Digest urth.v018.n007

Peter Grimes <grimes at waste.org> writes:

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

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

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...

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