BEER Group "Read. This was said.

[Fiona Shnapple]

And P is, call him modern or postmodern or whatever,  a practitioner
of the avant-garde.

Recall that discussion of the Nam talk in VL, about slack and point?
Well, avant-garde is a footnote to that translation of Nam talk,  to
how DL and Zoyd fit into the scene, both the campus scene and the
Prairie as teen scene.

Look up the word and see, there  it is:
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avant-garde (n.) (also avant garde, avantgarde); French, literally
"advance guard" (see avant + guard (n.)). Used in English 15c.-18c. in
a literal, military sense; borrowed again 1910 as an artistic term for
"pioneers or innovators of a particular period." Also used around the
same time in communist and anarchist publications. As an adjective, by
1925.

The avant-garde générale, avant-garde stratégique, or avant-garde
d'armée is a strong force (one, two, or three army corps) pushed out a
day's march to the front, immediately behind the cavalry screen. Its
mission is, vigorously to engage the enemy wherever he is found, and,
by binding him, to ensure liberty of action in time and space for the
main army. ["Sadowa," Gen. Henri Bonnal, transl. C.F. Atkinson, 1907]
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Sure, because P, call him a satirist, whatever, is critical, is
hostile, is negative about what happened to America at turns, what
Yeats called Gyres, of the Spiritus Mundi, the zeitgeist.

And he lays this on his own, on the so-called middle class, or
so-called bourgeoisie.


 These folks, who may have Lefty roots, turn as their branches find
the sunny side of the city, the bigger if not the BIG bucks. Or power,
control, fascists....

 and their position, their influence, grows and grows, away from the
roots, and up into political establishment, liberalism of the recent
stripe, that gives a hand through social programs, philanthropy with
your name attached to the endowment... but never thinks to let people
have a good fucking job cause that would be biting the corporate hand
and so on, so, work, even the slothful work of writing, playing music
at god knows what hour of the night....morning...

Because this middle class, the Jewish children are patriots, are
without conviction, with no principles but success values tested in
the market, are greedy money hugging hypocrites.

And, like them, the avant-gard artist who becomes as P, established,
can make art no more. It's the end of art because he needs to fuck
with them, but they, as we see here on P-L, just call him on it.

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> But at least we was there for each other.
>
> Even in VL, we still had some of that.
>
> But not in wuss BE.
>
> _____________________________________________________________________
> Yes, BE is 20 years later re this direction...and 20 years later involving
> the full drowning of us in
> a pop cultural, televisual, turning fully electronic, world.
>
> I checked out the McLuhan I'd half-forgotten (after I half-got) and I
> relearned this:
> He called the western world from the printing press thru TV the visual
> culture.....
> Said it was being supplanted by the electronic culture...........
>
> Did McLuhan predict Bleeding Edge?, so to turn it around....
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l