NP but somehow very P. BE? or AtD and more. Anyway, goes out for Morris and N.O. Brown, sorta. And Joseph too.

[Joseph Tracy]

Very Pynchon-like quote, that beautifully precise language for a generalizing theme.

> On Jan 17, 2022, at 5:30 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Someone very smart about novels posted this excerpt while recommending the
> book highly:
> And other smart friends of mine have praised it highly too.
> 
> Read an excerpt from "Homeland Elegies":
> [image: 📷] LITTLE, BROWN
> Overture: To America
> I had a professor in college, Mary Moroni, who taught Melville and Emerson,
> and who the once famous Norman O. Brown — her mentor — called the finest
> mind of her generation; a diminutive, cherubic woman in her early thirties
> with a resemblance to a Raphaelesque putto that was not incidental (her
> parents had immigrated from Urbino); a scholar of staggering erudition who
> quoted as easily from the Eddas and Hannah Arendt as she did from
> Moby-Dick; a lesbian, which I only mention because she did, often; a
> lecturer whose turns of phrase were sharp as a German paring knife, could
> score the brain's gray matter and carve out new grooves along which old
> thoughts would reroute, as on that February morning two weeks after Bill
> Clinton's first inauguration, when, during a class on life under early
> American capitalism, Mary, clearly interrupted by her own tantalizing
> thought, looked up from the floor at which she usually gazed as she spoke —
> her left hand characteristically buried in the pocket of the loose-fitting
> slacks that were her mainstay — looked up and remarked almost offhandedly
> that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is,
> a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and
> civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name — and for
> whose benefit — the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland
> but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires
> — however discreet, however banal — rather than question them, as the
> classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the
> pillaging patria, she said, and the marauding years of the Reagan regime
> had only expressed this enduring reality of American life with greater
> clarity and transparency than ever before.
> 
> *The Imperial Self *is a good work of lit crit which explores this concept
> in many of America's best novels and writers.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l