Thomas Pynchon Explained In GIFs Form not Henry Adams again, but Edmund Wilson again

[alice malice]

And yet To the Finland Station is, if not a great book, a grand book.
It brings a vanished world to life. Writing history is an imaginative
act. Few people would deny this, but not everyone agrees on what it
means. It doesn’t mean, obviously, that historians may alter or
suppress the facts, because that is not being imaginative;

it’s being dishonest. The role of imagination in writing history isn’t
to make up things that aren’t there; it’s to make sensible the
things that are there. When you undertake historical research, two
truths that once sounded banal come to seem profound. The
first is that your knowledge of the past—apart, occasionally, from a
limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor—comes
entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by
a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent.
You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical
actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written
about. Whatever has been written about therefore takes on an
importance which may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a
snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an
event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—
even though these are just the bits that have floated to the surface.
The historian clings to them, while somewhere below, the
huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.


http://home.comcast.net/~platypus1917/wilsonedmund_finlandstation_menandintro.pdf

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 6:09 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone spotted P at the production of TS play? Right?
>
> Anyway...it still amazes me that strong readers of P can't quite
> accept what he says in SL, and continue to focus on his omissions.
> He's an American and he writes about his country.
>
> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 6:00 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Intelligentsia
>>
>> Tom Stoppard on Russia’s renegade thinkers.
>>
>> by Hilton Als January 8, 2007
>> http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2007/01/08/070108crth_theatre_als
>>
>> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 5:54 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> And here, a dine piece of on the road to nowhere and speaking of
>>> Utopias and Wilson....
>>>
>>> On the Road to Nowhere
>>>
>>>
>>> Tom Stoppard’s Russian intellectuals take a wrong turn with Hegel,
>>> just as Edmund Wilson once did with Marx
>>>
>>> By John Patrick Diggins
>>>
>>> http://theamericanscholar.org/on-the-road-to-nowhere/#.U29ILSiBUTs
>>>
>>> On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 9:49 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> In that SL ....To the Finland Staton...
>>>>
>>>> http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/24/030324crbo_books1
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Saturday, May 10, 2014, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Is one question: How much of what is " objective scientific inquiry" an
>>>>> attempt to control?
>>>>>
>>>>> I remember Monte giving us an example of ( almost?) pure, loving "science"
>>>>> in M & D, I believe, and from naturalists that go way back, thru the
>>>>> present, we know this exists in History.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is the beginning of recording nature, simple catagorizing, the start of
>>>>> cataloging and NAMING scientifically, the beginning of domination, power of
>>>>> nature, science ambiguously in the service of
>>>>> Evil ( as well as good)?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>>>
>>>>> On May 10, 2014, at 5:06 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> >
>>>>> > >> It would be fair to say, though, that Pynchon is obsessed with the
>>>>> > >> relationship between reason and authoritarianism, and specifically with how
>>>>> > >> the intellectual lineage of fascism—both its roots in the Enlightenment, and
>>>>> > >> the way it informs present-day social and political structures—is intimately
>>>>> > >> related to the project of objective scientific inquiry.<<
>>>>> >
>>>>> > This sums it up for me.
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> > On 09.05.2014 21:23, Dave Monroe wrote:
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/gif-explainers-explained-in-thomas-pynchon-explained-1573696149
>>>>> >> -
>>>>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>> >
>>>>> > -
>>>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>> -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l