Saure Trauben der Mathematik

[Mark Kohut]

No need to apologize, "Self-criticism is an incredible thing; it shouldn't work but it does"--TRP in GR....we all refine our posts....
or probably should more often.........[you talkin' to yourself again, Kohut?]
 
One other question the maths, the beautiful maths, as with the science even Gore Vidal used against GR (because he felt he could not get it fer sure)
has lead more than one reader/critic, mostly from the generation AFTER the first readers of Pynchon, to feel---say, argue like Vidal---
that his left-leaning, in favor of the average preterite working stiff, progressive populist vision--as they saw it---meant that most of the buried
heroes of his work could not read said works....that it was condemningly elitist in what it required of its readers....
 
C'mon, all weigh in on this one. Be very interesting what most plisters think about THAT, imho.

From: Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Saturday, August 4, 2012 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: Saure Trauben der Mathematik


Mark, forgive me, I should have said, only things-in-themselves.


This reminds me of the english lolly scene in GR. By the time of AtD he is able to do with maths what he did with english lollies. His charlatanry is honed to the point of being functionally equivalent to understanding. I know he probably doesn't understand the Riemann conjecture. But I have a degree in maths and I can read him without dissonance. This is beautiful to me.

P.

On 4 August 2012 23:40, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

Pynchon has, as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson,  the ability to take,
>quickly, and make use of the works of others; he manages, as Cowart,
>in his latest book admits, to get the critical reader reading,
>searching, re-searching. So Cowart admits to reading a Santayana text
>to discover what P may have understood from it and how P may have made
>use of it.  This is, while absurd, not a complete waste, as Sanatayana
>is a far better thinker and writer than P in many respects and, while
>pragmatism, as discussed in several critical studies of P, may not be
>all that significant in the fictional lives of P characters, it does
>make it into the books. P is a theft; he robs from the rich and the
>poor, puts things together, shores his fragments against our ruins.
>The reader who attributes all that knowledge of, say math,  to P,  is
>probably smarter than Pin math, but not as clever.  Authors can make
>much of nothing much; it is their business to make, with magic, use of
>shadows and smoke and mirrors and words. That is what makes a
>Hawthorne or a Melville, or even an Emerson, who in the end, is more a
>n author of fictions, than we may be willing to accept. Pynchon has to
>fool us. But we are not fools. We  are, as Prospero reminds us,
>Shakespearean jesters too. We play the play and the play is the thing.
>
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