TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

[Keith Davis]

Naturally, Alice has said what I would have said if I had her (your)
ability, only more better...
How do you pigeonhole something that transcends genre? (Which raises
another question, does all true art transcend genre?) TP is encyclopedic,
as we've discussed before, so why shouldn't Sci-Fi be included among his
influences, without being a restraint?

Cheers

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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....
>
>
>


-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120623/5598df1d/attachment.html>