Sartre and Stockhausen in TP
Mark Kohut
mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Aug 4 05:24:53 CDT 2016
New Nobelist Modiano uses the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for all of our
different perspectives, distortions. I like it. Here is a perspective turn
I have had re this scene:
Experience here is a more self-conscious thing perhaps, than living? "Let
us go then you and I....talking of Michelangelo"--Prufrock.
Akin to 'having an adventure' vs doing something together, so to analogize?
Rather than simply living, (and thereby be able to genuinely create?, is
implied, I think, anyone, anyone? )which the Crew does not do,
it (just) talks about people who do create. By talking about 'those who do
create" they are satirizing themselves, the uncreators who want to create.
I have sometimes wondered if this section is a compressed allusion to The
Recognitions, that long satire of those who slipstream, who forge, art via
verbal association with it only. Their own self-satire-- captured by
Gaddis, so to speak.
In the early fifties in these United States, an influential--among
intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals "Committee on Art Education"--
convened and published their results in 1952 as Moral Values and the
Experience of Art. The very widely known and read philosopher in America,
John Dewey, published his *Art as Experience* in the thirties. An old
bookstore mentor told me in the sixties it/he had pervaded the
wanna-be-educated culture.
I later learned that critics were influenced--one as fine as Pauline Kael
(imho) who helped me learn how to see fully was helped by Dewey's work to
learn to see better and understand historically better.
What I try to remember here is how "hungry' Americans were for books and
art in the fifties. The Great Books, where Saul Bellow worked early, were
major. Mass market paperbacks of the classics sold from train stations thru
department stores. The Best writers of the time, Mailer, others could sell
millions in paperback at least after hardcover bestselling numbers.
*Art as Experience* was still lightly selling out of regular bookstores in
the sixties. For college courses it still sells.
I read it, instead of living.
On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 10:16 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here the concept of "living it" is contrasted with "experiencing it." And
> living is matched with creating. So living/creating is somehow divorced
> from experiencing. And satire is linked to experiencing, I guess
> vicariously, and reacting without creating.
>
> This is a mine field construction of illogic, and it seems a juvenile one,
> a product of a thought process that matures in GR.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Tuesday, August 2, 2016, Danny Weltman <danny.weltman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From V:
>>
>> "Oncue I will say it, is all: that Crew does not live, it experiences.
>> It does not create, it talks about people who do. Varese, Ionesco, de
>> Kooning, Wittgenstein, I could puke. It satirizes itself and doesn't mean
>> it. Time magazine takes it seriously and does mean it."
>>
>> Danny
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 11:17 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello P-listers,
>>>
>>> I come again to the avail of your collective intelligence and memory,
>>> because... what was I saying?
>>>
>>> Oh yeah, I remember. I could swear that I read a line in Pynchon where
>>> somebody sez sumthin like: "...Sartre, Stockhasuen, I could vomit." Not
>>> verbatim but you get the idea.
>>>
>>> Does that sound familiar or is it just me transferring literary bits
>>> around?
>>> I thought it was in V. but my searches have come up empty.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> mc otis
>>>
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160804/257b5b74/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list