Wild, Wild West

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

If nothing else, the highly reviled western excerpt from our upcoming apocalyptic barnburner indicate one specific, certain and inescapable aspect of “Against The Day”: There will be scenes from Western Movies. Welcome back to Hollywood!!! Sid Liftoff sez all is forgiven. Wants to set up a little sitdown with David Milch and TRP. 

Anyway, thought I pass on some of TRP’s thoughts on westerns, or at least one western:

“Sometimes at college we also succeeded in getting in the same literary wavelength. We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise---he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author. I suppose by then I was learning from Farina how to be amused at some of my obsessions. Also in ’59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest of American novels, “Warlock”, by Oakley Hall. We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while had a micro-cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in “Warlock” dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian-Wild West diction. This may have appealed to Farina partly as another method of maintaining cool.”

Thomas Pynchon---Introduction to “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me”

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_gift.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1590171616/ref=sib_dp_pop_ex/104-5467299-7458331?ie=UTF8&p=S00J#reader-link