BE: Pears Not Pixels

[rich]

DeSade for sure many parts of which are surely tedious all that boring
philosophy--just gives us the cocks and cunts, eh?


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 6:29 PM, <malignd at aol.com> wrote:

> Wonder who you're thinking of here.  Might you provide an example of
> someone you think writes from a purely amoral vision?  Celine?  Beckett?  I
> wouldn't classify them as such, but who to you fits?
>
> Being or writing with a 'purely' amoral vision seems as contrived and tedious as
> writing with all your chips riding on some particular moral truth, fad, vision.
> I am personally a moral thinker who, I believe, also knows the limits of moral
> thinking.
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, Jan 30, 2014 11:25 am
> Subject: Re: BE: Pears Not Pixels
>
>  Being or writing with a 'purely' amoral vision seems as contrived and tedious as
> writing with all your chips riding on some particular moral truth, fad, vision.
> I am personally a moral thinker who, I believe, also knows the limits of moral
> thinking.  I feel it is more honest and real to defend my moral and ultimately
> spiritual sensibilities than to abandon them for something that I don't trust ,
> admire or consider valid.  Nevertheless the world sings its own song and I hear
> but a fragment of that world or of the writing of the elusive Mr. Pynchon. I
> grow pears and they are as mysterious to me as pixels.
>
> It feels to me that part of what Pynchon does is describe the world with such
> colorful intensity, and with such a fearless inner urge to tell truth that most
> moral or spiritual ways of seeing( from Buddhism to fun loving hedonism and may
> points between or beyond)will find entry into his novels.  It is less
> accommodating to the humorless, the close minded, the literarily or
> ideologically orthodox, and he can even be quite satirically vicious about moral
> hypocrisy or destructive addictions. Still, that satire always requires a moral
> fulcrum to be effective.
>
>  Pynchon also creates a universe layered  with different dimensions, some having
> karmic rules, some inscrutable and poetic, many silly but all clearly
> referencing both the sublime grace and total weirdness of the inner lives of
> human culture. Some reader seem to think these underground, terrestrial  and
> floating worlds are  a gentle or ungentle mockery of all cosmic visions, but
> they can equally be read as a gentle openness to all such things. Generally with
> Pynchon there are appearances and disappearances but no grand moral finales,  no
> final word. The apocalypses he describes are not a function of spiritual beliefs
> or cosmic judgement but our own miserable capacities for poisoning everyone to
> kill what we fear and hate most.
>
> Maybe P's morality is suited more to talking monkeys than angels,  Karma 101:
> why making the planet a battleground is bad for everyone, The ass you kiss
> goodbye could be your own.
>
> On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:45 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> > Yep. One of the unexamined (or at least not-often-enough-examined) assumptions
> about modern / post-modern fiction, especially among observers with an axe to
> grind (I'm looking at you, John Gardner) is that because we all know how
> sanctimonious and hypocritical those dopey Victorians were, we Don't Do Moral
> Judgments Any More.
> >
> > I'm not immune: for years, every time I found in Pynchon a resonance or even
> explicit reference to Dante, or to Dickens the moralist, or to Greene's and Le
> Carre's dramas of faith and doubt and betrayal, I'd wonder: is this only because
> I happen to like those guys as well? Doesn't TRP riff on, undermine, and
> implicitly reject any moral scheme more ambitious than 'keep cool, but care'?
> >
> > But I was so much older then.
> >
> > "Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today." (GR 537)
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Magnificent,wonderful review...i remember when my use of "moral' got some
> blowback but
> > Pynchon is what she says in every book, every scene,every word.
> > Cassandra, I salute you.
> >
> >
> >
> > From: Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> > To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 4:02 AM
> > Subject: BE: Pears Not Pixels
> >
> > http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/02/pears-not-pixels
>
> >
> >
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
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