Very nice on M & D....

[Ian Livingston]

Is there any such a thing as fiction that is not, to some greater or
lesser degree, autobiographical? If it's fiction, it springs from the
mind of it's writer, right? What else could it be but autobiography?
The names have been changed to protect the innocent, the actions of
the characters reshaped by imagination, and the plot sifted and
synthesized from a selection of observations, but, in the end, it must
necessarily be a map of some part of the psyche of it's writer.

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:18 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course it is the poetic quality of his prose and not the kazoo
> songs and Tube-jingles; that is one reason why I quoted Fitzgerald in
> a prior post. Note too that the Fitzgerald poem appears as a prose
> paragraph and not in verse and stanzas in the text, This Side of
> Paradise. The beauty of Fitzgerald's prose, its ghostly lilting, its
> romantic whispers, its full-throated ease, its gyres turning and
> turning, its fantastic wastelands, its parades of paradises lost and
> longed for seem to haunt Pynchon's prose.  Of course, as you note,
> modern prose and poetry, a post-romantic prose, is, like all modern
> art, experiment and cross fertilization, between cultures,  between
> art forms and between disciplines.
>
> On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Are you referring, Ms Alice, to the Poetic Quality his prose takes on, more
>> than his actual poems and songs, as to what makes him great?
>> As I recall Miss Marianne Moore sez in her poem "The Past Is The Present",
>> "Hebrew poetry is prose with a sort of heightened consciousness",
>> I reckon this could apply to Pynchon, as well as a handful of other 20th
>> century prose writers.
>> Tho' I am especially fond of that Timothy Tox, and the various songs
>> throughout Pynchonia (The Aqyn, The Song of Byron the Bulb, et al.)
>> (hums to self) "Light up and shine up you in-can-descent Bulb Babies..."
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 6:23 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, one may argue the autobiographical nature of lots of works:
>>> Joyce's Portrait, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Melville's Typee,  & Co.,
>>> however, to confuse a parody such as IV with an Autobiography doesn't
>>> argue the autobiographical nature of the work.
>>>
>>> In any event, we were discussing what it is that makes P's works great
>>> and I think those of the aesthic crew here know that it is his poetry.
>>> Tom wanted to be a poet. I guess all great authors aspire to music or
>>> something like that.
>>>
>>> The last light wanes and drifts across the land,
>>> The low, long land, the sunny land of spires.
>>> The ghosts of evening tune again their lyres
>>> And wander singing, in a plaintive band
>>> Down the long corridors of trees. Pale fires
>>> Echo the night from tower top to tower.
>>> Oh sleep that dreams and dream that never tires,
>>> Press from the petals of the lotus-flower
>>> Something of this to keep, the essence of an hour!
>>>
>>> No more to wait the twilight of the moon
>>> In this sequestrated vale of star and spire;
>>> For one, eternal morning of desire
>>> Passes to time and earthy afternoon.
>>> Here, Heracletus, did you build of fire
>>> And changing stuffs your prophecy far hurled
>>> Down the dead years; this midnight I aspire
>>> To see, mirrored among the embers, curled
>>> In flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  http://www.caxtonclub.org/reading/2001/August2001/scottFitz.htm
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> > Alice, you may never make sense of a Critical Mind if you do not
>>> > practice
>>> > the art of Strongly Misreading...?
>>> > As for a novel or parody of a novel not being the same as Autobiography
>>> > see
>>> > Mark Twain's which may as well be a novel or a parody of one
>>> >  (tho' I believe his Autobiography Proper was published recently).
>>> > One may also argue the autobiographical nature of many great Novels...?
>>
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."