this is a man's world (was: Re: Top TV)

[Otto]

Will :
> When Bekah -- a member of list even -- said that she found GR "yucky,"
> she made my point quite succinctly.
>
> The critical bib don't convince me.
>
> w
>

Well, parts of GR necessarily are "yucky" (had to look up the word) given
its topics. War is "yucky," as Abu Ghraib or Beslan show.

The critical bib just showed some examples. I think Rob's right in what he
says about it.

The need for "characters fully fleshed out" sounds to my ears like being
somewhat outdated. Tyrone Slothrop's story is a story of someone looking for
who "he" is.

I've just finished Franzen's "The Corrections" -- maybe we could hear some
opinions on those characters (who are surely more "fleshy" than Pynchon's),
especially Denise:

"Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at
yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head
a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal." (TC, p. 404)

"She had a thing for a straight woman who was married to a man whom she
herself might have liked to marry. It was a reasonably hopeless case."
(ibid, p. 431)

Bekah also said about GR:
"It had a distinctly male point of view."

Or is critical of this point of view:

"Girls are to go in from the front, singing, dancing, vamping the
woman-hungry barbarians. Otto will try to knock out the car, Haftung will
get everybody rounded up and ready to rendezvous with the boat. "Tits 'n'
ass," mutter the girls, "tits 'n' ass. That's all we are around here."
"Ah, shaddap," snarls G. M. B. Haftung, which is his usual way of dealing
with the help." (GR, p. 507)

"This is a man's world, this is a man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl."
(James Brown)

Otto