SLPAD 5 - atd- no, not that AtD: attitudes towards death

[Mark Kohut]

I stand astride my attitude arms akimbo.

On Sun, Feb 19, 2023 at 5:57 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> It’s important, for sure.
>
> I’d carve out an exception for some science fiction and fantasy, just
> because “seriously”, what if things were different…
>
> Though serious work under that premise wouldn’t avoid taking some kind of
> attitude towards death, implied or explicit.
>
> But anyway, Mr Pynchon is unsatisfied with the ways his characters relate
> to death in his first published story, TSR.
>
> “They evade: they sleep late, they seek euphemisms. When they do mention
> death they try  to make with the jokes. Worst of all, they hook it up with
> sex.”
>
> They do that in “The Big Chill,” but maybe more maturely than Levine &
> cohort.
>
>
> But this paragraph uses death-sex connection more maturely within its
> structure to transition into commentary on writing about sex, the
> “nervousness” of the era, and TSR’s retreat into high-flown language to
> strategically blur the sex scene in the story.
>
> Which is nice & succinct. He’s made a salient point on “the death
> question”, and moves on to sex without an explicit new topic sentence.
>
>
> Comparing _V._ - Slothrop’s young and immature, one can still wonder where
> he’ll go, but one hopes he’ll be searching for love, however cluelessly;
> Stencil’s multi-clueful search for “the word [letter, anyway] of the
> Father” definitively ends. Eros v. Thanatos? Is having sex an avoidance of
> considering death, or is it the optimal result of the consideration?
>
> ¿Quién sabe?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>