BE: Pears Not Pixels

[malignd at aol.com]

DeSade, right.  There's one.



-----Original Message-----
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: MalignD at aol.com <malignd at aol.com>
Cc: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, Jan 30, 2014 8:37 pm
Subject: Re: BE: Pears Not Pixels


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

 




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20140131/68713507/attachment.html>