Regarding them Traverses...

[Michael Bailey]

Webb's ideal, labor value, certainly is on the right
track and a great praxis could emerge around that,
but it bogs down in his embrace of violence - at least, that's a reasonable interpretation of the action, isn't it?

Am I one of those people who has a saying for everything? Like Jimmy Durante, with a million of 'em? Like, here, "Ends don't justify means;
au contraire, means determine/shape/arc towards/have a fatality for their own ends!"

Buddenbrooks - haven't read it, maybe some time.
Is it good?

________________________________
From: Pynchon-l <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org> on behalf of Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:55 AM
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Regarding them Traverses...

I have always felt---little evidence and haven't tried to find any---that
the family decline
of the Traverses as worked out in Against the Day, was inspired by the
decline of the
Buddenbrooks family in Mann's work, the one cited by the Nobel Committee
even over *The Magic Mountain.... *

Speaking of that mountain of sickness, Olga Tokarczuk's* The Empusium, *which
is in the answer song tradition, so to borrow allusively,
where I can see some pynchonian themes and even a trope or two...some
effects of modernity to generalize
--
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