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

[malignd at aol.com]

I can't speak with any authority,  but it seems entirely possible--from 
what I know--that Bellow courted Rudolf Steiner for novelistic reasons. 
  He denied Steiner's request to review The Dean's December.  But who 
knows?  if it's true, I wouldn't begin to defend it.  Similarly Nabokov 
may have actually believed in an afterlife.  He would one of billions 
of educated people who do.

I guess I've just argued myself in a circle re P.  But very hard for me 
to understand in all three cases.


-----Original Message-----
From: Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com>
To: Ray Easton <kraimie at kraimie.net>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Nov 25, 2009 9:34 am
Subject: RE: rubrics (I like that word), wrecking crews and hugfests


<< That Pynchon employs the Tarot to give structure to GR, I do not 
think it follows from this fact that Pynchon takes the occult 
seriously.  Are we similarly to conclude that Joyce "believes in" Greek 
mythology? >>Well, that's why I said I'd sometimes 'wondered' whether 
(or to what extent) Pynchon takes all that stuff seriously.A bit like 
the way people wondered how seriously Saul Bellow took all that 
theosophy stuff he sprinkled through 'Humboldt's Gift'. IN Bellow's 
case, of course, people assumed he was just taking the piss, when in 
fact he was, apparently, dead serious. (Now, if that doesn't wake 
malignD up out of whatever coffin he sleeps through the daytime in, I 
don't know what will....)