something about pynchon and me...

[Dave Monroe]

This being technically the last day of my hosting
stint, I figured, given the chance, I should at least
check in.  Don't know to what extent I'll get to say
much of, respond to much of anything here, but ...
but, as I've intimated, it's been a rough couple of
weeks, and, while these past twenty-four hours brought
some of it to a certain closure, they've also opened
other complications (sometimes people only do half the
right thing, for better and for worse), so ...

But I do see that someone's losing the faith here, so
... while I'd disagree with Eric that only GR and M&D
really deserve any intense scrutiny--again, I think
I've found that there's much to be said about even the
humblest chapter of V., and I'm hoping to give
Vineland and the short fiction some attention in the
near future (it'll be a while before I get back to
M&D)--certainly, the thing to keep in mind is that
there are other authors, books to be read ...
 
And, as Doug reminds us, things beyond books to be
attended to, though I'd suggest that the problem there
is near the end, the Romanticists, Virginia Woolf, the
cats (Faulkner I strangely do not see as
pathology-inducing), but ... 

But, as might be apparent here, even as I spent the
past decade or so recovering from my eighties Pynchon
binge, reading Vineland and Mason & Dixon
half-heartedly and missing an astounding decade of
criticism, I've apparently never stopped researching.
I've been hauling out all sorts of material that's
suddenly assumed a new relevance to me, all that stuff
on automata and modernism and paranoia and temporality
and waeponry and gyroscopes I excerpt at length ...

Of course, I came to those Pynchonian texts already
interested in them--science, technology, modernity,
postmodernity, literature, music, popular culture,
cinema, warfare, history and so forth--but ... but
what's perhaps less obvious is that I've articulated
these interests with other texts (and then some) as
well.  Not only, say, Mary Shelley and Wordsworth and
Milton and Beckett and ... but also music and
snthropology and cinema and ...

Well, of course, the point is, esp. if you're lucky
enough to be in academia (U of C, did you say?  I had
my chance, but ...), and, esp., in today's hopefully
irreversibly interdisciplinary (but when has anything
ever really been "purely" intradisciplinary?) climate,
you hardly have to dveote even your immediate life to
any one issue, or author, or text (although maybe
Finnegans Wake is about as demanding as they get,
though also as interdisciplinary) ...  

I've been feeling the Pynchon pinch myself ever since
signing on here, and, of course, the last couple of
weeks have only exacerbated that.  But I hope it's
obvious that, even given my berserk schedule, I do
make time for as much else as possible.  My guess is
that Eroc's suggestion is an excellent one, though
I've only read Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. 
I've tended to read The Crying of Lot 49 when in the
mood for something quick, enjoyable, an rewarding, but
...

But, while we're on a recommended reading kick, and
along those lines, off the top of my head, short
novels that've made me laugh out loud: Kobo Abe, The
Ark Sakura (sort of a Japanese Confederacy of Dunces
(q.v.)); Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics; J.P. Donleavy,
The Ginger Man; Terry Southern, The Magic Christian;
Rene Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking; anything by
Leonora Carrington (I prefer the short stories, but
her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, is at least in print);
Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno; Samuel Beckett,
Murphy; Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet ...

--- --- <rosenlake at mac.com> wrote:
> 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


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