The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts

[Mark Kohut]

Erik......you are so ahead of me, some of us, in this reading, and with 
rereadings......

Which is great and moves discussion higher.....

here, and I have to get to this and later sections, I want to ask as well as the 
truths of all you
say, is there not working also, perhaps, a notion that an artwork to be Art, 
captures the world,
(much of ) the rest of society's overt and hidden communal truths? 

 




________________________________
From: Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com>
To: Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 11:33:30 AM
Subject: Re: The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts


i think part of what WG is working with is the importance of the author to the 
work. for Gaddis, the author is not important. or rather, he is important as a 
man, but the art is something more than that, something ephemeral, something 
transmitted and received. the original Flemish masters, the "source" of all 
these forgeries, were painted by schools, in the style of, and so on. proving 
authenticity, thus of an author, is difficult, often impossible (thus 
facilitating the fakes). I think the real sin for WG is the modern tendency to 
focus on the author, rather than the work; thus the embarrassing reality of the 
art market, where wealthy idiots pay top dollar for fakes -- because they care 
more that it's an "authentic" Van Eyck than that it's any good. 


"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do 
they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist 
but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?" (pp95-96)




 
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com> wrote:

The interesting thing about the Borges story, "Pierre Menard, autor
>del Quijote," is not that Menard reconceived Quijote without reading
>the original, it is that he wrote it identically, line for line,
>without reading the original, and that literary criticism
>'reconceived' or re-interpreted those same words through a different
>historical lens.
>
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