Suggestions

[Terrance]

> Danielle Thill wrote:
> 
> I just got my friend into reading Pynchon and it's great
> because she's so excited and always wants to talk.  She
> asked me for some books or articles about his writing, so
> I handed her  The Style of Connectedness  by Thomas Moore
> but after she read it
> she said it was a bit too much for her.  Can anyone
> suggest something mellower for her to get her feet wet?
> I'd appreciate it.
> 
> -Danielle

Well, there are tons of things to read about Pynchon's
books, enough On-Line to get 
the nose wet, but you know your friend and we don't so...so
maybe you know best.  

I guess, speaking from my own experience here, the
narrator(S), (particularly GR's narrators)  of Pynchon's
books are  what can get the reader swirling in the
fathomless deep. These have been know to cause even the
strongest readers to drowned or to toss the book across the
room. But Pynchon hasn't written Finnegans Wake, not yet,
but those Reader Companions (for V. CL49, GR) are a big
help. 

Some very good advice at the hyperart site for those of us
getting our feet wet, and 
those "Deep Divers" round here too. As we head into
"Mondaugen's Story" I will try to argue that Pynchon's own
view of the Holocaust, Nuremberg, the Atomic Bombing of
Japan by the U.S., the complicity of corporate america in
genocide, is located in the narrative norm and what can be
learned from the past and what needs to be remembered in a
"positively paranoid" society where Pynchon's nostalgia is a
nostalgia for the future, "for possibilities of social    
harmony glimpsed at crucial moments in the past, but not
ever yet realized" is likewise located in the narrative
norm.  See, imho, one of the best essays on VL, ""Cultural
Trauma and the "Timeless Burst": Pynchon's Revision of
Nostalgia in Vineland"" by James Berger, Postmodern Culture
v.5 n.3 (May, 1995), available On-line this essay makes
judicious use of Walter Benjamin, The Beatles and The
Rolling Stones. And following Dinn's questions, 

Who is speaking?

AND 

Where and when is the narrated action taking place and how
the hell did we get here from where we just were?

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/newbies.html

See a sloppy copy of Brian McHale's "Modernist Reading,
Postmodernist Text: the case of Gravity's Rainbow" is
available On-line someplace or in *Constructing
Postmodernism* Part II which also includes another essay on
GR and an essay on Vineland that might be helpful. Maybe add
to this,  Chapter 3 of Wayne C. Booth's *The Rhetoric Of
Fiction* General Rules, II: "The Author Should Be
Objective." 

Me, I stuck my toe in the same river twice at Dante's 
in trembling Kansas and can longer forget or remember if I
studied 
Pynchon Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop
kabbalah in
this cosmos or over rice and beans at Ginsberg's Diner 
when I was a black Beatrice to a Brownsville sista and you 
were a poet who yearned to dance on the rooftops in Brooklyn
to whisper your delicate lines with joy
blessing human understanding with a bolted door
in the towers of language where the same mad typewriter 
never could fade out the sounds of blasting and muffled
outrage
from down these mean streets. I am with you Elena....