Accounts secular and karmic

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Sun Apr 14 15:45:47 CDT 2013


Of course, money makes whores of us & them; slothful authors probably spend
fewer days on their backs.
On Sunday, April 14, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

>
> Well, if we read Bartleby with the other mag stories we discover that all
> were about work, work and failure. And, as the story was not published
> under Melville's name because at this point in his career he was a failure,
> we should do better to extend charity to a man who had far more talent than
> Pynchon, but was married to a family that was generous, but not in the
> business of marketing fiction. That P managed to recover from VL the bad,
> and to spin out yarns that Melville would never stoop to (IV, SL
> re-issued), and we suspect this BE will be another work of fart jokes and
> licking old snatches, as he worked on his major romances is proof that
> Recognition is often a business of counterfeiting, copying, doing what one
> prefers not to, and that money makes an artist a whore.
> On Sunday, April 14, 2013, wrote:
>
>> Succintly put. For my money, however, Bartleby probably takes himself a
>> little too seriously. On the other hand, he doesn't really seem like a
>> character at all, more like an algorithm- blades of grass, indeed. As for
>> the Pynch, knowledge that he's getting his advance and copping his
>> percentage, is as good a defense as any against taking him too seriously.
>> And I don't think he'd take any offense at that, on the way to the bank.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Sun, Apr 14, 2013 1:45 pm
>> Subject: Re: Accounts secular and karmic
>>
>>  The difference is clearly defined in several Pynchon essays,  and is,
>> of course, a major theme in all of his novels. Although some readers will
>> never quite get it because they refuse to accept the author's position,
>> even when he spells it out for them in plain words,  a good place to start
>> is with Pynchon's essay on Sloth.
>> In the essay the author examines Melville's Bartleby and explains that
>> the scrivener's sin against the economy was secular, but the sin of the
>> lawyer against Bartleby, even if the soul is little more than a few blades
>> of grass in the Tombs, is Karmic.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 12:30 PM, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>> What's the difference, I'd like to know?
>>
>>
>>
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