TCoL49 - relevance - from lithub.com

[David Morris]

I've long thought GR is a great pseudo attempted synthesis of all things
mystical with all things more mystical against nothing being meaningful,
and nothing Karmic:  no moral cause and effect.  I've always suspected he
wishes for karma to be in effect (don't we all?).  He is a pessimistic
romantic, and I throw out these terms w/o any scholarship.

David Morris

On Friday, July 8, 2016, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> As an extension or refinement of "excluded middle," read (or re-read)
> Dwight Eddins' 'The Gnostic Pynchon,' and consider _metaxy_
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaxy [clumsily written but gets the
> essence]
>
> Through earlier time with Campbell, I was fortunate enough to know Hans
> Jonas on gnosticism (though not Voegelin, or Kabbalah-as-gnosticism) when
> GR came out. So I was primed for Eddins' brilliant 1990 reading of Pynchon,
> and especially his gnostic-vs-Orphic take on GR.
>
> The Gnostic stance is that we are fallen sparks (= Kabbalah's "broken
> vessels") of The Light, of prefect transcendence; that this world is some
> cruel demiurge's deception to make us forget it; that only gnosis,
> "knowing," will take us out of the corrupt rubble and back to the Holy
> Center. That applies --and this is crucial -- whether the gnosis takes the
> form of Enzian's magical/mystical system (with a touch of technology) *or*
> Blicero's scientific/technological system (with a touch of magic) *or* a
> redemptive religious system of Saved and preterite, in which the Rockets
> and the white steeples aimed at heaven are the same .
>
> The Orphic stance is that we *do* arise right here and belong right here.
> Instead of rejecting the experienced world as deception, it embraces it,
> listening for all its pre-verbal and non-verbal songs, finding that lost
> harmonica again in the running stream. Knowledge isn't a learned way to
> take yourself out, it's a rediscovered / remembered way to feel at home
> again.
>
> GR is one long metaxic ping-pong between those poles, a 760-page system of
> words proving (like Rilke proves)  that no system of words will deliver the
> Word we think we want.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','mark.kohut at gmail.com');>> wrote:
>
>> "Yet The Crying of Lot 49 occupies a strange third space:"
>>
>> This fine appreciator presents us another spin on this: the depth (or
>> fullness) of the space of the excluded middle metaphor.
>>
>> The sublimity of the non-binary perspective: a third way.
>>
>> The way, just in itself, the book so wonderfully ends between binaries,
>> so to speak.As an embodiment of this conceit.
>>
>> Becky sends:
>> More at: (it’s quite interesting - read the last paragraph anyway - )
>> http://lithub.com/oedipa-maas-our-guide-to-contemporary-paranoia/
>>
>>
>> Also, Bloom reread it and wrote about it again sometime during the Bush
>> years. He argued
>> easily how it fit the times then, too.
>>
>> I think that P's way of finding perfect patterns within American history
>> (and ongoing American life) in symbolic, mostly scenic form, is why.
>>
>> (and, very dicily, riskily, speculatively, probably wrong again on my
>> part---why he didn't/doesn't like it since 1984.
>> Too symbolically patterned, he thinks now)
>>
>> But this one is one where we "trust the tale not the teller".
>>
>> Reread it, I suggest. It will flower in your brain anew.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net');>> wrote:
>>
>>> OEDIPA MAAS: OUR GUIDE TO
>>> CONTEMPORARY PARANOIA
>>> THE ONGOING RELEVANCE OF PYNCHON'S THE CRYING OF LOT 49, 50 YEARS LATER
>>> July 7, 2016  By Nick Ripatrazone
>>>
>>> A global postal conspiracy. Post horns graffitied across southern
>>> California. LSD prescribed as treatment for anxiety. Obscene radio station
>>> hosts. Beatles cover bands. Widespread paranoia. The Crying of Lot 49,
>>> Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, is quirky and eccentric even by Pynchon’s
>>> standards. Now 50 years old, the slim novel is truly a snapshot of
>>> mid-1960s culture.
>>>
>>> John Ruskin has said “all books are divisible into two classes: the
>>> books of the hour and the books of all time.” Yet The Crying of Lot 49
>>> occupies a strange third space: novels that are timely yet timeless—books
>>> that are so suffused with the cultural minutia and noise of a moment that
>>> their saturation itself helps them to endure.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Becky
>>> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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