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

[Richard Romeo]

Too bad they can’t win elections. I have nothing against the sentiment per se, it’s just we have 1000 people spouting the same. It’s the current equivalent of adding another pithy comment to a NY Times article with hundreds of them 

rich

> On Jan 17, 2022, at 5:41 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l