Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2009 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds


> 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.
>

Hey, I had a thought, Maybe Pynchon, now with the wisdom of age, has 
concluded that it is really impossible to put a lot of moral relevance into 
anything as imperfect as a novel,  so has this time out refrained from all 
the deep layered stuff he normally unloads on us.

He may still be just as good a writer (I think so anyway) as he ever was, 
which Inherent Vice plainly demonstrates.

P