Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[alice wellintown]

Why would you try to understand my motivation? Don't waste your time.
Go write a book or something.

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 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.
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