Gaddis, McElroy

[erik burns]

Boy, I am I glad to see more of MY favorite writer here on the pynchon list.
I confess that TRP fell away to Gaddis as soon as I read _ The Recognitions
_ and was pushed farther aside by the time I got to _ JR. This is not to
slap TRP or the people on this list; he is still up there and in any case it
is stupid to "rank" writers...usually great books are unmeasurably good,
making it hard to compare.  Right? Unless you get into one of those desert
island things...

and I apologize for jamming bandwidth with the alligators article... my
first time trying to import something!

as for Gaddis, it is a mistake to start with _ Frolic _ just as I think
people are soured to TRP when they start with _ Vineland _ ... make the
effort and try _ The Recognitions _ or at least read _ Carpenter's Gothic.
All of that punctuation and blurred dialogue and so forth starts to make
sense -- and it really made sense in _ JR _ when everything from television
sets to air raid warnings were part of the spoken world created.

...the only thing i don't like is Gaddis cop-out move-the-clock forward bit
(the second hand took big gulps out of the face, or something like that).

(note: in his brilliant book FIRE THE BASTARDS! about Gaddis' poor reviews
and poor reviewing in general, Jack Green (an antipunctuationeer if ever
there was one) sez the Big Unshaven Man is not actually Hemingway, but a BUM
of a different stripe -- I'm unconvinced.

erik