douglas fowler

[Terrance]

Kyle Winkler wrote:
> 
> hey i found it! i found one on the internet that is in good condition,
> and a first print too. problem though: it's $100 clams. is it worth
> that much? and what about other crits? like molly hite's or katharine
> hume's? let me know...

I wouldn't buy it. Not for $100 clams. It's difficult to give investment
advice when I don't know your tax situation, but even if you are a
wealthy person I would rather see you put your money in something that
will yield less diminishing returns. If you  already own or plan to
invest in the  Weisenburger Companion (a true blue chip and it's
available), Fowler won't do much to diversify your portfolio. In other
words, there is a lot of redundancy, the authors, not unlike p-listers,
cross paths and dig up the same stuff).  I disagree with Otto,
respectfully of course, I don't think Fowler's essays are all that good
and I don't like the idea of GR being a War of the Worlds novel at all. 
Worse by far is the notion that Pynchon serves up an indictment of
Western Christian civilization. An indictment? I doubt it. I'm glad
that Weisenburger didn't include generalizations like this in his
Companion. Even if I disagree with what W says in his book on satire
called Fables of
Subversion, I think the postmodernist approach that he outlines in his
Introduction to that study makes him a much more objective Companion
than Fowler. 




Some essays I suggest you check out: 

Black, Joel D. "Probing the Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow."  Boundary vol. 2 no. 8 (1980): 229-54.

Pynchon's living earth from V. to M&D is starting to interest the
critics and I think this essay is the first very big one to address the
theme. 

And On Swift and Norman O. Brown and Pynchon, 

Wolfley, Lawrence  PMLA 92:5 1977  Oct p873

"Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big
Novel" (PMLA 92, Oct. 1977, pp. 873-889. 

In the archives are an Introduction to
GT that one of my persons posted--Swift, Calvin, the  Devil,  Shit and
Money and the Word. 

Book of the Dead is worth looking into. 

How did we fail to mention that pied piper Charles Lutwidge Dodgson? 
Pynchon likes to make fun of men who like little girls. 
Did we mention Nabokov? 

And the American tradition Pynchon fits into to: 

Melville, Walt Whitman, Irving, Emily D, Hawthorne, Jack K.,  James,
Hemmingway, Fitzgerald,  oh, and the Catholics (converts and fallen),   
but Marshall McLuhan, Mumford, Dante, Eliot, the grail stories--Parcival
& Co. (the grail is very importnat), Grimm, but   Kerouac, Farina,
Joyce,  Teilhard de Chardin, Unamuno, Pavlov. And after Pavlov a
little music, Mozart's Don Giovan, Rossini, Wagner....Ring ans so on,
Beethovan 

Herero stuff: 



Gewald, Jan-Bart. Herero heroes : a socio-political history of the
Herero of Namibia,
1890-1923 

Drechsler, Horst. Let us die fighting : the struggle of the Herero and
Nama against German imperialism (1884-191

The revolt of the Hereros by Jon M. Bridgman.