AtD / TRP / feminist type stuff

[bekah]

You're absolutely right,  Terrance,  and I meant only to describe one 
way (since we were on the subject of sex anyway)  how the works were 
affected me regarding that as I've read and re-read them.   I didn't 
say or imply that  the books were all this or all that because that 
surely does an injustice to an author with as many dimensions as 
Pynchon.    Nabokov is excellent and Umberto Eco also advises readers 
to read a good book many times.   I also advise this and if I had a 
tad more time, or if there were fewer good books,  I'd do it more 
frequently.   :-)

bekah


At 4:39 PM -0500 12/29/06, terrance terrance wrote:
>In one of his famous lectures, Nabokov gives some pretty sound 
>advice to good readers. He says something like ... a good reader is 
>an active and creative reader and a re-reader. That reading and 
>re-reading supreme works of prose fiction so as to understand them 
>as the author created them is the only way to go about the business 
>of reading any book worth rereading. It's only after the very 
>difficult and thrilling work of reading and rereading a book like 
>Moby-Dick or Pale Fire that one can begin to use the tools of the 
>trade to connect the book with other great works and other 
>interesting things. I thinl Nabokov implies, or perhaps he states 
>explicitly, that to do otherwise is to give an unfair advantage to 
>the reader at the expense of the author. How Prophetic! Today we 
>don't read much at all. Not fair to authors, but we're too busy. 
>Today we simply don't have time to understand a book as big and as 
>complex as most of the books TRP, other guys and gals like him, 
>write. Today we need a book that's made for us. I'm a Feminist. How 
>are the chicks in his new book? I'm a Marxist. How are the workers? 
>I'm a Sci-Fi guy. How are the worlds juxtaposed? Back in 1973-74 
>things were different. The novel, although dozens of great ones were 
>being published, was dying. So were lots of people. People were 
>getting high and rock and roll was never going to die. But the novel 
>was dying and it had little to do with war or drugs or sex. It seems 
>to me that TRP and his kind did everything in their power to kill 
>the novel.   They failed. In fact, GR wond TRP The National Book 
>Award. He didn't win because he described gross sex acts. He did 
>something we no longer have time for. So get out your tools and 
>hammer away. Who has time to read a book like AtD anyway?
>
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