TRP letter re Ian McEwan

[Matthew Ryan]

"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
-Wilson Mizner

On 12/6/06, Chris Broderick <elsuperfantastico at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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