Politics vs Art

[Monte Davis]

The only thing better than a pointless flame war is a re-run of a pointless
flame war on two online venues simultaneously. Multimedia!!!

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 10:45 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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> 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
>> >
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160504/a4a1a6ea/attachment.html>