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

[Mark Kohut]

--- On Wed, 9/9/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: How we use and abuse the word genius. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 4:41 PM
> 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!"
> 
> 

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