col49, wedding present

[Otto Sell]

bet he don´t - better take some cd´s with you. _Do it Again_ and _Rikki ..._
are still dance-floor fillers, but maybe _Haitian Divorce_ is more
appropriate. Vineland  as a wedding present is perfect.

We all know what TRP has said about CL 49, but nonetheless I still think
that it´s a good way into Pynchon. All these over-deteminated signs,
entropy, information theory stuff, conspiracies, paranoia, the language. All
those different 49s from the Gold Rush to the I Ching, the 49 days in the
Bardo Thödol, 49 days between Easter and Whitsunday (at the end of the book
the miracle of whitsunday doesn´t happen), LSD, San Francisco 49ers. He
really got into dictionary work like Gertrude Stein to put every "lot" into
his story he could find. Maybe it´s all too much in a short text, but this
is generally the way TRP works in his longer novels too. So CL 49 is a good
way getting students of Anglistik into it cuz it´s short and no student got
the time to read V., GR or M&D during the semester. But you can send them
into the dictionaries.

Otto

"Forty-nine Clive as well forty-nine Clive as well forty-nine sixty-nine
seventy-nine eighty-nine one hundred and nine Clive as well forty-nine Clive
as well which is that it presses it to be or to be stay or to be twenty a
day or to be next to be or to be twenty to stay or to be which never
separates two more two women. (...) Wishing for Patriarchal Poetry."
Gertrude Stein <The Yale Gertrude Stein >