BE: Pears Not Pixels

[Rich]

More I read curzio malparte perhaps him as well



> On Jan 31, 2014, at 5:16 PM, malignd at aol.com wrote:
> 
> 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
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