BEER Group Read. Chap 2. Reg Despard, Artist?!

[Mark Kohut]

Going back to Monte's recent post on voices within GR, he stated emphatically that he did not see THAT as postmodern tropes. 

I have long thought the same, said so here, about Pynchon. That is I argue he is emphatically in the high modernist tradition. 
With deep sources of style and meaning from T.S. Eliot, H. Adams, all the Golden Bough/White Goddess roots, so many others
he is indebted to, etc......

How different is this book, if it is, from earlier ones? We seem to see lotsa wilfull use of televisual culture, stereotypes, schlock and kitsch
in Bleeding Edge per Robin and others---even, tellingly maybe, a few plist departures who felt all that was ...wallowing in the inartistic (to paraphrase). 

Is it at all possible that Pynchon is using all these postmodern signposts...to......send up postmodernism? 

I mean there is DEATH in this book, right? Not just kitsch.....there is worldwide financial manipulation that sure seems to speak
to the world's REAL recent past. Not just stereotypes of techies, new Yorkers and their problems...









----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: BEER Group Read. Chap 2. Reg Despard, Artist?!

Jameson's reflections on aspects of postmodernism or late capitalism
parallel much of Robin Landseadel's here: 

"However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular
biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance."
                                                         ----Jameson, from Chap 1 in the book.



----- Original Message -----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Cc: 
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 9:41 AM
Subject: Re: BEER Group Read. Chap 2. Reg Despard, Artist?!

"Saved" [HA!] from having to even think of Dizzy's Scam [one of those  
"Cat's Breath" Koans, I suppose] Maxi is relieved to see Reg, who  
looks "hammered" and if anybody would notice that sort of thing, it  
would be Maxi.

So, beneath the surface of Glib, "Pynchon-Lite" BE is a thickening web  
of cross references to previous Pynchonian Propositions, like—"You  
become what you watch on TV." A lawyer Obsessed with Perry Mason, a  
Radical Film-maker who learned perhaps a bit too much from TV. But in  
this case, perhaps the most successful of these portraits of  
televisual crossdressing, we are not quite sure of chicken or egg—did  
Larry David observe Reg? Is the "Trailer" for BE Reg's work? Did Reg  
get the idea from watching Seinfeld?

Reg might have thought of himself as a "Radical Documentarian", but  
now that the work is flowing in, he ain't so radical no more. Now,  
having taken on a sinister looking project, he's scared, goes to Maxi.  
The dialog —when I say how there are signs of Larry David's presence  
in BE, here it is:

"Looks like I'm catching you at a busy time"

"Seasonal, Passover, Easter week, NCAA playoffs,, St. Patrick's on a  
Saturday, da yoozh, not a problem, Reg—so what have we got here, a  
matrimonial?"

It doesn't have to be Elaine precisely, but we can hear the speech  
rhythms we heard on TV here, the compression of dialog to adapt to the  
increasing percentage of ads to program, particularly notable in the  
Law 'n' Order juggernaut.

"Though she feels like she's in a play, she is anyway . . ."


On Oct 16, 2013, at 6:22 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Yeah, so we get from P what a non-group-reader has cited as an  
> homage, a borrowing,
> an allusion to a famous Seinfeld show. One he thought better than  
> this book, this take, I guess.
>
> As Reg's film-stealing videos get acclaimed by the Acdademy, we get  
> another savaging of
> Candlebow U. For Pynchon just about all academics, in their  
> professional guise, are candlebrow idiots,no?
>
> What else here? Another punch at stupid supposed avant-garde art,
> post--modernist 'works of art'?;  a jab at 'documentary', that is,  
> "social realism" "art" that is nothing, in these
> times, but reproductions of older works? Back in the Day there was  
> lots of critical discussion about how
> the art of these times could not be great if it was simply in the  
> mode of traditional realism, traditional forms, etc.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l 


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