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

[alice malice]

Is Pynchon dishonest in his apparent elisions? An author, as he says,
of historical fiction...is not exactly a historian, and yet, what is
so obviously omitted...could be an honest look at history making.

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 7:20 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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