Various positions

[Craig G. Bleakley]

Some more or less random thoughts in response to recent postings, probably
more for my benefit than the group's, but here goes.  Plus, if you hang in
there long enough, an actual idea of sorts.

Don Larsson writes of Pynchon:
>the complexity of his handling of plot, character, theme
>and language are enough to keep me going, in same way that writers as
>different as Dickens, Conrad, Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany keep
>me going.

I suppose that in order to discuss differences in novels, we've got to divvy
them up somehow, and your categorizations certainly seem useful.  But the
writers you mention here don't "keep me going" the same way Pynchon, esp.
GR, does.  I see Morrisson's work especially operating in a different
dynamic, one grounded a lot more in the oral tradition of storytelling than
anything TRP sustains.  Different strokes . . . .

Rodney Welch humourosly recounts his disasterous efforts as turning the
opening of GR into a dramtic reading, to which I reply: Hey, I was fool
enough to try this as a prose interp for my high school speech team!  Yeah,
I sure knew what I was talking about.  Alas, now I'm too old to ever be
precocious again, and I look back on such youthful follies with nostalgia.

Oh, crap, the idea I promised now seems half baked, after about thirty
seconds of thought.  Never stopped me before.  Let me rephrase in the form
of a question: is Jules Seigel the only source for the Pynchon-Brian Wilson
connection?  Could Wilson's reclusiveness have been a model for Pynchon's,
or vice versa?  And doesn't Charlie manson fit into that relationship
somehow?  Funny, I'd peg Pynchon as more of a Jim Morrison fan, unless he's
reading "Fun Fun Fun" as a much more subversive text than I do.

Barbra Streisand and David Lynch's love child,
Craig B.