ENOUGH With the OBA Thing Now, Please!

[alice wellintown]

Yes, I enjoyed that American Masters film on Neil Young. Although, as
I noted in a previous post, Young looks, at times, more insane than
Manson, he comes across as a very sane and honest talent.

Artists are people and are always made up of ambiguities. Authors make
use of ambiguity for a number of reasons. Melville gave the word to
one of his novels. He used ambiguity, as Hawthorne, as Henry James, as
the others who have influenced his characterizations and narrative
tones. With Pynchon we often end up with these odd and loose readings.
The worse kind is this Both /  And & he is a strong moralist. I mean,
can it be that his books are Both / And ambiguous and unconfused
moralist? How can he condemn the Morgan Bush Capitalist Murderers and
the CIA dope pushes and Both/And at the same time? To pick out such
moral reading, readers seem compelled to paste passages from seperate
novels and read between lines and ignore most of the traditional
elements of prose fiction, like characters, plot, theme, setting,
conflict ..then argue, "those in the know are those who know" and all
others are not on the proper wavelength. It does smack of Oour Beloved
preacher/teacher/mentor and we are a cult following.

Perhaps Pynchon needs to be read as a style of writing. It's tone we
need to pay close attention to. But then why bother so much with all
the rest?