How we use and abuse the word genius. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

[rich]

ah columnists--all hail and kudos to Captain Dunsel!

yr friendly friends at Starfleet

rich

On 9/9/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Sep 9, 2009, at 1:11 PM, Paul Di Filippo wrote:
>
>> Pynchon as an example.....
>>
>> http://www.slate.com/id/2227801
>
>   . . . and a rather bad one at that:
>
> 	I have my own strong feelings about the question of genius in
> 	literature. I've always felt that if we look at the past century,
> 	Nabokov was a game-changer, as the academic phrase has it.
> 	Nabokov showed there is a place you can go, a place that the
> 	alchemy of words can transport reader and writer to, that no one
> 	had gone before. And Nabokov went there, with ease, in Lolita
> 	and Pale Fire. So it's hard to call any other writer in the past
> 	century a genius of the same order. Which in part accounts for
> 	my ambivalence about the decision to publish, against his
> 	wishes, an unfinished draft of his last incomplete work, The
> 	Original of Laura: No one was more aware than he of when a
> 	work of his had reached its zenith of genius. He didn't feel this
> 	one had. Perhaps, though, we'll learn some valuable lessons
> 	about the degrees of ascent to genius. Is it all or nothing?
>
> 	I'd say the only work of genius in the past half-century to come
> 	close may have been Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. (Gravity's
> 	Rainbow was to be his Ulysses but turned out to be his
> 	Finnegans mistake.)
>
> 	Maybe genius must give the feeling of effortlessness as well as
> 	utter confidence and transcendence. Ulysses and Gravity's
> 	Rainbow both show the palpable sweaty strain to become
> 	encyclopedic works of genius: Always screaming across the
> 	sky: "This is a work of genius!"
>
>