OK

[j minnich]

s writes:
>    Is anyone on the list an academic "expert" on Pynchon?   An email
>"interview" would probably help me immensely with my project.
>    (Yes, I am motivated ultimately by selfishness, sadly enough.)
>
><s>


I think that there are academic "experts" on or lurking near this list but
I'm sure not one of them.  Your "selfishness" has the strong virtue of being
relevant to Pynchon & his texts, which is an improvement over a lot of the
discussions we tend to get lost in.  Some list members think _V_ is the best
thing TRP ever did.  It's my least favorite.  It was my first exposure to
the work of TRP and I approached it the way I approached any other
conventional narrative, of the sort I'd been used to reading in my teens and
early twenties, for instance stuff by  Robert Ruark.  (A-and what ever
became of him?)  At some point I went back and re-read _V_ but wasn't any
more impressed.  There are (for me) far too many long tedious passages.  But
there were also things here and there that I liked a lot.  The opening, for
instance, is wonderful.  (I was fresh from a hitch in the Air Force when I
read it.  Seemed pretty realistic.)  The part about Father Faring's parish
was also memorable.  (It forshadows things in COL49--the rumored, the
damaged, the imperfectly remembered or reproduced.)  Esther's nose-job was
about the most graphic scene I'd encountered back then, so it had "shock
value."  Also, I liked the entropy stuff at the time.  Fausto's diaries were
all but unreadable, and nearly as bad were Malta, Foppl's seige party, the
genocide.  I was a naive reader.  Someone told me that once you had solved
the book's central mystery, it became a lot less interesting.  I failed to
"solve" it, but I continued thinking for a long time that the book did have
"a solution."  I had no idea at the time that I was reading a post-modern
text.  I'd been an engineering student before the Air Force, you see, and
they hadn't taught us that we were living in the post-modern era.  Engineers
didn't need to know that.  Maybe I read _V_ first because I was attracted by
the cover on the Bantam paperback.  With those converging perspective lines,
and the storm-blown red-head in a strapless dress apparently forming some
sort of glyph with her arms, it sort of reminded me of the cover on a
paper-back I'd seen of Hesse's _Magister Ludi_.  Later I tried to get
through _The Education of Henry Adams_ but failed.  Reading Pynchon's work
in the order published isn't bad advice, because the high point (for many)
comes in the third act.   

j minnich
---------------------------------------------------------------
...The poet is dead.
Nor will ever again hear the sea lions 
Grunt in the kelp at Point Lobos.
Nor look to the south when the grunion 
Run the Pacific, and the plunging
Shearwaters, insatiable, 
Stun themselves in the sea.  
   -Wm. Everson