Politics vs Art

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue May 3 21:45:19 CDT 2016


Nostalgia death throws?  Flames back then were just this slippery and
silly.  Straw men making red-hot fuel. Desperate teeth-grips on bones of
idiocy, sucked at like Cuban cigars.  I told you the good old days were
something.

David Morris

On Tuesday, May 3, 2016, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Forge ahead, David. Fuck the war...
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
> > On May 3, 2016, at 10:28 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> > Million continues on FB:
> >
> > "naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be
> stacked in front of the crematoriums" is a hallmark image of the Holocaust,
> and that word - and such images - were in wide circulation at the time that
> Pynchon wrote and published GR in which he describes a concentration camp
> with corpses stacked up to be cremated, and tells the story of a German
> engineer who made himself blind to the horror that supported his work on
> the rocket.
> > Readers of GR (published in 1973 by an author who knows WWII history as
> well as any novelist, I expect) have never been confined within the
> boundaries of what might have been known to people in the novel, nor is the
> author, and some of the people in the novel certainly know about the Nazi
> extermination of Jews, so-called "gypsies", homosexuals, and political
> enemies in the camps, and other undesirables, whether or not the
> perpetrators referred to what they were doing as a Holocaust; the facts of
> their war crimes remain whatever the term used to refer to them
> collectively.  Pokler knew it was going on but refused to admit it to
> himself at the time, as he plainly explains in GR.
> >
> > My reply:
> > This a graphic description of the V-2 slave-worker's fate. Within GR's
> revealed world it doesn't suggest genocide in WW2, now called Holocaust. We
> bring that knowledge into GR from outside the text.  In GR's revealed world
> this isn't a depiction of genocide, though it is extremely disturbing.  P
> had already described genocide in V.  I think it is telling that he chose
> that genocide to depict.  It is the neglected story.
> >
> > Your argument is a nit pick. The Holocaust isn't depicted in GR, but we
> all know it lurks LARGE offstage.  Old nits (& wits) die hard, don't they?
> Why pick this witlessness?  You are forging an argument that doesn't
> exist.  But isn't that what trolls do?  Same as it ever was...
> >
> > David Morris
> >
>
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