pynchon-l-digest V2 #1596

[Doug Millison]

jody:
>Drawing conclusions about the "meaning"
>of the art based on "the person" manifested in the scraps available (for
>Pynchon not in general) is tantamount to filing your nails on my blackboard.

Remind me to stay out of your classroom.  ;-)

>"It is of course precisely in such episodes of mental traveling that writers
>are known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal
>problems, getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic adventures that with
>luck can be recovered later on. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of
>what we do."

I recalled this passage when we got to the dream people -- is it the 
Senoi? -- passage in M&D.  Sure, you don't need to know what Pynchon 
has said about dreaming and creativity to read or enjoy that M&D 
passage. I find that it adds to my experience of reading Pynchon's 
fiction to know more about Pynchon himself and what's he had to say, 
outside the novels,  about elements that he uses in his novel.  It's 
also true that I greatly enjoyed Pynchon's novels before I knew 
anything about the author beyond the back-of-the-book bio blurb; I 
read GR, V., and COL49 before the JS article appeared in Playboy and 
the brief Newsweek item that mentioned that Pynchon was writing about 
the Mason-Dixon line.

-- 
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