Pynchon unbuttoned

[Mark Kohut]

 The other is "unbuttoned," a word he uses to praise a writer who's done plenty of hard thinking but projects it casually. (Think Pynchon.)
This is a quote from a 1959 essay by John Leonard from the post below as Mark Athitakis is reading John Leonard. He had to add
the Think Pynchon line since Leonard had no novel to review and use by 1959....(and he did praise Pynchon lovingly)
 
I want to use it to say: there is such beautiful lyrical prose in AtD when Pynchon is not spinning out his looping conceits, when TRP
is writing about the West, of course but also in the mid-section when Europe enters the picture more.......the land,the mountains, and
much much more.......
 
I----one---ought to just quote huge chunks, as we quote the metaphoric games, to balance the investigation of difficult meaning with
the presentation of the real world......this rich beautiful real world IS a major part of the meaning of AtD, of course..
 
I suggest this is one way to feel the 'projects it casually' above....[as well as the way those
wild surreal conceits are given us as just another everyday happening] 
 
 
 
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Mark Athitakis American Fiction Notes <donotreply at wordpress.com>
To: markekohut at yahoo.com 
Sent: Sunday, April 1, 2012 5:15 AM
Subject: [New post] The Discipline of Form and the Love of an Educated Heart


New post on Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes    
  The Discipline of Form and the Love of an Educated Heartby Mark Athitakis  
From a 1959 essay, "Epitaph for the Beat Generation," included the new anthology of John Leonard's essays, Reading for My Life:
[The Beats] proved at least one thing more. That poetry, painting, music, and fiction are products of the individual. That the great American novel will be written by some antisocial SOB who can't stand espresso and never heard of Wilhelm Reich---the guy who sits up all night at a typewriter and brings to his particular vision the discipline of form and the love of an educated heart. A generation may be disenchanted, but it takes a man alone to chronicle that disenchantment. Art-by-citadel won't work. It's in league with brainstorming and Groupthink and government-by-committee. Movements, Generations, Subcultures---these are the strewn carcasses of sterile imaginations, conjured up to explain lamely the why and how of genius.
Leonard is more or less new to me; while he was alive (he died in 2008), I preferred to read music or film criticism. I'm still reading, but I've noticed two terms show up a few times in the essays collected in the book. One is "Author-God," which is meant to be mildly critical of the magisterial novelist who's a lot artful and a little disengaged with the wider world. (John Updike would be the exemplar of that.) The other is "unbuttoned," a word he uses to praise a writer who's done plenty of hard thinking but projects it casually. (Think Pynchon.) Leonard's own prose echoes what he praised and criticized in others' writing. It's loose, often nut-graf-less, thick with lists of ideas, writers, politicians, philosophers, a millennium's worth of cultural detritus, all rattling by like boxcars---Leonard makes you want to write like him, something few critics do---smart but always presented in plain speech. He'll never convince me to read Harlot's Ghost, but
 he makes you want to spend time with every writer he discusses, a rarer feat for a critic than it ought to be.
Mark Athitakis | April 1, 2012 at 4:15 am | Categories: John Leonard | URL: http://wp.me/pagcQ-SK
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