Have a great week digesting your even greater news!

I’m reading William Gaddis’ JR, having finally caught up with his first masterpiece The Recognitions last year. Gaddis is who Pynchon wants to be when he grows up.

Other books I’ve enjoyed recently include Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation and Dennis Cooper’s God Jr.

I can’t for the life of me understand where comments like this come from–you certainly don’t convince me of YOUR critical acuity by saying that you think one undeniably great writer is better than the next undeniably great writer. Both are unique–get it?–UNIQUE. If Pynchon was trying to be like Gaddis, I would agree he failed at the attempt. I see nothing in such works as V or Gravity’s Rainbow, or even Mason and Dixon(much less Against the Day, which I’m just finishing)that makes me think that is Pynchon’s program.

Great writers who work in the same era can only be ranked, if at all, when their works have been ripened by being on our shelves for a LONG time. Some are clearly great in their own era–Faulkner, Yeats, Joyce, Shakespeare(who however had his contemporanious detractors)–I could write for pages. Others are, in a famous analogy, like the mountain that only reveals its true height as we move ever further away from it. Will Blood Meridian be one of those books(to bring in another great writer who is often left out of the discussion)? Will Stephen King, whose case strikes me as a lot like Dickens’s–vastly popular and because of that not respected–I don’t know because I haven’t read him. But you’ll notice that I don’t call him a Dickens wannabe.

I think it safe to make two observations about Gaddis and Pynchon. Neither is terribly widely read–Gaddis even less so than Pynchon. Both are writers who can be very difficult–for completely different reasons. I find Gaddis more of a trial, but I love him–especially Recognitions and Carpenter’s Gothic. I find in Pynchon, however, a mirthful nihilism that masks something much darker(if that’s possible). He has a way of writing that actually defies the conventions of expression, that undercuts the actual structure, the elements, of meaning, of the sentence. I think a naive reader could get through all of his work and not notice that he does this. You could get distracted by the Trollope-like obsession with silly names: where Trollope had Dr. Fillgrave, Pynchon has the spa named “Bad Karma”, but that is far from the most important part of Pynchon’s program. I could go on, again, for pages about what I love in his works–the recondite learning, the farce, the obscenity, the decameron-like story telling, the revival of history unwisely forgotten, but if you can’t discuss him in any way other than to dismiss him, where would be the point?

I suggest that you either remember why you fell in love with reading in the first place, Mr. Ehrenstein, and go back to look at Pynchon again with a more open mind, or at least remember that dismissals like the one you make of Pynchon are actually destructive, for they destroy the dialogue that all art exists in. It’s the lesson of the ages in this regard. It’s okay to say WHY you don’t care for Pynchon because that furthers the conversation, it isn’t okay to say that he’s no good at all, or that he’s sophomoric because that ENDS conversation. It’s a form of ad hominem attack–which helps no one

Christian G Appy’s Patriots

Le Ly Hayslip’s two books which i read after seeing Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth:
When Heaven and Earth changed places
and
Child of War Woman of Peace

Gloria Emerson’s Winners and Losers

Next up:

Roy Morris’ Fraud of the Century
and
David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback

1. Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter. I admire President Carter not only for writing this book, but also for facing the firestorm of criticism that has been thrown at him for breaking several taboos that have crippled open debate on our options in the Israel/Palestine conflict. We have badly needed a book like this, and an author of his stature, for decades.

2. George W. Bush vs. the U.S. Constitution, ed. by Anita Miller (2006)

3. Impeach the President: The Case against Bush and Cheney, ed. by Dennis Loo & Peter Phillips (2006)

4. The Case for Impeachment, by Dave Lindorff & Barbara Olshansky (2006)

5. The Genius of Impeachment, by John Nichols (2006)

6. Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush, by the Center for Constitutional Rights (Second ed., 2006)

(Do you see a pattern here???)

And of course,

7. Anatomy of Deceit.

What’s the best book or blog or article for the grounds to impeach Cheney? Anatomy of Deceit? I want that one on my list, if its not there already.

Bob in HI

TBR: “Breakpoint,” – Richard Clarke; “The God Delusion,” – Richard Dawkins; and “Spook” – Mary Roach. And now, every single book already mentioned here!

neokneme — re: speed of mind — actually, I think I’ve read recently that the speed is 40Ghz in terms of frequency. Stuff transmitted faster than that is not received, kind of like a dog whistle isn’t heard by humans.

While I don’t subscribe to his political positions (which seem oddly centrist to conservative compared to the rest of his works), I like Deepak Chopra’s philosophy or perspective on the nature of human existence. Although he’s informed primarily by Hindu, Sufi and Buddhist traditions, I think his model of the soul makes great sense. But then I also came to agree with his perspective after experiencing what I would call a transcendent or kundalini event; the concept of the individual being part of a larger whole made complete sense in that state. Particle became wave, collapsing in a moment. Think Chopra’s last book is a restatement of much of what he’s said before, except that he’s become far more efficient at explaining it.

I recommend http://www.noetic.org/ if you enjoy exploring the expansion of the noosphere.

Thanks for the come-back. Your sharing is a highlight of FDL.

Our noema is a filter which is too selective to escape its self-resonance.

That’s what makes U.G.’s explication so compelling. It undermines rationality as we know it.

Forty GHz? That’s fast! That would be 25 pico-seconds. At roughly 100 ps/in, that is only a quarter of an inch.

I suppose thought could operate in a BB sized portion of my brain!

:~}

The Bastard of Istanbul. Elif Shafak.
Wizard of the Crow. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.
The Wandering Jew. Stefan Heym.
Fantomas. Marcel Allain.
Uncle Ovid’s Exercise Book. Don Webb.