V-2nd - 2: At the V-Note

[Mark Kohut]

Michael Bailey writes:
Here in V. and also in GR someplace Mr Pynchon seems to shun
Birdolatry, here I think as a rejection of the cult of personality
 
YES, i say, yes.......fits in with P's anti-charisma themes....and his
own profound avoidance of the cult of personality.............



----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, July 10, 2010 10:07:37 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd - 2: At the V-Note

Mark Kohut wrote:
> I suggest P's attitude is like Fu's...such pseudo-analysis is an attitude 
worth
> a bar fight....although, unlike Fu, TRP might just go on listening....
> this little bit is akin, yes, to his savaging of 'literary criticism' in 
>various
> places...sometimes not unlike ours?
>
> He might say (but he wouldn't say it, just imply it);;;;experience the art as
> fully as you can....words to 'explain' don't help
>
> Or, to deserve a savaging myself: As Wittgenstein sez: About which one cannot
> speak, one must remain silent...
>

there's a whole sub-genre of expressions devoted to expressing disgust
with certain expressions,
and homicidal or suicidal feelings evoked by another person's discourse...

there's this comic strip with a rat and a pig for instance, where the
rat has a list of expressions he won't tolerate, and enforces it by
violence
Archie Bunker used to go thru the motions of hanging himself while
Edith was talking
various magazines issue lists of phrases that will no longer be
tolerated ("at the end of the day", "synergy","talking points","Tea
Party" (well, not yet that I've seen, but one can hope))

Here in V. and also in GR someplace Mr Pynchon seems to shun
Birdolatry, here I think as a rejection of the cult of personality
that is especially pronounced in people who don't know much about a
field of endeavour (like trotting out Einstein or Hawking's name in a
physics symposium, as really the best one can offer, so why indeed
bother (like when I was talking with my cousin who's a physics
professor and asked him "say, how about those Nebulae?" halting
conversation perceptibly, though it eventually moved on...somebody
somewhere was probably breaking an imaginary bottle and bearing down
on my neck with it...)), but in GR I seem to recall the hint, or more
than a hint, of a rejection of a death-orientation he perceives in the
artist and even his music...

Older, wiser, revisiting this issue mutatis mutandis in IV, he throws
the sax player into the politics and spying that elsewhere in the book
is implied to be part of the American life that people escape from
into drugs...
the sax player is freed from his drug addiction in this course of
events; and then thru Doc's timely intervention, freed from the
political machinations too


-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")