Julian Assange

[Mark Kohut]

We've heard (from Rich himself) and others on the retreat to family, cuddly or cute. An opinion to take seriously, to somehow refute within one's understanding of later Pynchon. 

But, although I've liked and learned from Le Clair, to say TRP  "lacks passion" ala GR, is to ignore M&D's style as well as ATD's and perhaps use Passion to mean that knife-edge---all scumbled together(GR)---verbal intensity of GR raised over the styles P has chosen for later laid-back-intense books , IMHO.

And that Gass and Coover have passion (still) and TRP does not? C'mon. What 's he talking, latest books? Coover has some fine books about which passion ala the prose of GR is not his way, and Gass's progressive knotting inward, as ambitious as TRP's perhaps,might lose 
"Passion" for a depth charge.

Also,  "bleeding heart" is cheap wrong- headed rhetoric even if you think BE
Doesn't cut it, IMHO. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 6, 2014, at 12:25 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> long (and interesting) piece on working with Julian Assange. compare the following excerpt contrasted with what's in BE described below.
> 
> 
> "That is why I didn’t walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact. In our overnight conversations, he told me about the mindset of the expert hacker. He described how, as a teenager, he’d wandered through the virtual corridors of Nasa, Bank of America, the Melbourne transport system or the Pentagon. At his best, he represented a new way of existing in relation to authority. He wasn’t very straightforwardly of the left and couldn’t have distinguished dialectical materialism from a bag of nuts. He hates systems of belief, hates all systems, wants indeed to be a ghost in the machine, walking through the corridors of power and switching off the lights. I found myself writing notes culled from what he said to me about himself. ‘When you’re a hacker you’re interested in masks within masks,’ and ‘We could undermine corruption from its dead centre. Justice will always in the end be about human beings, but there is a new vanguard of experts, criminalised as we are, who have fastened onto the cancer of modern power, and seen how it spreads in ways that are still hidden from ordinary human experience.’
> 
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting
> 
> i wonder if Pynchon missed an opportunity weighing down Bleeding Edge with a cuddly family in the words of Tom LeClair
> 
> 
> 'Like earlier Pynchon novels, Bleeding Edge impresses with the energy of its numerous characters in multiple plots and with its command of American vernaculars both educated and ignorant, but Pynchon lacks Coover's -- and Gass's--passion.  The events of 9/11 in New York City and their consequences are described with odd detachment by the author of the sublimely passionate Gravity's Rainbow.  His satire of dot-com schemes and Internet foolishness demonstrates that he probably knows how to program his VCR, but his depiction of the recent past seems more dated -- less imaginative -- than the distant pasts of his historical novels.  Pynchon focuses his narration through his protagonist Maxine Tornow, a fraud investigator with two small children and a wandering husband.  Her sensibility, seemingly tough but really tender, becomes increasingly identified with the author, who provides a cuddly family ending to the novel.' 
> 
> But from Pynchon -- even at 77 -- I expect more than a work that too often beats with a bleeding heart.
> 
> http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/A-Country-for-Old-Men/ba-p/12459
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