Fwd: Re: On Joyce (briefly) & what writers know - Slightly TP

[Mark Kohut]

I'll play. Baedeker (or equivalent) Dublin....


From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2012 8:54 AM
Subject: Fwd: Re: On Joyce (briefly) & what writers know - Slightly TP

-------- Original Message -------- 
Subject: Re: On Joyce (briefly) & what writers know - Slightly TP 
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2012 08:54:16 -0400 
From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> 
To: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> 
On 6/24/2012 7:12 AM, Matthew Cissell wrote:> I thought I would follow on on a couple of threads that have been running. The first is Joyce (Bloomsday and Jude Bloom's query) and the second is TP due to my own recent comment on Nabokov and the PYn.>> If someone said that Joyce's prose was Dante, bible, Shakes & Cardinal Newman they would be off by a bit even though those are important influences for JJ. Likewise if someone said that Finnegan's Wake is just Vico's "New Science" with a collage of myth they would be missing a lot.>> (JJ read a lot and put a lot into his work; we find Freud, Jung, references to contemporary science and culture, both low and high, and so much more. And although Joyce was no specialist in any of these fields, he made extremely  good use of the material. The same could be said of Mann's use of Nietzsche or music. (Kai, if you're reading I know that Mann had more than a passing knowledge of FN and 12 tone theory, but I
 maintain my argument that he was no specialist. I think it fair to say that Mann knew FN and music better than JJ knew Freud et al.) Kerouac wrote jazz, but could he explain in musical terms what is happening on Kind of Blue. No. Good writers get material and use it well without being experts on the subject. See what TP has to say about entropy in the intro. to SL.)>> Now back to Pyn. My point about the story "Lance" by Nabokov wasn't that TP pulled the idea (SF that isn't SF) off of old Vladimir. That would be insulting and far off the mark. Could it have been something that was important for the seed to germinate? I yes yessingly to the yes of this yespeculation. Now I just need to know if Pyn checked the book out from the library or had/has it in his own library. If I'm proven wrong it's just another rejected hypothesis.>> Oh, anybody want to guess the most underlined book (that's to say that played a part in his writing and shows) that JJ had?
 I'll take some guesses before I throw out the answer I have.>probably Isben since he was learning the languageP 
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