Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot!

[Dave Monroe]

... and Martin Heidegger, for starters ... well, much to catch up with
here, probably won't even attempt to comment, wish I were hauling around
McHoul and Wills' Writing Pynchon, not to mention Hutcheon's The Poetics
of Postmodernism, am hauling around Eddins' The Gnostic Pynchon,
wondering why both he and Hume (Pynchon's Mythography) are so
immediately defensive in re: "the poststructuralist Eumenides" (as
Eddins calls "them," whoever "they" are), except for maybe that they
both don't quite seem to "get" "poststructuralism" (whatever that might
be ...), do see Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, by the way,
and not only for his remarks on, addenda to McHoul and Wills ...

... have always been skeptical, however, of Robbe-Grillet's, of
anybody's, ability to "simply" "represent" anything (there's an
interesting Mark Tansey painting on this, "Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every
Objec in Sight," see
http://freud.tau.ac.il/~mintz/images/stonespiccopy.jpg ... A R-G wrote
the introduction to the Judi Freeman edited Mark Tansey catalog, by the
way), "forces or permits," well, which one?  Kinda sorta different ...
inflections there, dontcha think?  but, well, is difficult to see a
"moral" or "ethics" to Robbe-Grillet (though it has been suggested that
there's a certain politics to his [texts'] apoliticism).  Pynchon['s
texts], on the other hand ... well, again, those "decisions," "meta-" or
otherwise, "force[d]" and/or "permit[ted]," well, they would rather
depend on what is "represent[ed]," "simply" or (as is more likely here)
otherwise, wouln't they?  "If they can get you asking the wrong
questions ..." ... well, question is, what questions are being asked
here? A-and m-maybe, eve, are tehy the "right" ones?  or, at any rate,
not "wrong" ...

In the meantime, also just received David Seed's The Fictional
Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon--any comments?  Also, in re: V., is the
pagination to that yellow Harper whatever ed. with the shady-faced lady
on the cover the same as the more recent HarperCollins ed. with the
jumbo V. superimposed over the (presumably) Bad Priest illustration?
Hope so ... but anyone with teh Bantam ed. will have to fend for
tehmselves in re: pagination here, no handy companion (quite yet) for me
to get dual pagination from ...