Pynchon reference for today
Michael Bailey
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Sat Mar 11 02:27:39 CST 2006
On 3/9/06, Elainemmbell at aol.com <Elainemmbell at aol.com> wrote:
> Word of the Day for Thursday March 9, 2006
> contradistinction \kon-truh-dis-TINK-shuhn\, noun:
> Distinction by contrast; as, "sculpture in contradistinction to painting."
>
> In the quarter-century since "Gravity's Rainbow," American
> novelists have increasingly fixed their boldest inventions in the past,
> usually their own early years or a time long before they were born -- in
> contradistinction to postwar writers who vigorously peeled away World War II
> and the social fabric of the 1950's.
> --Gary Giddins, "Escape to New York," New York Times, September 20, 1998
>
>
Although half of V is in the 50s, and certainly CoL49 is set about the
time of its writing, (and that other novel of his that I'd like to
write a thesis on in order to extol its gemlike perfection isn't set
so very long ago) there's a truth lurking there but whether it speaks
to Pynchon's concept of bicameral mind -
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html
>Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live
and work >hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the
Left prosecute their >affairs in the streets manipulated by mob
violence. And cannot live but in the >dreamscape of the future. --V.
- or to other tendencies (current events becoming more the subject of
TV, movies, periodicals and blogs than of novels? editors' choices?
the consolidation of ownership in the publishing industry? sales
numbers? or just the fascination inherent in history? perhps a seemly
humility in not wanting to rush to judgement on current events?) I
wouldn't venture to opine
--
"Acceptance, forgiveness, love - now that's a philosophy of life!"
-Woody Allen, as Broadway Danny Rose
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