Very nice on M & D....

[alice wellintown]

Absolutely. That a work has an author or is the product of an author's
mind doesn't make all works autobiography or autobiographical.

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 12:29 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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."
>