Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[Robin Landseadel]

Sorry—as I recall, I rather enjoyed "The Scarlet Letter." That "take- 
it-or-leave-it indifference" you speak of—wonder what to make of the  
"Deleuze & Guattari Fakebook" in Vineland?

I understand your bridling at what can be construed as a low-brow  
hissy fit. What I'm perceiving in Inherent Vice is the conscious  
adoption of a low-brow genre with a concomitant awareness of Raymond  
Chandler's use of a low-brow form which he then filled with some  
amazing and very creative descriptive prose. I guess by virtue of what  
I'm doing right here, right now I'm one of the lit-crit crowd.

IV is still Pynchon, take it or leave it. I think this book is bloody  
marv, but I'm sure we've all noticed how "Alice" expends so much  
effort to take this book down as many notches as possible. I sense  
that was, in part, Pynchon's intent in Inherent Vice—to come up with  
something that "Acadmy" would just hate. The longer I read this book,  
the deeper this book gets. But the style, the language of IV  
encourages facile readings. I'm reading a lot of autobiographical  
meaning in IV, and note that it provides a frame of sorts for reading  
Gravity's Rainbow—lit-crit deelite. There is this extraordinary  
distance between the content of GR and the circumstances in which it  
was written.

Hope this constitutes FB as given.
On Oct 25, 2009, at 8:32 AM, Monte Davis wrote:

> Robin Landseadel sez:
>
>> ... I'm pretty sure the "WTF" moments in IV are there to piss
>> off the lit-crit crowd
>
> I'm pretty sure from my own readings, strongly reinforced by the  
> preface to
> _Slow Learner_, that after _V._ he was self-confident enough for a
> take-it-or-leave-it indifference: neither pandering to any audience
> demographic nor making an effort to piss any off, any more than does
> Nabokov, Joyce, Flaubert, or Smollett.
>
> I bridle a bit at "lit-crit crowd," which is language I associate  
> with the
> boringly predictable hissy fits in SF and other genre forums.  
> Someone says
> "but X's writing is so lame," and someone else is sure to jump in  
> (wearing a
> chip on his shoulder that's been there ever since he hated _The  
> Scarlet
> Letter_ in 10th grade) to speak for the Real People who value a  
> Ripping Good
> Yarn, unlike that effete lit-crit crowd with its pretense of  
> pleasure at
> artsy-fartsy arcana. (For that matter, it's also like some of  
> Nabokov's
> shots from the hip at Freud and Freudian readings.)
>
> GMAFB. To read *anything* as closely and explore it as minutely as the
> regulars on this listserv IS to be engaged in literary criticism.  
> Period.
>
> -Monte
>