RIP Robert Altman / atd coming tomorrow / (np) plumbing

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

Ready to Wear, anyone? great variety-filled soundtrack, lots of goodies ("this is Kitty Potter")
Player's ok but although Tim Robbins is likeable his character isn't. Short Cuts and Nashville are among the best movies ever, though.
Couldn't get into McCabe past about 5 minutes, might have to give it another try. Anyway, wow, he did leave a lot of good movies.
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I ordered AtD from Powell's (union-friendly) and it should be arriving tomorrow or Thursday. But I might not be able to read it right away, having decided now is the time to replace the leaky main stack: will be fussing with soil pipe cutters (I think I've broken the one I rented, or badly maimed it. Have cut almost all the above-ground stuff and jackhammered to get down behind the fricking house trap and that cut is the most unkindest cut of all...got the chain around it, tightened like mad but no satisfying snap - this is old 4" cast iron - discovered the thing wasn't fastened right, due to narrow dark cramped conditions --- may have bent the chain, may have to cut the pipe with a reciprocating saw which supposedly takes an hour or more and wears out carborundum blades, because the cutter won't even come loose now) and ABS and the fragrant glue, for time period only known to the Deity.
While buying a plumbing book at a major bookstore this evening, thumbed thru a few pages of AtD and began to get a little smile playing around my lips and face...oboy oboy
I'm truthfully going to stop posting for a discernible number of weeks, until I meet my personal goals for firming up position at work, doing some wife-wooing (taking Terrance's recent comment to heart), reading "The Education of Henry Adams", and finishing the plumbing --- I know I said I'd leave weeks ago but it's so nice to read and write about Pynchon with people who understand.
I hope that John Carvill and J Porter iron out their differences, which I may have inadvertently provoked while the attempted GR group read of 2005 was getting started. JC indicated several times that he'd like an organized "host-per-section" read. 
I was going at GR like never before: have never learned so much about the 1st part of a book as from that "group read" both from the attention to and rereading of the text I put into my own posts and from the (needed) corrections to my misapprehensions, and all the other points of view that came in daily mail. 
As a new poster, I made what I considered to be a lighthearted response indicating I liked the anarchic mode but would fall in with whatever anybody else did that seemed to work. JP wrote what seemed to me like a fairly lighthearted post (more expressive of velleity than volition, as was mine) supporting anarchy (rather tongue-in-cheekly) but apparently something in the verbiage didn't sit right with JC, whereupon he - and, I remember sensing (& joining) at the time, a quorum of others - disavowed the group read. (it's all in the archives, you could look it up) 
I'm not aware of any other negative dynamic between those 2, both of whose posts are worthwhile. (for that matter, I could imagine pynchonoid and jbor coexisting peacefully. again, both have worthwhile things to say) I apologize if I've contributed to any misunderstanding or ill will. However, some good did ensue: in the space that opened up in the consensus that the GR group read had failed, Toby's voyage thru M&D was a superb means of wiling away the countdown to AtD.
mike
"down the toilet, look at me - what a silly thing to do;
hope nobody takes a pee. Ippy-dippy-dippy-do."



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Herzog [mailto:zogboy at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:37 AM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: RIP Robert Altman
> 
> I'm partial to the mix of comedy and doomed romanticism in McCabe and
> Mrs. Miller, which is probably one of the best seventies revisionist
> westerns.
> 
> The expertly placed Leonard Cohen tunes on the soundtrack don't hurt either.
> 
> J.
> 
> On 11/21/06, ang leterre <angleterre at gmail.com> wrote:
> > THE PLAYER, is maybe his best work?,
> > certainly some of the best of that decade
> >
> > - - from anybody.
> >
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> Check out the best in under-the-counter culture at corkscrew:
> http://www.mekonista.blogspot.com
> 

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