NP but Richard Rorty, yet could gloss (some of) visionary Pynchon, yes? (This from a review in LA Review of Books about new collection of lectures)

[Mark Kohut]

Puzzling to me from you, Joseph, with all the powerful stuff you find and
say in Pynchon. But, as we know, I don't understand you.

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 1:11 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> The correlation between how politicians vote and who funds their campaigns
> and the direct hand of corportions in writing legislation makes it the only
> plausible explanation. Rueful acquiescence seems accurate.  Even our
> children for sale without much of a fight.
>
> > On Oct 29, 2021, at 8:56 AM, Heikki R <
> situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Rorty, however, seemed to regard Pynchon as something of an
> > anti-Emerson/Whitman/Dewey...
> >
> > "Snow Crash capitalizes on the widespread belief that giant corporation,
> > and a shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an agent for the
> > corporations, now make all the important decisions.  This belief finds
> > popular expression in popular thrilers like Richard Condon's The
> Manchurian
> > Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more ambitious works like
> Thomas
> > Pynchon's Vineland and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  The view that the
> > visible government is just a false front is a plausible extrapolation
> from
> > the fact that we are living in a second Gilded Age: even Mark Twain might
> > have been startled by the shamelessness with which our politicians now
> sell
> > themselves. Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's, and Pynchon's are novels
> > not of social protest but of rueful acquiescence in the end of American
> > hopes...."
> >
> > From The Rorty Reader, ed. Voparil and Bernstein, Wiley-Blackwell 2010,
> p.
> > 373
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 1:14 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> “I should like to make it sound attractive by dubbing it ‘American’,” he
> >> writes with his usual dash of irony, “construing it as the idea common
> to
> >> Emerson and Whitman, the idea of a new, self-creating community, united
> not
> >> by knowledge of the same truths, but by sharing the same generous,
> >> inclusivist, democratic hopes.”
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>