Mindless Pleasures

[Marshall Joseph Armintor]

Thanks to all who responded to my calls for help.
  1) It's not a problem of whether or not I like the book or think it's worth
it or that I simply find it TOO DIFFICULT.  Claiming that a book isn't worth 
reading because it's hard is a copout.  There's only one narrative voice, 
really, and readers can get used to anything.  Hell, _JR_ loosens up after
200 pages or so.  If you get used to Gaddis, the sky's the limit.
  2) The academic framework doesn't really matter all that much.  It's nice 
to have other people to discuss the book with, but in the end, we're all in it
together.  The book, like all literature worth talking about at length, defies
pigeonholing.
  3) My intuition is that the secondary textual reading doesn't help ALL that
much. One of the reasons I warmed to GR immediately was the Rilke subtext with 
Blicero/Weissman; nice to know that, and Rilke's metaphysics coincide to some
extent with those of GR (being, the self's relation to it, the longing for 
ecstasy that one cannot quite reach while still a prisoner of this world).  
On the other hand, the Tractatus references in V. are simply distracting and 
flashy (especially when in Lhamon's opinion this text is closer in spirit to
the Philosophical Investigations...although L.W.'s two principal works don't 
cancel each other out...well, I'm not going to go into it here.).  it runs hot and cold. _The Golden Bough_ may help one read _The Waste Land_, but what does
it ADD to the work, honestly?  The endless allusions indicate a widely read
writer, but it doesn't create an assemblage - the book doesn't CHANGE the way 
you view King Kong, or the Lone Ranger, or Emily Dickinson, or Superman, etc.
  4) My question could be rephrased this way.  Every book (if it's good) yields
more discussion - but do you 1) find more connections or 2) revel in the prose (which you certainly can do) or 3) cancel out earlier readings?  Does one work
more towards grasping it as a whole or more as a mine for interesting observ-
ations?  Does one move towards unified sense (because the text somehow seems to
hold out the promise) or for different ways of reading the book through (a
book that holds many different books)?  My view: the book is, in a sense, 
utter realism: the guts of the twentieth-century mind projected graphically
onto the page, genre and media types in tow.  TP was 8 when WWII ended: 
how do you think he learned about the Blitz in the first place?  Other people's
writing, second-hand images. This isn't a dis, and it doesn't affect the power
of the work.
   Just something I'm thinking about.    

Marshall