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

[alice wellintown]

The scene reads like a writer's notebook. I suspect that P was not yet
young enough to see that he was so much older then when he wrote this,
I also hold with those, few, who view the jazz man here as less than
positive--all crypric allusions aside. His keep cool but care simply
doesn't sum up anything to this reader; more mantra stereotype cant.

I don't think P does his best work too close to home. In fact, he
needs to move his work away from himself to write great prose. V.'s
sick crew scenes are too close to home.

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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")
>
>
>
>
>