And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

[Monte Davis]

Umm, for starters, those that jumped out at my own 1950s kid's
preoccupations:

That looking for a rainbow (God's promise after the flood in Genesis, and
Tyrone's VE-Day American optimism) in the aftermath of WWII was a fool's
errand, because the "new rainbow" was the ballistic arc of a missile...
IOW, that the Cold War and arms race were already implicit, inescapable, in
the Zone

That the brightest threads of the modern world which started boiling out of
Europe c. 1500 -- all the way to the Kazakh steppe, Argentina, American
West, Pacific islands -- are still connected with death-fearing,
death-craving, nightmarish roots: Teutonic mythology, slavery, visions of
absolute power/purity/control. Like Mark sez, you need dark satanic mills
to build a Crystal Palace.

That fresh starts, personal or collective (Roger & Jessica cocooned against
the War, anarchists and Hereros winning some space back from the
world-system, Tyrone just trying to do his job and get laid without
tripping over some *contract* his Pop signed) are really hard to come by.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 3:44 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm still curious in which sense is, say, GR a novel of ideas? Of course
> it is full of many felicitously presented abstruse and difficult thoughts,
> but, what I'd really like to see discussed are its ideas in the sense of
> opinions, hopes, or beliefs. Could someone  develop a list of these, and
> say whether they are, in the course of the novel, sought after, attained,
> rejected, or given up as hopeless.  Does Slothrop's quest, for example,
> qualify as one of these?
>
> I need to be enlighten as much as Tyrone.
>
> P
>
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> What you said, Peter (and well). It's hard to cut through the accumulated
>> undergrowth of
>>
>> "Pynchon books are status tokens for pretentious hipsters with post-horn
>> tattoos who never actually get through anything but CoL49"
>>
>> "Pynchon is the perfect starting point for another look at those wild &
>> wacky Sixties, [because I, the litchat writer, never got through anything
>> but CoL49 and a review of Vineland]"
>>
>> "Pynchon is funny names, pop-culture references, stylistic acrobatics,
>> kinky sex, and a Britannica + Google's worth of obscure historical and
>> scientific allusions"
>>
>> "Pynchon holds the Salinger Chair of Reclusive Authorship, so he's weird
>> from the jump because he's never sat down with Charlie Rose or been
>> photographed birding with Jonathan Franzen"
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Peter M. Fitzpatrick <
>> petopoet at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Here is my two cents.
>>>
>>>      I love to read Pynchon because of his absolute bravery and
>>> uninhibited imagination. His "ideas" are never lifeless, neutral, or
>>> abstract, but embodied, political, and provocative. He takes chances that
>>> remind me a great deal of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. I don't think
>>> Joyce was particularly concerned with the hoi polloi or popularity and
>>> neither he or Pynchon will EVER be found among the books sold in the big
>>> box stores like Target, WalMart, Menards, etc. (this is an American
>>> phenomenon, where the likes of Cussler, Grisham, Patterson, etc, are found
>>> in the far reaches of almost every mass-market shelf space available, with
>>> one or two copies of each author present, changing with each new release.)
>>>       There is room for this kind of literature,of course, but there are
>>> those of us who demand a more inventive and boundary-testing fare. Pynchon
>>> does manage to ascend into pure lyrical poetry that almost demands aural
>>> interpretation - I do enjoy listening to an audio version of "Against the
>>> Day". Finnegans Wake is also best read aloud and listened to. These are
>>> poetic voices and are suitable for analysis of their poetics.  Much like
>>> Bakhtin devoted his life to analyzing the poetics of Dostoyevski, there
>>> will be scholars devoted to studying both Joyce and Pynchon. Yes, some of
>>> this smacks of the academic machinery that produces English department
>>> secondary source reductions that misinterpret and misconstrue. But that is
>>> the nature of interpretation. It is polyvalent and polyphonic (ala'
>>> Bakhtin) by rights. There is a reason such books attract scholastic
>>> attention.
>>>       They are ideas, voices, conceptions; "Weltanschauungs" in short.
>>> Simultaneously political, historical, and philosophical, I think we
>>> intuitively characterize them as novels of Ideas because they last longer
>>> than the commercial ones, thereby resembling Plato's World of Forms, or
>>> Ideals. Not quite eternal, no, but of more lasting value than say, a Janet
>>> Evanovich # 55,  ( I have read one or two of hers, by the way.)
>>>
>>>    -Pete
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 4:49 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> If inclusion on course syllabuses is indicative of the respect teachers
>>>> have for an author, than our man P is respected in the academy. His works
>>>> are taught at all the tier one Colleges and highest ranked Universities in
>>>> the US, at State Universities and Colleges,  to humanities and
>>>> non-humanities students.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm glad there are some out there who respect our guy.
>>>>>
>>>>> P
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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