The Daily Beast's Alexander Nazaryan on Bleeding Edge

[Henry M]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/11/thomas-pynchon-meets-his-match-the-internet.html


In moments of calm and discipline, the man can write with genuine insight
about “the landfill of failing memory” into which our private New Yorks are
eternally shoveled, “the childlike hope and depravity” of late-capitalism
Manhattan, and the Internet, “that vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry
they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of.” He also
pulls one of the trickiest novelistic feats, an accurate yet original
description of the sky, describing it over New Jersey as “a pale battle
flag of the ancient nation of winter.” Yes, Tom. Yes.

It is a crime to have the capacity to write such sentence and yet resort to
MILF jokes—and yet Pynchon, ever the hyper-puerile teenager, does. Also,
jokes about Britney Spears dressed as Jay-Z (or is it a Britney Spears
imitator…you know what, forget about it), Carmen Electra and several at the
expense of poor, unloved Zima. I suspect that in part, this is because, as
a writer who came of age during the countercultural Sixties remains
suspicious of seriousness as the value of squares. It may be so. But humor
unchecked is simply silliness.

Yours truly,
٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
Henry Musikar, CISSP
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20
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