TRP letter re Ian McEwan

[Chris Broderick]

Pynchon sez:

...assuming that it really is about who owns the right
to describe using gentian violet for ringworm, for
heaven's sake, allow me a gentle suggestion.

So I say:

Reminds me of a quote from Nabokov that a particularly
blowhardy professor of mine mentioned, a quote that
may be apocryphal, to the effect that stealing from
one writer is called plagiarism, but stealing from
many is called research.  Does anyone know the actual
quote, if it, in fact, exists, and if so, where it's
from?

-Chris

--- pynchon-l-digest
<owner-pynchon-l-digest at waste.org> wrote:

> 
> pynchon-l-digest     Wednesday, December 6 2006    
> Volume 02 : Number 5060
> 
> 
> 
> Isola di Rifiuti
> RE: Yet More New (and, Incidentally, Delicious)
> Pynchon Verbiage!
> Re: FW: you hoird it here foirst!
> Primate behaviour
> ATD "unterm strich"
> Re: FW: you hoird it here foirst!
> NP Richard Powers
> TRP letter re Ian McEwan
> Re: FW: you hoird it here foirst!
> Stamps
> Semi NP: Ire and Vice: Timaeus begs to differ
> Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> RE: Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> Re: Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> RE: Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> Re: Vollmann the Artist
> Re: FW: you hoird it here foirst!
> AtD 184 SPOILER
> Humans and Other Animals ...
> Re: AtD 184 SPOILER
> RE: Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> RE: Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> [none]
> RE: Pynchon backs McEwan in 'copying' row
> Re: 
> Atd : page 542---starts on page 524.Big Ass Spoiler
> 
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 09:18:09 +0100
> From: Werner Presber <wernerpresber at yahoo.de>
> Subject: Isola di Rifiuti
> 
> via Isola di Rifiuti, The Flats: 
>
http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2006/12/flats.html
> 
> "(
) Thomas Pynchon, in London, stretching out the
> (slightly) nasalized 
> o’s and n’s, brandishing the sentence like a cutlass
> (“Or a cutlet,” ’s 
> what he’d add): “Evening drew on, the vast jangling
> thronged somehow 
> monumental London evening, light falling seemingly
> without a 
> destination across the wind-attended squares and
> haunted remnants of 
> something older, and they went to eat at Molinari’s
> in Old Compton 
> Street, also known as the Hôtel d’Italie, reputed to
> be one of the 
> haunts of Mr. Arthur Edward Waite . . .” Of the
> fayre Afton isle, its 
> lingual verdancies, Pynchon speaks, in the voice of
> maths student 
> Yashmeen Halfcourt, (though one’d think—and
> pardonably—he ’s yanking 
> the reader’s chain re: the readerly response to the
> very words in the 
> very book in hand): “On this island, . . . as you
> will have begun to 
> notice, no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it’s
> Cockney rhyming codes 
> or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English,
> spoken or written, is 
> looked down on as no more than strings of text
> cleverly encrypted. 
> Nothing beyond. Any who may come to feel betrayed by
> them, insulted, 
> even hurt, even grievously, are simply ‘taking it
> too seriously.’ The 
> English exercise their eyebrows and smile and tell
> you it’s ‘irony’ or 
> ‘a bit of fun,’ for it’s only combinations of
> letters after all, isn’t 
> it.”
> 
> Or, here, Pynchon about the goings-on on the Isle of
> Mirrors, one of 
> the Terre Perse, “Lost Lands,” sunk off the Venetian
> coast: “The 
> classical anamorphoscopes . . . were mirrors,
> cylindrical or conical, 
> usually, which when placed on or otherwise near a
> deliberately 
> distorted picture, and viewed from the appropriate
> direction, would 
> make the image appear “normal” again. Fads for these
> came and went 
> beginning as early as the seventeenth century, and
> the artisans of 
> Isola degli Specchi were not slow in learning how to
> supply this 
> specialized market. To be sure, a certain percentage
> of them went mad 
> and ended up in the asylum on San Servolo. Most of
> these unfortunates 
> could not bear to look at any sort of mirror again,
> and were kept 
> scrupulously away from reflective surfaces of any
> kind. But a few, 
> choosing to venture deeper in the painful corridors
> of their 
> affliction, found after a while that they could now
> grind and polish 
> ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidal and even
> stranger, eventually 
> including what we must term “imaginary” shapes,
> though some preferred 
> Clifford’s term, “invisible.” These specialists
> remained at Isola degli 
> Specchi under a sort of confinement within
> confinement so strict as to 
> provide them, paradoxically, a freedom unknown in
> Europe and indeed 
> anywhere, before or since.”
> 
> Saturday, after a nap. (Typing th’above caught me in
> the reticular bag 
> of sleep, yellow (canary in a mineshaft-color’d)
> “graph paper” with 
> quarter-inch squares.) The air is pinging
> dub-molecular ’roundabout. 
> Voices dredging for lost voices in the aether, or a
> voice struggling 
> against an aether’d stranglehold, no rebuttals
> allow’d, applejack 
> popping its cork in the coldbox. What sweet
> confinement to wake to an 
> empty house. What it is about the Pynchon: he
> locates the affliction 
> and pushes harder against it. Tarries with it,
> niggles it, makes it 
> perceptibly worse (to make it perceptible). Akin to
> something I’ve 
> quoted before, by the Italian painter Marco Celotti,
> in “Reflections of 
> the Head Painter”:
> 
>      . . . Clarity begins in the furrows.
> 
>      It is fictional to think that art does not
> touch the sores, that it 
> is afraid to put its multitude of fingers on the
> festering wounds of 
> uninvolvement. Moreover, it is bad fiction.
> 
>      To an aesthetic of buttery consistency, art
> could suddenly 
> contribute its often rejected bag of rusty nails.
> Out of the blue the 
> former concubine takes a road, an address. It dons
> its mottled robes, 
> fishermen’s hooks, pulleys, ropes and winches. It
> discards its purses, 
> its golddigger pans, its safes and vaults, the inner
> sanctum of the 
> money-lenders. . . .
> 
>      Ah, the beauty of these pulsating nostrils on
> the new proud head . 
> . .
> 
>      Who is to say that Titian’s brush (the same one
> picked up by the 
> king) has not fallen again on the ground of broken
> teeth of the 
> Bolivian miners?
> 
> Or Colorado miners, as the present “case” ’s got it?
> Is that it? 
> Asymptotically approaching it? Here’s a story. In
> the verdancy of one’s 
> years, one fell into mad pursuit of a piece of
> writing somewhat larger 
> than usual, somewhat unratify’d by sense, or less
> ratify’d, somewhat 
> perversely “flying off at the handle”—a broken back
> single of a 
> metaphor—and the writing proved meet (and
> publishable) only because it 
> fail’d at its intent: that of “breaking through”
> into some new clarity, 
> some reduction, some marc tramp’d out of the
> leavings of the 
> bottle-able red. One believed, with the negligent
> belief of youth, that 
> one’d make clarity emerge out of the renegade
> hobblegobble of sound, 
> that a limit-function ’d cause one to split some
> ripe seam through 
> sheer malarkey-peddling, and out’d tumble, pared
> down and apt, once 
> wash’d of the rosy complect, a searingly precise,
> uhh, couplet. (In the 
> 
=== message truncated ===



 
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