NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, he finds some writers and stories are Art before the time in question.
He is speaking of a critical aggregate and wider variety than Melville,
Hawthorne and Poe (more minor, he thinks) ....

He sez, scoring the basic
disinterest of Americans, "readers who haven't (even) read Melville (yet)"
about the present.....I am sure you know how
Into Oblivion Melville went before his rediscovery in the 1920s?



On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 6:21 AM, bulb <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:

> Bartleby was published in 1853.
>
>
>
> Michel.
>
>
>
> *From:* owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Mark Kohut
> *Sent:* zondag 8 januari 2017 12:10
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Subject:* NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair
>
>
>
> Some might find this not uninteresting.
>
>
>
> Guy named Edward O'Brien,
>
> who seemed to be the founder, or at least first editor for the annual
> American
>
> Best Short Stories of the Year for a long while, made his bones with
>
> a book on the American short story to that publication time, which was
> 1931,
>
> it seems.
>
>
>
> in this book's preface, one learns that he was friends with Robert Graves
> (!)
>
> and his vision of the story is, when it is art, it is the presentation of
> a new 'form of life'
>
> on the page. It offers a formed richness of emotions outside of
> standardized ways of
>
> feeling. Almost Lawrentian, I'd say.
>
>
>
> It is THE American art form literarily, he argues.
>
> America's  novelists ain't like them great English writers, with an
> exception or two, such as Moby Dick which ain't like them English writers
> as well.
>
>
>
> Anyway, he argues that it is around the time of the Chicago World's Fair
> that
>
> the short story in the US changed and deepened in the aggregate enough to
>
> produce a few most important Artists of the genre, of the real and new
> forms of life.
>
> From the Fair thru the next 20 years
>
> of all the new immigrants which produced the seedbed for those richness of
>
> emotions to overcome the standard US 'frontier' sensibility (in general).
>
>
>
> I send this re Pynchon as another example of his artistic finding of
> seminal events
>
> to frame his novels around.
>
> When you go for the King (of Achievements), you better not miss--
>
> and he doesn't.
>
>
>
>
>
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