing. Pynchon hands them plenty
>to write about, a chance to publish so they don't have
>to perish.
>
>Many commentators mistakenly refer to Pynchon as an
>avant garde-ist. Among others who have anticipated his
>work are Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Terry
>Southern, and Joseph Heller. Burroughs, Kerouac, and
>Southern employed plays, poems, and song lyrics in
>their work before Pynchon, and other novelists did it
>far before all of them. The technique of blending
>poems, playlets, and other forms with straight-ahead
>prose fiction was employed by Russian experimenters in
>the early part of the century and labeled
>"ornamentalism." Joyce also blended forms. Pynchon's
>combining fact and fantasy isn't anything new, and he
>didn't invent absurdism, which he sometimes uses. He's
>synthesized some relatively modern styles and
>techniques that readers of conventional fiction don't
>often run across, so they give him credit for being
>more far-out and original than he really is. Pynchon
>uses long, complex sentences, but they aren't
>innovative grammatically or syntactically. He didn't
>invent the encyclopedic novel either. Ulysses, for
>example, was published over 40 years before V.
>
>The way Pynchon jams information into his books
>doesn't have much purpose, other than to attempt to
>dazzle readers. Joyce, on the other hand, uses his
>immense knowledge far more subtly in the process of
>creating symbols. Merely citing a bunch of product
>names like Stacey Adams shoes and Count Chocula, as
>Pynchon does, isn't a great feat, nor is his giving
>cutesy names to people and places like Benny Profane
>and the Bohdi Dharma Pizza Parlor. Anyone can just sit
>around for 10 years and read, like Pynchon; his
>reclusiveness has aided in building his reputation,
>and then write a novel filled with the factual
>information picked up.
>
>In Mason & Dixon Pynchon employs his old gimmicks and
>uses one that's new to him, though not to 20th-century
>novelists: He uses deliberately archaic prose, as
>Charles Portis did more skillfully and humorously in
>True Grit. The book's a fictionalized biography of
>British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,
>who drew their famous line between Pennsylvania and
>Maryland in the 18th century. According to a blurb,
>it's supposed to be "...a grand tour of the
>Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first
>journey together to the Cape of Good Hope to
>pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into
>the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later
>lives." Along the way they meet Benjamin Franklin,
>George Washington, a Chinese Feng Shui master, a
>talking dog, and a robot duck. Feh! If Pynchon
>deserves any prize it's for being the world's most
>overrated trivia buff. He's the literary equivalent of
>the Piltdown Man.
>
>But I ain't kidding myself about convincing readers
>that Pynchon has no clothes, old or new. More than
>likely his fans will believe jealousy inspired me to
>write this article. After all, didn't Mason & Dixon
>get a great review in Time? Doesn't your English
>teacher think he's fabulous? Yeah, yeah.
>
>But just remember, literary fashions change. One day
>people will realize that Pynchon has feet of clay. And
>then they'll think, "Ol' Harv saw through him years
>ago. He knew what was happening all along!"
>
>"Yes he did!" - Harvey Pekar
>
>http://rachel.auschron.com/issues/vol16/issue41/books.pynchon.html
>
>
>
>__________________________________
>Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
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