something about pynchon and me...

[---]

Saioued Al-Zaioued wrote:
> I feel a little let down, now that I am going through V. with all of
> yall (though in a more erratic pace, I've been ahead of you guys by several
> sections most of the time), I feel empty. I do not know if I made all the
> right decisions, but I could always claim that I was enjoying everything I
> was doing; that is no longer true. The man has become so distant from the
> work, that the work is lonely, and I feel V. is an empty set in hollywood,
> an abandoned movie script that was entertaining for the first couple of
> scenes that the studios had no interest in.

No single book can answer to all that an individual needs from reading.
And no single author - except James Joyce, perhaps - starts or continues
at a consistently high quality. Pynchon's work is consistently
entertaining and inventive and allusive, but only Gravity's Rainbow and
Mason & Dixon perhaps deserve the amount of critical attention that it
all gets.

> I could crawl into Finnegans Wake, and come out a stronger man ...

Stronger, I don't know, but you could get a lot more blissed out than by
focussing on Pynchon. To help you get started . . .

<http://homepage.mac.com/rosenlake/fw/ShorterFW.html>

Or just take a break with Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth, the funniest
book I've ever read and read and read . . .

Yours,
Eric R