Photography vs. movies: Misc TRP discussion during break?

[Mark Kohut]

 "Play it fuckin' louder!"---Dylan going electric at Newport.

On the loudness of modern fiction BECAUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY!....sex this guy.

http://www.sltrib.com/arts/ci_14020122







--- On Sun, 12/20/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Photography vs. movies: Misc TRP discussion during break?
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, December 20, 2009, 7:14 AM
> I recommend:
> 
> Charles Sheeler and Cult of the Machine
> Karen Lucic
> At the dawn of the twentieth century Henry Adams proclaimed
> that the
> machine was as central to our modem American culture as the
> Virgin was
> to medieval culture. We worshiped in our factories as our
> ancestors
> worshiped in cathedrals. In this century we also raised up
> bridges,
> grain elevators, and skyscrapers, and many were dazzled by
> these
> symbols of the Machine Age—from American presidents such
> as Calvin
> Coolidge to European artists such as Marcel Duchamp.
> Charles Sheeler
> (1886–1965) was one of the most noted American painters
> and
> photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine.
> But was he
> high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production
> and
> technology that dominated his era?
> 
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LUCCHX.html
> 
> Forced to speculate, I would say that P's texts are as
> ambivalent as
> Sheeler's. The obvious difference is that critics misread
> Sheeler as a
> machine prophet, though  Lucic and others have
> recently argued
> convincingly that he was not, while critics misread P as a
> Luddite
> prophet, though his own statements on this (including his
> essays,  on
> Orwell, Sloth, Luddism, his development as an author ...),
> argue, not
> so convincingly, it would seem, that he is not.
> 
> More interesting, by far, is how and to what end  P,
> like hundreds of
> his predesesors in American art, uses photography and film
> in his
> fictions. His tone or his attitude is not so easily
> discerned and
> seems a near futile project at this point. But the
> tradition, from the
> obvious starting point--Hawthorne's HSG-- through Crane's
> use of
> Brady, and so on, is worth considering.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > Recently we plisters had a very interesting--to me at
> least---
> > discussion about some of the possible attitudes of TRP
> to
> > photography and movies in his fiction......
> >
> > I held out for a steadfy dissing satire of
> photography......many others,
> > such as John C., thought that that did not explain
> TRP's obvious love of
> > movie-going, obvious love of many movies visible in
> the text, etc.
> >
> > Which seems as true as rain.
> >
> > So, I could not help turning over the works
> > in my mind---rereading all of them since then [UNFUNNY
> JOKE]---in what passes for thinking in my life.....
> >
> > And this possibility occurred to me. Does TRP make a
> lifelong distinction between photographing what we take as
> the world [while reading] his fiction versus all the
> photgraphs that make up a movie in his fictions? Movies
> which are entertainment, some are even art, let's say, that
> is, that he presents filmed artifacts as fictions,
> metaphysically, while shots of "reality" or life---and
> 24fps's deathly failure---are part of a vision which
> steadily disses "capturing" "shooting" life while it should
> be lived.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>