mayBE?

[John Bailey]

Re: the use of pop culture in BE - heard a statement this week
(critiquing the supposed irony of the new Grand Theft Auto videogame)
that seemed to sum up part of the problem:

"Satire isn't satire if it doesn't challenge the thing it copies.
That's just repetition."

BE doesn't give the reader an alternative route out of Tubeland, USA.
It doesn't challenge or undermine or even really poke fun at, most of
the time.

And I felt that some of the negative published reviews of the novel
took umbrage, even personal offence, at all of the mentions of Britney
Spears, Moby, Dolce & Gabana etc. Because as has been pointed out, the
Big Books (and even the small) offer some kind of preterite, some
W.A.S.T.E or counterforce or counterculture that can be put in
opposition to late capitalist consumer culture. Even the refs in IV
were things like Fapadokly and Elephant's Memory and despite the
complete failure of the hippie movement in the book at least we can
pretend that there was some real and worthy dream in amongst the pot
haze.

If BE had been a blazing critique of pop culture - rather than simple
repetition - it would have been a truly nostalgic novel, which I don't
think it is. In the novel's vision, there is no Alternative which
cannot be co-opted, no Authentic Underground, no Revolution that
doesn't come full circle (as they tend to do).

Blood Meridian: ""Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The
mystery is that there is no mystery."

Of course that line comes from the Judge, and he's no more reliable a
preacher than any.

Re: the bloody effing tired trope of women attracted to fascist
authority figures - yeah, was very irked and angered by it again. But
in BE we at least get P's most thorough exploration of this hobby
horse, and Maxi explores her own motivations for feeling that way, and
Windust is most certainly not Brock Vond. Both change a lot over the
course of the narrative and this alone is unusual in a Pynchon book,
as they stop representing abstract ideas in opposition and become
something my old high school English teacher liked to call
'characters'. It's an old-fashioned book that way, and I normally
wouldn't like it much for that.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Priceless.
>
> On Oct 7, 2013, at 4:21 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
> Bless me reader for I have sinned and am currently having an imaginary
> affair with Ann Coulter in the management suite of Google.
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l