TCoL49 - relevance - from lithub.com

[Mark Kohut]

I have also come to see this reading from Morris in this related way. Which
he might have implied; which he might think I've misread him
to get, dunno, whatever...

About all of the Good Shit stuff in GR, the Love affairs, the moments of
kindness, of tenderness, of anarchic freedom, et al----our "aggregate of
last moments'
are also Just THERE, basically unexplained, presented in media res, so to
label,  with no fictional backstory of cause & effect leading up to them.
(as most novels do)....

And Slothrop losing cause & effect throughout.

Another thing TRP does---you're gonna want cause & effect?--and plays with
in a way that fans out and through the whole book.

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:58 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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> 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
>>> > 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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