Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

[Mark Thibodeau]

Just to be clear, are you saying that you prefer the witticisms of the
character Larry, from Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh, over
Nietzsche's aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil? Because there would
definitely be some significant qualitative differences that would come
into play in comparing the two, would there not?

J.

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 10:21 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
> --
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