grgr (28): cosmic windmill mandala (--- "graphicity" in pynchon's prose)

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Mark Wright AIA wrote:

> I can think of a few other writers from the 60's and 70's who were
> using graphics within (rather than to illustrate) a text.  An easy one:
> Vonnegut in "Breakfast of Champions", filled with simple drawings and
> doodles of the toilet-stall style, making BoC a "novel of ideas" (sort
> of) in an exagerated populist mode.  Another easy one: some of Donald
> Barthelme's short stories, for instance "At The Tolstoy Museum" from
> the "City Life" collection.  Perhaps in his case the "language as
> medium (subverted)" game is played.  Some of our lit-crit members might
> want to elaborate.  Both examples are "sixties" in flavor, as are V,
> CoL49, GR.


Gore Vidal in his 1976 NYRB "American Plastic: The Matter of
Fiction," whose final author therein critiqued is Pynchon, finishes the
piece with "my first graphic ever," which appears as an irregular circular
figure suggesting, I suppose, the zero.

			P.