TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

[Mark Kohut]

Alice,
 
I'll bow to a creative defense of genre I never expected. Human cultural evolution. Wonderful --as well as inimitably written,
overwriting its own defense. Seymour Krim mashed with Tom Wolfe thru one's favorite lit critic, whomever that may be. 
 
Thanks,
Mark

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2012 12:43 PM
Subject: Re: TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

Mark,

Teach anything and you will discover that most people take the class
because they need the credit. Why would anyone read Joyce? Or
Melville? Or Under the Volcano or Middlemarch or countless other works
most people find boring or impossible or too difficult or too long or
too whatever? Why read Pride and Prejudice with Zombies or Sense and
Sensibility with Aliens? Why are many reading these classics with
monsters before or in lieu of the canonical work? My first Dante was a
graphic novel. I got round to the original, eventually. So, I'm not
knocking these books or popular trends. Hell, I read all of Bertrand
Russell and it didn't help nor hurt my reading of that graphic novel,
Logicomix.

But, genre, for those of us with some formalism left in our old
brains, or maybe its in our guts, is worth something; it helps us see
how we evolved from sea creatures and grew necks that turn and noses
we follow. We are animals, but we are not sponges. And, while we may
not want to go back to square and Aristotle's four causes, his
rhetoric, his poetics, his logic, and, as we have inherited the wind,
and progress that put gasoline in the clouds, well, we can have our
darwin and our bible too. We just need to keep them in their own
genres or classification systems or whatever. Because, if we don't, we
can't communicate about these works. If Freud write science fiction
and Marx is a poet...well...I'm the mad mad mad maud mad....
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