Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/9/2012 10:04 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> And, doesn't Hume, and doesn't Rich, make a valid argument about P and
> the family? Isn't this one of the reasons many did not like VL? Isn't
> this one of the reasons some of us find the California novels too much
> like the Simpsons? Yeah, after all the dysfunctional fucking-up, after
> all the tangled knots of pain inflicted on friends and family, not all
> of it easily blamed on the forces of evil that consume us, the family,
> whatever a family is, comes together on the couch to watch one more
> Emersonian episode or listen to one more Alice's Resturaunt come round
> again in the guitar, with feeling?
>

Yeah it pissed a lot of readers off because it seems to make a lot of 
unfounded assumptions about what we want.  It puts limits on our 
aspirations. Who wants to come home to that kind of contentment. Well, 
we might want to, but we don't want to want to.  Grrrr.

And speaking of limits, I think THESE are what Mark is getting at in his 
talk about excluded middles.  The limits of traditional logic represent 
limits on social possibility.  And getting into 'anarchic destruction' 
the notion that destroying present authority and restraint is 
unthinkable because there is nothing to take its place.  Well I happen 
to believe that might be the case.  Without, that is, untold brutal 
coercion at the very least, leaving us worse off than before.  And that, 
too, leaves us very pissed off.

P