Editing Pynchon?

[Mark Kohut]

1) not that conflicted a relationship with the American consumer culture---he's almost entirely 'agin it......the love of things savaged since V., at least.

2) I suggest P excoriates our perverted desires in many of his "pornographic' set pieces as much as he scores "capitalist-consumption"
or more. 

3) You have no evidence beyond what TRP says about C of L49 in the SL intro
for why he does not like it any longer. And he is pretty straightforward there. Earlier in his life, he wrote to
scholars like David Cowart, an academic doing a book about his work and Hollander, for example.

4)Late books self-designed to "fail"?  One day after "Inherent Vice" is published and its
'success' so far, in reviews and sales? One day after Heikki reminds us that both Vineland and Mason & Dixon made the new York Times bestseller list? Skewed argument here.

5)"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." — Herman Melville ...
TRP quotes Orwell in the 1984 intro as, dour, pessimistic George wrote
that "all novels are failures", meaning they all fall short of what they should be.


--- On Wed, 8/5/09, Nushra MohamedKhan <nushramkhan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Nushra MohamedKhan <nushramkhan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Editing Pynchon?
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 8:35 AM
> John, I am sorry about the "real"
> stuff. Really!
> But we know because we are smart readers of literature and
> of Pynchon's works.
> 
> Again, take a look at P's comments on Nabokov and Henry
> Miller in SL.
> P's works are, as the stuff I posted earlier argues for
> Film Noir,
> in a conflicted relationship with the American consumer
> culture of
> which they are a part.
> Take the Pudding scene in GR or better yet, the Lake sex
> scene in
> AGTD. While the themes of love and death and all that
> Normon O. Brown
> stuff and the plot lines and all are important, P includes
> offesnsive
> scenes to make a point about the pornographic consumption
> of
> death-shit "art" in capitalist-consumption culture. he
> pushes Love and
> Death in the American Novel (great critical text) threw the
> consumer's
> pornographic screen.   He makes that point
> again and again. He could
> take the Lake scene out and do no damage to the novel while
> increasing
> his reading audience. But P dislikes CL49, in part, because
> the
> Academy loves it. He writes, as Melville famously said of
> his late
> great works, novels that are designed to fail.
>