V-2nd, Chap 7

[Mark Kohut]

Well, I say Schlesinger had not the foresight into the Vital Center-Right shift
in American culture that TRP foresaw......even in V. he saw the pattern in the
fold of history that would make it happen................in V. in the Profane 
sections, TRP
saw the Vital Dead Center of 50s America..........

He saw the shift [Vital Center-Right] in GR and Vineland and commented on it in 
comic
tranquillity in IV.....

Schlesinger disses TRP's "unreadable work" in his diaries...

I think that shows he was too inside to see what TRP saw and foresaw. 
Schlesinger 
had little feel for artists' visions...(ever read some of his movie reviews? 
boring and---if you want a
second opinion---stupid too) 

he worked with too many American Godolphins and Goodfellows to illuminate TRP's 
visions, I say.


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, September 26, 2010 1:18:23 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd, Chap 7

We forgot to mention _Cambridge Companion to 19th Cent. American
Women's Writing_ where Arthur M. Schlesinger, who, like Benny, was a
"Catholic Jew" and who wrote a great deal on Jacksonian Democracy and
what Melville called "the Kingly Commons" and on anti-Catholicism in
America, is the figure the authors of the Introduction and Editors,
Gould and Bauer allude to ("The Vital Center"), as they define the
cultural shifts after the second great war and the reflection of these
in American Literature. Also worth reading on this head is Giddens's
Introduction to Weber's PESC, not to mention what has been mentioned
before, but worth mentioning in this thread, De Rougemont's Love in
the Western World.