Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

[rich]

I prefer Eugene O'Neil's burned out anarchist, Larry, in Iceman

'And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall
asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.'

Rich

On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 6:31 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sadly, I spent Sunday sitting by the pool, reading Beyond Good & Evil. I
> read some passages in Neitzsche's fantastic ramblings which provided an
> excellent analogy to every partisan fighting over which version of a
> seemingly bifurcated reality they live on:
>
> "The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth,"
> forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and
> if one has so far contemplated him (her) only with artistic curiosity, with
> regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire
> to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated into a "martyr," into a
> stage - and platform-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire
> to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case- merely a satyr play,
> merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real
> tragedy is at an end, assuming that every philosophy was in its genesis a
> long tragedy. (pg. 37, Translated by Walter Kaufmann)"
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 8:26 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In Michiko Kakutani's new book---entitled what appears after the "&"--
> > Pynchon is one of the few writers quoted---many writers of fiction
> > name-checked and alluded to though . She quotes
> > the words from Gravity's Rainbow about how "religious--comforting"
> paranoia
> > can be and---"there is
> > still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything---a
> > condition not many of us can bear for long."
> >
> > A Pynchon fave, John Le Carre, supplies a chapter epigraph: "Without
> clear
> > language, there is no standard of truth."
> > Orwell throughout this chapter.
> >
> > And, she quotes Roth [American Pastoral] as defining anew--like an
> > artist--Hofstadter's "paranoid style in America":
> > "this counternarrative Roth entitled "the indigenous American berserk"."
> I
> > think of another great American writer, Charles Portis, with this phrase.
> >
> > Michiko says that Hofstadter's original essay was
> > "spurred by Goldwater's campaign and the right-wing movement around it."
> > It's seen then in Lot 49.
> >
> > (From another source, a scholar says
> > that the modern bashing of the mainstream media--liberal bias and more--
> by
> > the Right began then (and even with Goldwater's
> > book, I believe,he says, but I'm not looking anything more up).
> >
> > She focuses on Hofstadter's words: paranoia characterized by "heated
> > exaggerations" and more words but seeing these two
> > in quotes put Woods on Pynchon's "hysterical realism" into my head.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>