Fwd: The best of times the worst of times

[Joseph Tracy]

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> Subject: Re: The best of times the worst of times
> Date: September 14, 2021 at 9:27:33 AM EDT
> To: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> 
> For some reason I am not getting Raphael’s posts .  Enjoyed this one, though I assume I am being chided for looking at the hole. But I enjoy Thomas Pynchon for the same reasons you mention- the humor,the craftsmanship, dot connecting, everything you say quite well. Don’t know if it’s the hole or the whole I feel obliged to mention, but trying in my posts to be real with athentic response to the topic. 
> 
>> On Sep 10, 2021, at 5:11 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Balanced for me by the words and thinking in action example of an early
>> mentor, college age I was.
>> 
>> "See it whole"..."See things whole" ........
>> 
>> to go with those homonyms...
>> 
>> On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 12:49 AM Raphael Saltwood <
>> PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Well, yeah, there’s that.
>>> 
>>> But as my dad used to say, though I’m sure he didn’t make it up, “look at
>>> the donut, not the hole.”
>>> 
>>> If you read Pynchon for sentens then sure. But I’ve tended to read him
>>> more for solas. I mean, yes, he does connect a lot of the dots to make it
>>> easier to understand how things are so messed up. But there’s those
>>> beautiful sentences (solas-giving sentences), there’s the cheerfulness of
>>> his Fools on the brinks of all the cliffs he depicts, there’s the limning
>>> of moods ne’er so well-expressed, the moments of grace, the camaraderie.
>>> The humor.
>>> 
>>> But yeah. It’s like the Bible, in Sunday School and a million or more
>>> pulpits when they hit those Old Testament tales, and give us the example of
>>> David or Solomon to emulate. I mean they take one tiny little good thing
>>> they might have done and completely ignore the thousands of wives and
>>> concubines which must’ve cramped the style of lots of young Israelite dudes
>>> looking for love, the territorial expansionism which made them bad
>>> neighbors, the militarism which wasted so much human potential, so as to
>>> focus on a few Psalms the content of many of which is dubious or outright
>>> reprehensible…or make much of an expression of repentance and a belief in
>>> and acceptance of forgiveness, without any attempt that I can think of to
>>> make amends or change one’s ways
>>> 
>>> …looking at the donut with a vengeance…
>>> 
>>> And why?
>>> Accentuate the positive?
>>> IQ test - given the facts, see how many people see the implicit lessons
>>> (“that was what he did, but really, don’t you be like David, except in
>>> these carefully curated regards…”)?
>>> 
>>> Robert Anton Wilson sez regarding division of labor in the individual
>>> mind: what the thinker thinks, the finder finds.
>>> Looking for the silver lining?
>>> Is the main thing about my life that I live in late capitalism and a bunch
>>> of clueless greed heads are running around doing weird shit that if they
>>> applied a smidgen of ethics, not to mention commonsense, they could improve
>>> things for everyone?
>>> 
>>> Nah - hellz no! - that’s just part of the backdrop.
>>> 
>>> Checks and balances are inevitable & if I look for the good maybe I can
>>> find a way to make a positive contribution that isn’t completely clueless.
>>> Meantime there’s all this other interesting stuff going on, much of which
>>> has nothing to do with that at all; or even if affected by the clueless
>>> greed heads there’s still parts that are a bit of all right.
>>> 
>>> But yeah. Got to do one’s due diligence, move away from being part of the
>>> problem. Somehow.
>>> 
>>> Anyway, in re stories -
>>> Me, I like a verbose explicit moral - but perhaps a panorama of (often,
>>> but not exclusively) ill effects and a clear (or at least findable)
>>> attribution of causes to human behaviors (and a panoply of natural laws
>>> that is still being plumbed, if you can plumb a panoply - like, I want a
>>> big shower head in my panoply and a Clivus Multrum a-and grey water for the
>>> garden…) serves the same purpose in fiction.
>>> 
>>> In place of a simplistic lesson producing an edict that wouldn’t anyhow be
>>> obeyed (a storyteller doesn’t have recourse to compulsion the way the
>>> acknowledged legislators of the world have) - we’re given sadness to
>>> sympathize with, and something to like about even the bad guys.
>>> 
>>> But yeah. Your point still resonates. It’s why those movies about the
>>> founding of Facebook or that portray Gates and Jobs don’t have much
>>> traction for me. They leave so much out.
>>> 
>>> BE does some much better tinkering with that mythos, imho.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Just wanted to mention that this was my most malign and satirically dark
>>> way of seeing the chums. To me the chums are about the role fiction plays
>>> in how we interpret history and culture. We have some beautiful fictions
>>> but it often seems our favorite story, no matter what cultural niche we
>>> occupy, is how we, the good guys, at great risk have challenged the dark
>>> forces and won a small or great  battle for all that we( whoever we are)
>>> hold dear. ( See the Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit.) Now the
>>> narratives have armies of computers,  mobile phones,  memers, twitterers
>>> and twits, mostly generating  distractions from the obvious cracks in a
>>> civilization undermined by its own greed.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> 
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>