Merrill Lynches Dylan, Lauds Pynchon

[Martin Phipps]

Is Trump good for anything? Maybe to prove a point. James Wood, a Notable Cunt when it comes to Pynchon, once wrote a review of Against the Day, which, amongst much similar opinionating, said Scarsdale Vibe was "not a true figure" but just another trivial, cartoonish parody of a Bovary/Bloom-style Well-Rounded-Character which put TRP in the company of such lesser literary lights as Henry Fielding. (!) But now behold Trump. Surely SV's a pale palimpsest of oligarchical overplus in comparison. So fuck you, Wood! Or, put more succinctly: WRONG!!!!

Becoming more measured in my criticism now, I turn to Langdon Hammer's recent bio of James Merrill, in which the celebrated subject calls GR a "fantastic book" which he reads while writing The Changing Light at Sandover (a fantastic book, btw), and delights in spotting TRP "in the backyard of his neighbor, a literary agent." However, teaching at Amherst in 1967, "Bob Dylan's songs, he said, were 'hymns' of the day, consisting of 'melodies and verse of mediocre workmanship that its public considers comforting and inspiring because it expresses already ingrained assumptions about life.'" More-art-less-matter's a reasonable criticism, maybe, from such an accomplished craftsman (or lofty elitist?)-but apparently even Vonnegut deplored Dylan as "the worst poet alive" (according to an upcoming, c. '91 interview in the prestigious literary journal Hustler.    (http://hustlermagazine.com/#!december-2016-features-kurt-vonnegut-visits-a-strip-club/pub1583 ). "He can get maybe one good line in a song, and the rest is just gibberish." So it goes. Although now it looks like the calypso singer's gotten the last laugh on Eliot and Pound in the captain's tower, doesn't it?

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