GR changed my life

[Chris Stolz]

When I was 18, having just got out of highschool, I spent a year
working in a camera store to save up money for university.  I
worked with real dough-heads, you know, 40 year old people who
*still* listened to Pink Floyd whilst stoned and were proud of
being $8/hr retail clerks.  The conversation, dealing largely with new
camera systems and beer and women, sucked.  I didn't know 
anybody in Calgary, and
so spent a lot of lonesome time after work reading.  I stumbled
across _GR_ because a store customer who was an English professor
recommended it, and at the same time I had read a salutary review of
the novel in _The Whole Earth Catalog_.  Well, I picked up The
Tome at the local library one evening and vanished into the world
of Pynchon for three months.

	I lived and breahted that book.  It was alike a movie,
for a couple of hours I would escape into it, not understanding a
thing along the way but moved by the language and laughiong my
head off at the humour.  The putzes I worked with no longer
mattered-- I had my Pynchon to escape into.  _GR_ got me thinking
about the deeper meanings of international politics and business,
turned me on to Rilke, made me read more history and made me
rethink popular culture.  itt also reassured me, because Iknew
that the,uhhh, lower-level lit with which I'd been bombarded in
high-school (Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies etc)
wasn't important and that literature could transform my mind.
Pynchon was the first writer (excluding Shakespeare) I'd ever 
read who changed the way I
thought, for up until him, literature had been transparent, a
simple thing to decode and forget.  Pynchon got me started along
the road of reading "difficult" and "unconventional" literature.
His works made me a lot more sensitive to issues of class and
race, and still hold out the stubborn humanist promise that deep
down, most of us share very basic concerns and that we are
divided by the mechanical, political world's silent machinery.  



-- 
chris stolz		16 oakview pl. sw calgary ab canada t2v-3z9
cstolz at acs.ucalgary.ca	(403) 281-6794


"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich 
and varied sort?" said Ulrich.


			Robert Musil, _The Man Without Qualities_