Gratuitous Pleasure

[ish mailian]

I've been reading Joel Dinerstein's book, _The Origins of Cool in
Potswar America_.
By and bye, anyone read his other interesting looking book?
This one here---->

Swinging the Machine:
Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars
An innovative study of the influence of black popular culture on
modern American life

As it turns, Dinerstein says that Hansberry has been neglected, that
no comprehensive biography of her short life has been written. Hard to
believe. Anyways, some here may remember, or at least have been hipped
to Hanberry's critique of the Camusians, the existentialists, the
Beats, and with her calling out of the New Paternalists, Mailer and
his White Negro nonsense, her disdain for the New Negro Project
because of how it warped history, the Black and African history, and
especially, how scholars like C.L.R. James, now lauded as having told
Melville's Black Truth, were dismissed by the academic establishment,
hunted like crocodiles, by the FBI and so, and that Hansberry, though
she critiques Mailer and Genet, said Genet was correct to call America
a sick society, and so on...and this is all unfolding in the Summer of
1961, when our young author is writing V.

Apx.  three years on, by 1964, according to a letter, P is writing
four novels, and in 64 "The Secret Integration" is published  and by
1966, Watts and Lot49.

The brilliant young rebel, Hanberry dies in Jan 65.

In the SL Introduction P divulges, honestly and frankly, his personal
journey out of the typical white male attitude into the mind of a
still young Pynchon. He's a Slow Learner in this.  The paternalism,
not Mailer's or Genet's is still there in GR.


In fact, P doesn't come round to a political position that Hansberry
would not call Paternalistic, in writing that is, until VL.

But the maturity and development of the mind of P, on race, on women,
is begun in the publication of Watts and TSI. These are flawed,
surely, artistically, journalisticlly, and politically.  But they are
not Beat. P has taken a slow step in Hansberry's new cool direction.

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 8:19 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> "The Beats created a hollow rebellion full of gratuitous pleasure w/o
> political objectives"
>
> This is Joel Dinerstein
> from _The Origins of Cool in Postwar America_
> A book we learned about here.
> In in Chapter 11 "Lorraine Hansberry and the End of Postwar Cool"
>
> Her attacks on Mailer, the White Negro, and on the New Negro, on the
> New Paternalists and the Camus crowd,  and so on, so sharp so right
> on.
>
> P's Watts essay shows up a bit later than the debates with Mailer and
> the New Paternalists.
>
> It's as if he needed to unload that white man's burden to turn Huck's
> Pap into the Jazz man in The Secret Integration, Mr. McAfee, and to
> prevent Carl Barrington from becoming a real boy.
>
> Somehow Tyrone is an Invisible Man because of this too.
>
> Gratuitous?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l