Can or should creative writing be taught?

[Mark Kohut]

Robin,

Find C.S. Pierce on self-organizing, at least. There is an essay on (early) Pynchon using this concept. Pierce was America's greatest philosopher, most say, including Wm. James hisself, most famous American pragmatist probably---Menand in that recommended book does, I believe.

See if self-organizing does NOT remind you of the anarchist dance miracle.

See other Pierce which should all be in public domain online. See him on the open-ended universe and much, much more. 

I agree with alice's recommendation re The Metaphysical Club. In one book, an education. In one book, the major stream of American philosophy which will illumine Pynchon---and many others. 

We might read it online while reading our next Pynchon???  

Mark

P.S. Confession re Menand: his negative review of Against the Day (in the New Yorker) struck deeper in me than Wood's ever did. I have not reread it 'cause i don't care if, as judgment, he is right. The book is STILL worth explicating for whatever it is. 

--- On Sat, 12/5/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Can or should creative writing be taught?
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, December 5, 2009, 11:42 AM
> On Dec 5, 2009, at 6:46 AM, alice
> wellintown wrote:
> 
> > There are only a few academic articles that discuss
> the American
> > philosophical strain that informs Pynchon’s works. I
> mean Pragmatism.
> > But they are buried under the stacks that claim or
> assume Pynchon’s
> > philosophical influences are Eastern, Transcendental,
> or not
> > philosophical but Theosophical.
> 
> It would be useful/helpful if you were to offer up the
> titles and authors of the academic articles that frame
> Pynchon's writing within the boundaries of Pragmatism. I'm
> not certain what your background is, other than
> college-level English—it's the specifics that make me
> curious. It's clear that you're framing some of your ideas
> concerning Pynchon's writing in the context of Hawthorne,
> Melville and Henry James—were you reading these authors in
> your college studies or is this a more of a personal quest?
> I gather that Pragmatism is important for you, you may
> correctly gather that I know nothing about the subject. I
> suspect that I am not alone on this list in that regard. As
> Dixon says on page 314 of "Mason & Dixon": "Amuse me."
> 
> I can claim no proper College education but I can claim an
> ability to extract meaning from context. Pynchon's books
> have many references to Theosophical and Occult systems. The
> manner in which this material is presented is—to these
> eyes, at least—by no means negative. Sortilège is always
> right. Geli Tripping appears to commit a most virtuous &
> Christian act using the tools and resources of Black Magic.
> The shamans in Pynchon's tales, already on the right track,
> willingly send various lost characters back to the right
> path. I'd point to Lew Basnight's various
> transformations—starting on page 38 of Against the
> Day—as among the more interesting demonstrations of
> magical actions and their karmic consequences to be found in
> TRP's books. For whatever reason, this is a subject that
> reappears constantly in TRP's writing.
> 
> You may be scrying negative messages concerning the
> "Non-Scheduled Theologies" that are tossed into Pynchon's
> tales but I'm seeing acre lots of Magical Realism, often
> with attendant signifiers of Parrots, magickal tools &
> really cute Witches. There also appears to be various fables
> within these books that require Charles Hollander's "Magic
> Eye" in order to properly contextualize—I'd give a nod to
> Doc 'n Bigfoot's perambulations around West Hollywood as a
> more secular example. In any case, Pynchon has always seemed
> to be more of a publicans and sinners kind of guy anyway.
> I've probably said this too many times already, but it
> appears that heresy itself is the author's true idée fixe.
> I'm not attempting to box the author into some subdivision
> of a Wiccan enclave, rather I'd assert that the author is an
> extraordinarily heretical Christian. Excessively Catholic,
> one might say.
> 
> A lot of Pynchon is concerned with forks in the road. This
> all seems like a very "Hippy" trip to me, and Pynchon seems
> to spend an awful lot of his efforts and considerable
> resources focusing on this lost tribe. I've been saying for
> a long time "Take the man at his word." As far as I can
> tell, the man spends an awful lot of words engaged with
> Magic and the context in which the author is placing these
> observations appears to be "The Counterculture." If there
> are "only a few academic articles that discuss the America
> philosophical strain that informs Pynchon’s works" perhaps
> that is due to those articles being outliers. Perhaps the
> limited amount of biographical material concerning the
> author is actually useful, particularly in the context of
> the current novel. Perhaps the author owes more to Jack
> Kerouac than to William & Henry James.
> 
> > That said, I hope people will go on teaching writing.
> Teach people to
> > write poems, letters, essays, editorials. Teach them
> to read, comics,
> > billboards, Cassill's Norton Anthology of Short
> Fiction. It's the
> > democratic thing to do. God knows we need to do
> everything we can to
> > get out democracy back in the hands of citizens who
> read and write
> > well.
> > 
> > As Walt Whitman sez, Give them Books, Open the
> Libraries!
> > http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00159.html
> 
> Amen to that!
> 
> 

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