version's Thomas Pynchon masterclass

[Benny Bunter]

Just finished the Blicero chapter, absolutely amazing.

Key passage:

“Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded in History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

And the bit about Frans and the dodos was incredible.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Gerry Fialka asserts that Marshall McLuhan asserts that the antenna metaphor originates with Pound. Which sounds familiar from my time reading Kenner.

 

[kid charlemagne]

thomas pynchon, mimi baez, and richard farina

 

[sus]

Get outta here.

Where did you find this?

 

[sus]

Man I spent so long trying to find the Pynch in the Fariña wedding photos

 

[sus]

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's Grigori again!



Where's @Slothrop when you need him?

 

[kid charlemagne]

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

Awful title, and I'm not optimistic about the concept. How did he get $115 million for another Pynchon adaptation anyway? Inherent Vice didn't do well.

 

[luka]

Throughout this poem, metaphors of outlay and circulation abound with a density of allusiveness rarely experienced since The Cantos, and here too there is an economy of exchanges, the hyperbolic ironies of ‘stern purpose’ casting out widening circles of implication to fold within the lyric frame more epic perspectives. Many difficulties associated with the work of J H Prynne might be rooted here, but it is the moment of whole otherness that I will concentrate on. How recognisable can this moment be in fact, “with no name & place”, to the community of witnesses drawn into its pronominal range? How free from the ironies of recursive anticipation, “the grove on/ the hill we know too much of” reducing the movement of understanding to a sanctified acknowledgement of prior historical foreclosures? How open to the ‘unrecognised turn’ which, in the ‘Note on Metal’, appended to the Aristeas volume of 1968, Prynne sets out as the true wager of poetical endeavour, so that the twin movements of outgoing and return, allotropes of the division between existence and essence, may actively signal possibilities of real (that is, ethical) change, rather than a merely mechanical materialism or, even worse, a Heideggerian apophatics which would collapse the autonomy of the poem in the rush towards a negative theology of the unennhalte?



Prynne is hardly the first to have confronted the problem, and when Richard Blackmur censured Hart Crane a long time ago for attempting to ‘write the cultural epic with the lyric fragment’, it was presumably because fragmentation was the mechanism of the cultural epic in reverse, the scenario of The Waste Land, from the Grail mythos (Parsifal to Jessie Weston) and its reductio ad absurdum in Gravity’s Rainbow and Apocalypse Now. But the short-circuit between lyric and epic which Eliot’s poem instated (with some assistance from the mass slaughters of 1914–18) seemed to imply that from henceforth the hermeneutic circle of part and whole had resolved itself into a more navigable psychologism of symptom and diagnosis (with Hamlet installed as reigning emblem of ironical sequestration, the downcast king reappointed as monarch in disguise etc.). Pound was only too happy to apply himself to the task of diagnosis, but the numinous transformations of The Cantos leave the problem of totality, in all its now unfashionable implications, quite unresolved. And by the time that Prynne came into his mature voice, the epic ambition itself was itself unravelling, circa 1970, into the full irony of a ‘post-imperial outlook’, which is to say the commencement of high-force telematic brokerage and global commodification of knowledge by the media and their nominees within the universities.