re SLSL Intro "access to my dream life"

[pynchonoid]

   "Another influence in 'Under the Rose,' too recent
for me then to abuse to the extent I have done since,
is Surrealism.  I had been taking one of those
elective courses in Modern Art, and it was the
Surrealists who'd really caught my attention.  Having
as yet virtually no acces to my dream life, I missed
the main point of the movement, and became fascinated
instead with the simple idea that one could combine
inside the same frame elements not normally found
together to produce illogical and startling effects."
(SL, "Intro," p. 20)


"Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life" 
...might suggest that Pynchon eventually gained such
access.


Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?
The New York Times Book Review
28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html


"This is one of several interesting similarities
between Frankenstein and an earlier tale of the Bad
and Big, The Castle of Otranto (1765), by Horace
Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel.
For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books
to the public, used voices not their own. Mary
Shelley's preface was written by her husband, Percy,
who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later
did she write an introduction to Frankenstein in her
own voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book
an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was
a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his
preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.
The novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal
origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming.
Mary Shelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva,
trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld
the creature being brought to life, the images arising
in her mind "with a vividness far beyond the usual
bounds of reverie." Walpole had been awakened from a
dream, "of which, all I could remember was, that I had
thought myself in an ancient castle ... and that on
the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a
gigantic hand in armour."

Introduction to The Writings of Donald Barthelme 
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_barthelme.html
"Another combination of interest is the interchapter
material from Overnight to Many Distant Cities, which
furnishes an instance of Barthelme's way with dream
material. One out of several humiliating features
about writing fiction for a living is that here after
all is just about everybody else, all along the
capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems
analysts, cheerfully selling their bodies or body
parts according to time-honored custom and usage,
while it's only writers, out at the fringes of the
entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are
obliged, more intimately and painfully, actually to
sell their dreams, yes dreams these days you'll find
are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies
there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it,
though, in most cases it doesn't present much moral
problem since dreams seldom make it through into print
with anything like the original production values
anyway. Even if you do good recovery learning to write
legibly in the dark and so forth, there's still the
matter of getting it down in words that can bring back
even a little of the clarity and sweep, the intensity
of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary
experience. So it's a safe bet that most writers'
dreams, maybe even including the best ones, manage to
stay untranslated and private after all."



"But Sloth's offspring, though bad -- to paraphrase
the Shangri-Las -- are not always evil, for example
what Aquinas terms Uneasiness of the Mind, or "rushing
after various things without rhyme or reason," which,
"if it pertains to the imaginative power... is called
curiosity." 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."

Nearer, my Couch, to Thee
>From The New York Times Book Review
6 June 1993 
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html

-Doug








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