Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[Joseph Tracy]

You mostly repeat the same reductive theory, attributing your  
perception  of the writer's intentions  and sources to Pynchon,  
leaving both yourself and Pynchon with little room to say anything.  
This is boring to you , so you argue with those who enjoyed or are  
interested in studying the novel,  if you can call no it isn't , it's  
crap, it's worn out and tired, arguments. Perhaps it is time to write  
your own book and give yourself and the world the jewel-like romance  
you want. Perhaps Gaiman would be a better writer for you.

What I am saying is I don't understand your motivation.  I didn't  
like the much touted The Road, despite McCarthy's masterfully  
engaging writing, but I have no desire to find people who liked it or  
Moby Dick or other books I didn't like (Moby D I respect, but just  
didn't enjoy- The Road I enjoyed reading but just couldn't respect)  
and tell them what I thought. If someone asks I will tell them, but  
to discuss the novel page by page would hold no interest for me.

On Oct 25, 2009, at 9:34 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Michael Bailey  wrote:
>
>> alice wellintown  wrote:
>>>
>>> That Po-Mo has ended, and indeed it has exhausted itself, matters
>>> little, since we now know that it was yet another ISM of us Moderns.
>>
>> a lot of interesting stuff seems to fall under that rubric...
>
> My Definition of Modernism
>
> Modernism: diverse cross-fertilization between cultures, between art
> forms and between disciplines---the need to confront violence,
> nihilism, and despair; the fascination with, but fear of, the
> unconscious; the centrality of a dramatized narrator who is not
> omniscient but rather himself searching for understanding; a symbolic
> richness which invites multiple interpretations (influence of French
> Symbolism), radical redefinition of the real (W and H James, Freud,
> Bergson) Colonial programs, ruthless exploitation, journey (up the
> Congo) or Modern (T.S. Eliot secularized) quest or symbolic
> exploration into the darkest heart (consciousness) of Man,
> manipulation of the reader's experience of time and space by means of
> disruption of narrative chronology and ontological/epistemological
> differentiation and the representation of consciousness (stream and
> multiple) by the description of events, and the use of the
> reflexivity and self-consciousness.
>
>  Those masterful images because complete
> Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
> A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
> Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
> Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
> Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
> I must lie down where all the ladders start
> In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
>
>         --W. B. Yeats
>
> Pynchon reminds me of Jonathan Edwards, the so-called "Last American
> Puritan," who has one foot in the TULIP and one foot on the Train. In
> the final assessment, forced to make one of course, I would say that P
> is a Modernist, a Satirist, and author of American Romance. The PO-MO
> is clearly an important movement and,  P is, while not its high
> priest, certainly an adept practitioner.
>
>
>> But I remain skeptical that Pynchon's texts
>> can be described fully satisfingly with those critical tools.
>
> Well, they are only tools, extensions of our human faculties. We use
> them to get the job done. If we want to describe fully and
> satisfactorily, I doubt we can make a jig for the job. What are we to
> do? Sit silently like Quakers? Of perhaps we should all shut our
> mouths and wiggle our little fingers like Cratylus. ;-)
>
> It's not easy to describe Apocalypse Now & Jungleland:
>
>
> Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
> Between flesh and what's fantasy and the poets down here
> Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
> And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
> And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even  
> dead
> Tonight in Jungleland
>
>
>>
>> Some (but not all) of this is doubtless due to my incomplete  
>> knowledge
>> of them...
>
>>>
>>> ANd, while the direct and at times interesting parody of the hard
>>> boiled novel/film holds our attention in a few scenes, his
>>> postmodernist experimentation are no longer novel
>>
>> ah, but it's not a novel, it's a romance...
>
> Yes! So we expect to meet characters like Krook — a rag and bottle
> merchant and collector of papers. He is the landlord of the house
> where Nemo and Miss Flite live and where Nemo dies. Krook dies from a
> case of spontaneous human combustion.  Ironically, amongst the stacks
> of papers obsessively hoarded by the illiterate Krook is the key to
> resolving the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
>
>
>
>>> Moreover, P's tropes are worn out and tired, his ideas float on the
>>> surface of a filthy and ugly pool of poisoned and polluted
>>> prose-landscapes where zombies and manikins and thanatoids and
>>> subversive stereotypes zap in and out of Tube-lands and Movie  
>>> Sets and
>>> drug induced trips down lost highways where the spilled and broken
>>> battle the blind and all end up in the ditch.
>>>
>>
>> 3 responses, none of which is completely responsive, but taken  
>> together,
>> also don't completely answer your objection:
>>
>> a) exactly!  what's not to like about that?
>
> I need the picturesque sublime aesthetic Diamonds;  they are, after
> all, a girl's best friend. It's not beauty or beast that kills this
> book, it's the lack of both.
>
>
>
>> b) it holds the mirror up to life!
>
> Too often, it hold the mirror up to and exhausted Pynchon.
>
>
>> c) tropes worn out and tired? nah - his tropes keep
>> changing.  I don't find him guilty of stylistic stop-loss a-tall.
>
> IV is VL with a couple few jigsaw pieces missing, Willie McCoy and  
> Leroy Brown.