Serious, Solemn, Satiric, Hopeless, Happiness

[Mark Kohut]

LOL....



On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 9:11 AM O G <octogonalyoyo at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> If you're wondering from where such a line as no hope/so happy arose, it's
> probably from a misunderstanding of Nietzsche.
>
> Certainly of Zarathustra.  But even Nietzsche didn't understand
> Zarathustra, so Miller is forgiven.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 5:31 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Sometimes when one has been away from ones computer and reading
>> posts on one's phone, those posts seem be lost when one sits
>> back down at the computer....caught in Icloud or somewhere.....
>>
>> So, I cannot find Dr, Krafft's post related to Miller's epigram but I hope
>> I remember its
>> thrust as an argument and major words. Serious, solemn and satirical.
>>
>> Although I could not articulate the paragraph Dr. Krafft wrote as well as
>> he did, I think
>> it expressed the way I read the story too. Tom IS satirizing these
>> characters. One might say
>> he is satirizing their seriousness, their solemnity?
>>
>> The first time I attempted to read *V,* still early in college but not in
>> a
>> class--that copy recently unearthed, the Modern Library edition
>> with my bookmark still in it--I stopped at the party scene with the Whole
>> Sick Crew in the bar with a pool table, etc. One used "a little too much
>> force"
>> as Dylan wrote, on what's her name.....I stopped reading because I thought
>> I was
>> to identify closely with The Whole Sick Crew. I came to understand
>> otherwise, which the phrase 'sick crew' should
>> have clued me in on earlier, I think.
>>
>> When I read* Entropy, *much later in time, I read the characters I think
>> in
>> the way Dr. Krafft has described.
>> Describing the characters of that party as like the heat death of the
>> universe, while we know entropy is
>> overcome on this earth with every action we take, is to say these
>> characters are dead--to human life; to human
>> engagement; to human energy.
>>
>> To the plister who wrote one can't be happy with such expressed
>> hopelesssness, I think Tom might have
>> thought the same thing. That Miller's surprising paradox is not 'earned"
>> as
>> Dr. Leavis might say. Which is
>> why Tom left it off the epigraph and is what the story is "about"....
>>
>> PS. I get Tom's later life criticism of 'starting with an idea first" but
>> since I like ideas, esp Tom's, I still like
>> this story for the way it works atmospherically, to pun ideationally.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>