Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[Mark Kohut]

I'm afraid I must comment......there is no avid fanship of terrorism in Against the Day. None. The book is, in fact, one of the longest worked-out
family epics of the sins of the fathers, the fountainhead terrorist beginnings shown to lead to death down the generations. Violence, as well as other things, kills in Against the Day. Up close or over time. 


Adam Kirsch, good reader in general, the first to say this, was/is wrong in that review he had to write too hastily. 

The deepest themes of Against the Day align with the deep life-embracing ones in Gravity's Rainbow. We have explored them in depth here---some kind of Buddhism; some kind of panentheism if not pantheism; some kind of indwelling of the (non-transcendant) Spirit. As above, so below. 

IMHO.


--- On Sat, 2/13/10, Phillip Grayson <phillip.grayson at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Phillip Grayson <phillip.grayson at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)
> To: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Cc: "Richard Fiero" <rfiero at gmail.com>, "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, February 13, 2010, 7:52 PM
> I'd agree that the "post" in
> post-Cold War there might be a bit displaced.
> 
> One thing that seemed especially good/hard to reconcile
> about _Against the Day_ was the avid fanship of terrorism
> displayed, a natural outgrowth of the individualism of early
> P under the fighting oppression of reagan-bush-bush jr
> America, a nixonian evil made strong by finally having
> "rogues" and lone individuals without states in
> particular to blame.  No longer a massive, Manichean
> opposite like the USSR, but just idealistic dudes to blame
> for everything.
> 
> 
> However real it is (and I doubt it's as real as
> purported, because the US can't be that hard to invade,
> seems.  Seems people just like to vote Republican when
> they're scared...) this new threat is a boon to
> Monolithic government.  
> 
> 
> _AtD_'s anarchism seems a bit naive because it's
> uncompromising, even as New York is destroyed.  It seems
> unfocused because its focus is a bit far off.  It refuses
> this new paranoia like GR did the old Cold War version. 
> (ie the Soviets are not the enemy, corporations are,
> something now a truism)  (The men who would kill themselves
> dynamically for their beliefs are not our enemies, it's
> those who drive them to it, one way or the other)
> 
> 
> The hegemony of monetary evil remains the persistent,
> underlying, increasingly obfuscated enemy.
> 
> There's a nice inverted parabola of this happening from
> Depression to WWII to these days, one the man might have
> imagined would hit ground before reaganomics, in 1973, but
> which continues to plummet, and not alone.
> 
> 
> Of course, actual politics have been Pynchon's
> weakness, in my humble little opinion, because he's
> prolly an idealist, but his sociology seems pretty spot on,
> from CoL49's hippy predictions (or, "The Lost
> Integration"s civil rights retrospectively
> obviousnesses)  into astute observations about the motives
> of racial hatred and... well, most other things in the big
> books.
> 
> 
> He is very funny, and the reclusiveness that so contributed
> to his popularity might be lending a hand to those who find
> him overrated these days, his first book was a masterpiece
> so polychromatic that going beyond it was hard to imagine,
> and the fact that his next two did so left him in a tough
> place, so that even as he's done more, he's never
> made an epochleaping leap like GR was (no one, I think, has
> yet, since) though _Mason and Dixon_ was a solid try.  
> 
> 
> His rep might be punished for a minute now short term for
> loving to write and for doing so increasingly often, but V.
> Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, and (I
> believe) Against the Day, will stand as the most impressive
> post-war output of any author, none of the self-agrandizing
> of Mailer (or, differently, of Updike), and none
> (subjectively speaking) of the compulsion to publish, rather
> than to write, that did in both those, and Roth, and most of
> the Beats, too.  James McEllroy has a claim, artistically,
> but can't connect as well, Coover is sharp, but
> can't write as well, DeLillo has a way with words, but
> seems to want to be a visual artist or performance artist
> instead (and these shortcoming, I hasten to mention,
> don't stop any of these guys from being spectacular, I
> really truly like them all, but they aren't finally,
> Pynchon) Wallace was great, but too crippled by success to
> top his first masterpiece.  Others of his generation are
> pretty meh, castrated by PCism or Creative Writing courses
> or something, waiting for Juno Diaz and those younger than
> him to step up.
> 
> 
> Pynchon, in my opinion, was the greatest writer between
> 1950 and 2000, in English and otherwise.  He can have his
> detective larks, he can try to just have fun for all I care,
> if that's how he blows off steam between paragraphs in
> the big books and scrapes together some scratch.  I'll
> read those before anything else.
> 
> 
> Can't wait 'til his next novella, if only because
> it foretells his next doorstopper...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 7:02 PM,
> David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> Post Cold War is apt, even though
> GR preceded the end of the Cold War.
> 
>  But many at that time saw the fallacy of the domino
> theory and a
> 
> Super-Other takeover as foundations for our national and
> foreign
> 
> policy.
> 
> 
> 
> The MAD model has not completely been put to bed.
>  Nuclear
> 
> proliferation via terrorist-states as suppliers of enriched
> juice for
> 
> their own or others' use undercuts the threat of like
> retribution.
> 
> Some kind of international policing is required for any
> real nuclear
> 
> disarmament.
> 
> 
> 
> David Morris
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 9:10 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > David Morris wrote:
> 
> >>
> 
> >> Knowing nothing about this Mark Lawson, I'd
> only say that Pynchon
> 
> >> might not really be in the category of
> "post-WWII American literary
> 
> >> giants."  I would think the term would apply
> to authors coming to
> 
> >> prominence in the close-term aftermath of that
> event, and thus their
> 
> >> identities having been intimately formed by that
> event.  I would think
> 
> >> that any post-modern author would not be in their
> ranks.  Maybe
> 
> >> Vietnam era (and post) American literary giants
> would be more
> 
> >> accurate.
> 
> >>
> 
> >> David Morris
> 
> >
> 
> > Post Cold War perhaps.
> 
> > From "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
> 
> > "It [science fiction]was just as important as the
> Beat movement going on at
> 
> > the same time, certainly more important than
> mainstream fiction, which with
> 
> > only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the
> political climate of the
> 
> > cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly
> ideal synthesis of the
> 
> > Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have
> been one of the principal
> 
> > refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite
> persuasion.
> 
> >
> 
> > By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any
> piece of machinery, was
> 
> > the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution
> -- had been extended
> 
> > to include the Manhattan Project, the German
> long-range rocket program and
> 
> > the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no
> major gift of prophecy
> 
> > to see how these three curves of development might
> plausibly converge, and
> 
> > before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched
> nuclear weapons multiply
> 
> > out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for
> global purposes, unlimited
> 
> > range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a
> holocaust running to
> 
> > seven- and eight-figure body counts has become --
> among those who,
> 
> > particularly since 1980, have been guiding our
> military policies --
> 
> > conventional wisdom."
> 
> >
> 
> 
> 
>