Finders Keepers

Pynchon, plots and puritanism

From Mindful Pleasures:  Essays on Thomas Pynchon, Scott Sanders writes:

In Calvinist theology -- and subsequently in Puritanism -- everyone is held to be either elect or preterite.  If elect, one's life is filled with meaning, because one is incorporated into God's scheme of things. If preterite, one's life is meaningless, not so much damned as simply void, because one is excluded from God's plan.  There are exactly the binary possibilities imagined by Pynchon... To be passed over, to drop out of all plots, is to lose one's identity.  Isolated from external schemes, character dissolves. Pynchon formulates this view in Mondaugenn's Law [in Gravity's Rainbow] which states that character is a function of historical awareness:  "The more you dwell in the past and in the future... the more solid your persona.  But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are."

John Gardner on "catching on"

John Gardner writes, in On Becoming a Novelist:

Catching on is important in the arts, as in athletics.  Practical sciences, including the verbal engineering of commercial fiction, can be taught and learned.  The arts, too, can be taught, uip to a point; but except for certain matters of technique, one does not learn the arts, one simply catches on.

If my own experience is representative, what one mainly catches on to is the value of painstaking -- almost ridiculously painstaking -- work. 

Oh, boy! Is he right!  ("Verbal engineering of commercial fiction"!)

And the very notion of "painstaking -- almost ridiculously painstaking -- work" is oddly exciting, sexy for the artist.

Sor Juana

I found this translation of a  Sor Juana poem somewhere but made no note of the translator:

I am not at all what you think
What you've done is attribute to me
a different nature with your pens,
a different talent with your lips.
Borne on your feather-pen's plumes,
my flight is no longer mine;
it's not as you like to imagine,
not what your fancy depicts.

We do have ideas about other people which have nothing to do with who they think they are, often have nothing to do with who they really are.

F.N. Spindler wrote in The Sense of Sight:

Our standard image of a human being is that of a person about ten feet away.

Guy Davenport (who died the other day) wrote:

Psychology is the policeman of the bourgeoisie, enforcing middle-class values with as bogus a science as alchemy or palm-reading.  Foucault was right on this point.

Family secrets

This morning I've been giving some heavy use to my Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964 edition, hard covers taped together).  I noticed that the book opens automatically to several pages.

Now this dictionary was inherited along with some other antiques, so it's had a lot of use before ending up in this household.  Here are the pages which lie flat and/or have little marks made long ago by an earlier generation of family members:

addiction
chichi
deformity
dramatic
empiric [erudite and recognizable family member notes a disagreement with the definition]
eunuch
fabulist
hymen
jobation
luteous
Malacca
masturbate
nonconformity
noyade
parados
phlebo-
potlatch
prolepsis
prorogue
quaternion
slang
un-

Losing touch with reality?

In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin writes about the charting and understanding of the land of Australia by its original inhabitants.  The people sang and made stories about the land to be given from one generation to another as a way to pass along history as well as information about the land, its forms, its animals -- life maps.

Older people tend to collect reminiscences, photographs, often wondering whether their old diaries and pictures will hold any interest for their children and grandchildren.  When does one finally throw away these memories?  The natives of Australia didn't.  Their history wasn't on paper.   It lay in the songlines, the stories.   Here's a short excerpt from Chatwin's Songlines:

Aboriginal Creation myths tell of legendarytotemic beings who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path -- birds, animals, plants, rocks, water-holes -- and so singing the world into existence...

And later:

In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land; since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.   To allow that to happen was the worst of all possible crimes...

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is being built in Cincinnati.  I hope it will display the quilts and songs of the slaves who used quilt design as a covert form of maps to freedom, and wrote songs with hidden descriptions of trails and safe houses.

Walter Benjamin in "The Storyteller" writes:  "In every case the story teller is a man who has counsel for his readers.  But if today 'having counsel' is beginning to have an old fashioned ring to it is because the communicability of experience is decreasing."  He is quote in Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, an account of the thoughts and experiences of McMurtry and his family in the Texas Panhandle and beyond.

What does he mean? Do we blow off experience because our technological progress is so rapid that what you know is out of date by the time you write it down?  Are we losing the maps of our experience and history?  Is one reason why we're so uncaring about the environment because its shapes and features can't be seen anymore on the GPS screens in our cars?  Does it really not matter that a movie about a North Carolina story is filmed in Rumania?  That all of America on the screen resembles California -- is California?

Was Benjamin right when he wrote that the "communicability of experience is decreasing"?