COL49: Why the Negativity, TRP?

[Michael Bailey]

this is why I love this list.
"If you can't say anything nice, hey, come and sit next to me!" as
Alice Longworth Roosevelt wrote, except for the "hey" part - that was
me.

while I will never deny there's a goshawful lotta other good stuff out
there to read, and would never suggest Pynchon is the only author who
can ring my chimes, and indeed would resist any kind of ranking and
plunk for a non-hierarchical sort of meritocracy like Garry Wills
finds in his interpretation of Catholicism in _Why I am a Catholic_
which I'm finding very good going (though it's non-fiction)...

while I would never stand for ruling your criticisms out, and would
consider under some weird hypothetical circumstance (if I hadn't
forsworn dire activities in hypothetical circumstances with the most
stringent of anathemical vows) perishing in defense of your right to
say these things about _Vineland_ et al;

still, what you say only makes me want to "shut up and play my guitar",
(like this fellow in Ann Arbor called One-String Sam who'd appear here
and there, unsought, like the doppelganger of the Scarlet Pimpernel
and once jumped onstage when Hunter Thompson was giving a lecture in
the Hill Auditorium and did his thing...)

I can't argue these things with you and your wonderful wonderful
references (what I can sit still long enough to read of them); and
though I do not understand your desire to confine comparison to a
generational clade of authors, I'm not much gonna push the Ulysses
thing (though occasionally feel I have to burst out in Caedmon-type
song about it)...

I've conquered my urge to rant; and am down to only a few occasional
raves; would no doubt have been long ago booted and killfiled from
most other lists for irrepressible a-holery, and will probably cringe
- but assuredly, not nearly enough - when the time comes (as I'm
relatively sure it will, grid willing) for me to reread the archives
(just the thought of some of those posts I've written...shudder...)

but I'll go flying towards grace believing that these books are worthy
of raving about, that as I wrote in one of my earliest posts on this
list, they are one of the things that make life worth living

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:58 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael Bailey wrote:
>> I mean, there's a reason for ornate and intricate writing and it's not  just to show off.
>
> The rhetoical question I like is: How does the text mean? What Eliot's
> Wasteland means is, for anyone willing to read it with the old "close
> reading" method, which is making a huge come back now that the
> rootless and endless rooting of, for lack of a better term,
> postmodernism's exhaustion has been exhausted if not buried with the
> roots that clutch and the branches that branch, is not too difficult
> to discover. How it means is a horse of a different gender or a mule.
> But, and this butt is is a big as my mama's ass--when she backs it up
> her beeper go off, but, what Pynchon means is often not dicoverable.
> So, that he combines the Modernist methods of Eliot & Co., loading up
> his prose with allusions and intertextual parodies and narrative
> ambiguities--and a dozen or so other major modern methods 1. (as
> stated here before, My Definition of Modernism) with postmodernist
> techniques (Brian McHale) renders the reading of P one that is focused
> on a how that disallows a what. This is fun, for those of us who love
> a pale fire, but it can be quite tiresome if the game, the play on the
> tradition is trumped by (to use Eliot's phrase) the individual talent.
> This is Lot49's problem and GR is the solution to it. Beautiful
> imaginative poetic prose. This is why, in my never humble opinion, the
> California novels are crap. Well, VL has lotsof great corn stuck in it
> and it floats in the bowl, Lot49 suffers from thinning hair and legs
> and arms and rolled trousers and dead mermaids shored upon the ruins
> of a great idea and, of course, Inherent Vice is a jump on the book
> wagon hardboiloed boyz book that falls off and is mecifully run over
> by a tuna truck then flushed down the toiloet with a couple of junkies
> on the boarder of mexico.
>
> 1. Modernism: diverse cross-fertilization between cultures, between art
> forms and between disciplines---the need to confront violence,
> nihilism, and despair; the fascination with, but fear of, the
> unconscious; the centrality of a dramatized narrator who is not
> omniscient but rather himself searching for understanding; a symbolic
> richness which invites multiple interpretations (influence of French
> Symbolism), radical redefinition of the real (W and H James, Freud,
> Bergson) Colonial programs, ruthless exploitation, journey (up the
> Congo) or Modern (T.S. Eliot secularized) quest or symbolic
> exploration into the darkest heart (consciousness) of Man,
> manipulation of the reader's experience of time and space by means of
> disruption of narrative chronology and ontological/epistemological
> differentiation and the representation of consciousness (stream and
> multiple) by the description of events, and the use of the
> reflexivity and self-consciousness.
>



-- 
"What birds have done today, men may do tomorrow: be it moult, be it
hatch, be it agreement in the nest" - James Joyce