TPPM Barthelme: "Melancholy"

[pynchonoid]

Love the notes you've posted so far, Dave.  Thanks for
taking the time and making the effort. 

> 
> Burton, Robert.  The Anatomy of Melancholy.
>    Ed. Holbrook Jackson.  New York: NYRB Books,
>    2001 [1621].
> 
> http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=2


Not to be read by anybody actively suffering clinical
depression, I hear on good authority. Symptoms
multiply as Burton describes them.

> 
> Cf. "jail humor and military and rodeo humor" ...

Re this essay, and others in which Pynchon focuses on
an author, P always seems to zero in on traits that
mark his own writing. 

At lunch the other day with a NYPLr in San Francisco
for the day, for example, over sushi we talked a bit
about our first encounters with Pynchon.  Mine was GR,
in the summer of '73, on the US Army base in South
Korea where I was serving at the time.  One reason the
book made such a strong impression on me is that
Pynchon's military slang echoed what I was hearing
around me at that very moment, as well as the Navy
slang my father brought home him from WWII.





=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


		
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