rubrics (I like that word), wrecking crews and hugfests

[alice wellintown]

Richard Fiero wrote:

> The US or WE is always false. The Counterforce amounts to nothing, the
> Trystero is just another force taking turf away from some other
> organization.
>
> No sufficient reason has been given for not reading Mr. Pynchon on the
> surface. There may be no allegories and if there are, they are likely traps.
> However, for the Everything is Everything crowd that can be endlessly
> entertaining.

A reader who hopes to understand the US or WE and the counterforce
stuff in Pynchon must understand the Paranoid Puritan. The Gnostic
Pynchon by Eddins is very difficult but the best book on the subject.

The allegories are traps.


“I love all men who dive,” wrote Herman Melville to a friend. “Any
fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down
stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all
the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will. I’m not
talking of Mr Emerson now—but of the whole corps of thought-divers,
that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the
world began.”  In his review (1850) of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses
from an Old Manse (1846), Melville wrote, “For genius, all over the
world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the
whole circle around.”

Robin is a Catskill eagle. So is Hollander. Men who dive deep. I
rather enjoy Robin's hammering. I hope he keeps swinging. The old
saying about a man with a hammer seeing the world as nails to be
countersunk holds some truth. When one makes Heideggerian reaches for
a hammer, one's understanding of what a hammer is is not determined by
a theoretical understanding of its presence, but by the fact that it
is something one needs at the moment one wishes to do hammering.
Later,  understanding might come to contemplate a hammer as an object.

Entertainment? Do I ammuse myself? It's still better than TV.