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

[Mark Kohut]

As the word---postmodernism--- itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them.



----- 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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