Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v018.n007

From: Kieran Mullen <kieran at phyast.nhn.ou.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 00:31:49 +0000

Peter Grimes <grimes at waste.org> writes:

>Ugh, I just can't let this go by unremarked.  Illuminatus is garbage
>writing...       [Stuff
>                    Deleted]                 ....  Robert Anton Wilson and
>his co-conspirator are just not terribly good writers.

   Very well put and very true.  It is painful to see Wolfe and Wilson
compared.  

>So what if Foucault kills the conspiracy at the end?  That's more or
>less the point of the book.  Its about how an obsession with conspiracy
>leads someone to see them everywhere and in fact contributes to their
>creation.

   I think FP suffers from poor editing.  Eco was too big a writer to have
his prose altered, I suspect.  You could cut a fair bit of the middle bit
out.

   That said, it's a brilliant criticism of Postmodernism, and a wonderful
book.  The fact that there _is_ a supernatural reality (evidenced by the
ectoplasm manifested in the church) is a oft overlooked sly twist.

               Kieran Mullen

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Jack Lyons <revjack at radix.net>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 06:58:33 +0000

On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, Kieran Mullen wrote:

:Peter Grimes <grimes at waste.org> writes:
:
:>Ugh, I just can't let this go by unremarked.  Illuminatus is garbage
:>writing...       [Stuff
:>                    Deleted]                 ....  Robert Anton Wilson and
:>his co-conspirator are just not terribly good writers.
:
:   Very well put and very true.  It is painful to see Wolfe and Wilson
:compared.  

Well, it's like comparing a rubber chicken to a Rodin
scuplture. Both do have their uses, and I enjoy them both,
though rarely together.

As far as women in Wilson's book go - I seem to recall that
Miss Portinari wasn't a sex object, and in fact had the
mantle of Leader of the Illuminatus abdicated to her in the
end, no small feat. I should also note that while nearly all
of the women in ILLUMINATUS are indeed caricatured as sex
dolls, the men get far worse treatment as dolts and morons.
Take your pick which offends you more.

I treat Focault's Pendulum as an entertaining prose history
book, a mixture of book types in the same way MAUS mixed
history and comics. Eco was having *fun*. Lighten up. :)

Of course now that we have mentioned *three* books we can
posit a Trinity connection...perhaps the rubber chicken
represents the Host...

-- 
_________________
revjack at radix.net

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 08:42:42 +0000

> his prose altered, I suspect.  You could cut a fair bit of the middle bit

Absolutely not.  That's like saying you could cut out a bunch of those
repeated phrases in Ravel's Bolero.  The fact that the long sections in
the middle about all the conspiracies is interminable is part of the
point. 

-Rostrum