from LSD to LJC from M&D to ATD

[Joseph T]

Hello all

This is my 2nd try at posting this after resubscribing to the list,  
though I never unsubscribed.  So it may have gotten through to others  
without the email coming back to me.
I finished M&D a few weeks ago and finally ordered ATD. So  i feel   
I'm kinda trailing behind everyone, but I wanted to read the whole  
body of Pynchon novels before starting on ATD. I found M&D both  
utterly Pynchonian and  oddly different than  other Pynchon work. I  
thought he could have dropped a few chapters about a 3rd of the way  
through.The bulk, however  I found to be memorable, hilarious, sad  
and rich.

What I think I cannot fully give due credit for, as far as Pynchon's  
take on history is the  transforming and lingering effect of having  
been to a past world more real in its seeming anachronisms and dark  
corners  than  any I have visited , though I   also enjoy and have  
respect for focused traditional realism like Tracy Chevalier's stores. 
( I realize I'm not a proper pomo literateur)  But returning to  
Pynchon, he gives us a past as fully strange  as the world is and  
must always be. People's imagination is always bounding back and  
forth in time(This sense was enhanced by watching the eminently  
enjoyabe movie of the book Longitude) There is something blessedly  
inexplicable in the human imagination that allows an ancient Greek  
philosopher/logician  to imagine a world composed of elemental atoms.  
What is it? Ya got me.

I felt more love for all the characters than I normally do with  
Pynchon but I know the philosophical and spiritual terrain he  
describes in M&D pretty well.I am beginning to think the distinctions  
of flat vs. rounded characters miss the mark. I sense that he  
believes the idea of the dramatic novelistic inner life to be flawed,  
that characters change directions but personalities change less and  
are no more fully knowable than any other of the swirling currents of  
time and chance, and that shallowness and surfaces are no less  
mysterious than deep waters or hidden worlds, that conspiracies come  
with our mothers milk and are as much a part of the inner as the  
outer structures of the human experience .
The slow, conscious movement toward death is true to the era and  
effectively used.

Whether it is evident in these hasty and blunt sentences or not, I  
feel that my reading of M&D was much enriched by participation on  
this list, arguments  just as much as the jokes, weird enthusiasms,  
and more subtle discussions. Looking forward to ATD and the ATD  
pynchon list  talks.  If anyone is needed to help host  some of those  
chapters I would be glad to give it a go.
Joseph T

By the way the first part of my subject line is a reference to a  
sermon I attended many years ago by a traveling evangelist whose  
daughter had gone from LSD to the Lord Jesus Christ.  When His  
daughter didn't show up at the appointed moment he dashed off the  
platform and a few moments later back from behind the curtains,  
grabbing the microphone like a man deranged and yelled
''She's gone, Brothers and Sisters; Patsy Lee's gone."

Sometimes the real world is as charmingly strange as a good book, or  
even "THE" good book.

So in the spirit of relief that Patsy Lee was found to be OK I just  
want to welcome friend Tom to the Motley crew, ridiculous assumptions  
and all.


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