NP: Ick

[Mark Kohut]

OK......that was me, not Pynchon. I may have learned badly from him, my bad, but you cannot convince me he is NOT a master of 
"overarching metaphors"....which I think you would agree to, yes? His metaphors are not cartoonish, we would mostly agree, I guess, so I'm not him. So be it. None of us are. I am afraid some of my 'cartoonish overarching metaphors' will continue. That's me, just trying to scry his bootstraps.  If Pynchon himself can be called cartoonish, I'll live with the failure. You can call any of them out that you want. 

Of course I've taken anti-biotics and will again. I did quote Doctor Chekhov on anaesthesia. Context matters, of course (and maybe I should flesh out more contextual words with many of my remarks; maybe my narcissism is showing as I take for granted that some context--P's and mine-- is already known of and accepted.) For example, to grow meat for our everyday consumption and what that means for our common humanity, not to mention the horror examples you also give, seems almost qualitatively different from developing antibiotics--to me. But, if you think otherwise, you've said so, I guess.

Chekhov, doctor, a giver of anaesthesia, STILL has a number of wonderful stories very subtly about the healing power of nature, and the psychological healthiness of outdoor people. He shows it subtly catching one by surprise. Clist-like if there is one.  It is part of his vision....That is what fiction embodies when it works, we all know but disagree about in execution. So it is. 

There is, I still believe, a deep strain of acceptance of the natural processes of life in Pynchon, whether he has taken antibiotics or not as well. That is part of his fictional vision for insight, contrast with death-in-life, I believe. 

Just as, as I've written, streetlights, artificial lights 
are Bad Shit almost everywhere in P's work, especially in AtD, yet the man
walks the streets of manhattan and other cities and ANY of us can riff on the value of lighting. He wants to give us a fable/parable/myth of electricty and modernity, among much else, no matter what we KNOW about electricity and that we all use it everyday. 

Crystal is another, for example. Think he dislikes rock crystals? I do not think he even thinks that way. For him, it's a constant metaphor worked in everywhere relevant and where one doesn't often expect it-- like the poet he is.

His works are 'symbolic forms', as one critic's way of phrasing would put it, saturated with satire to score (much of) the modern world, aspects of the world, history, America, kinds of foax. Their coherent symbolic 'truths' say things about the world they are about---but seldom  literally. Did Eliot think London, the West, was literally, totally a Wasteland in that 1922 classic? Even a total moral wasteland? Well, yes, we have to say, while knowing that many people were kind to him, were morally acceptable to him, in London at that time. 

I am afraid I do mean most of my remarks, but I'll try to rephrase them
more often.

It seems that, unlike you, I do think I see and love to comment on what I perceive to be P's values, small v at least,-- but there seems to be some kind of Buddhism that pervades--- and his fictional, visionary hostility to many other things. 

Call me wrong. Delete me. That's life.

Hey, have you read "Zeitoun" about your city during Katrina? I just did and was moved and angered.

Later,

Mark





 

--- On Thu, 12/3/09, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: NP: Ick
> To: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Thursday, December 3, 2009, 2:22 PM
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Mark
> Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Yea, it's growing..just an overarching metaphor
> learned from Pynchon...
> >
> > Not naturally organic, therefore Bad Shit....imho.
> 
> Man, it sure would be nice if you didn't reduce all
> realities to the
> most cartoonish "overarching metaphors."  And please
> don't blame
> Pynchon with that fault.
> 
> And I know you don't really mean most of these "therefore
> Bad Shit"
> judgements.  Nobody could.  Have you ever taken
> antibiotics?
> 
> David Morris
>