Gottfried & Blicero, Nietzsche & Pynchon

[Kevin Brown]

The comment was re: Gravity's Rainbow.

Though even without the source, which I don't have either, isn't it obvious?
Despite the noise of TCoL49, it's hardly as discursive as GR. Unless Pynchon
reacts to drugs in a concise and more deliberate way than I do . . .

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org]On
> Behalf Of Dave Monroe
> Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 7:42 AM
> To: Stacy Borah
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Gottfried & Blicero, Nietzsche & Pynchon
>
>
> I think that comment was in re: The Crying of Lot 49, and, while I don't
> particularly doubt it, I think I came across it reported
> secondhand in that
> J_l_s S__g_l book (L_n_l_nd), which I imagine many here will warn
> you to take
> with a shaker of salt.  But I do think it tends to weaken a
> reading to depend on
> positing something (inetntion) which (a) one can't ascertain, at
> least without
> the cooperation of (b) someone (the author) who necessarily has their own
> interests in presenting (or not presenting) their version of the
> story which (c)
> may or may not be accurate in the first place and (d)
> can't necessarily be considered the final word on the subject
> anyway (for at
> least all of the preceding reasons), so ...
>
> But, I agree, one cannot necessarily be said to have chosen with perfect,
> absolute freedom each and ev'ry word one writes, utters,
> whatever, language (and
> maybe chemistry as well ...) speaks you at least as much as you
> speak it, and
> I'm also very wary of that Information/noise binary, separating
> the Significant
> from teh insignificant, esp. in texts which not only foreground,
> but so often
> address, that very problem.  Still, so much of GR, so much of any of TRP's
> texts, seem so unusual, so unexpected, so potentially significant
> at LEAST in
> that information theory sense, that it's hard to discount
> anything ... on the
> other hand, yeah, a lot of it is SO f_ck_d _p, well, you can't
> HELP but wonder,
> if not, "what was going on his head," then, "what was going on in his
> bloodstream"?  That litany of dwarves or gnomes or whatever,
> that's the one that
> always gets me ...
>
> Stacy Borah wrote:
>
> > Saying that there is "Not much of anything careless about Pynchon the
> > writer" is overlooking one very important fact that Pynchon himself has
> > admitted to:  the fact that he himself can't remember what he
> meant when he
> > wrote many of the episodes in "GR", that he was either too
> wasted or too far
> > out on some existential ledge to pull any coherent meaning out
> of his own
> > text.  Can't remember right offhand where he said this, but i will look
> > diligently tomorrow when I wake up.


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