Ever seen Dylan & Pynchon in the same room together?

[John Carvill]

"But the only writer of any stature that I can think of who seemed like
he came out of the same world as, say, Dylan, was Pynchon. Lowell was a
prominent war protester, but he was also the ultimate academic poet.
Pynchon read as though he didn't just know of acid but might have taken
some along the way. And again, it wasn't just the hallucinatory quality
of his prose, it was the attitude. Pynchon read like Dylan sounded, like
a well-educated hipster. Which is where I left off the last time when I
wondered if they're the same person.

With a Dylan song and a Pynchon novel, you always get the feeling of the
singer/author being inside his work and outside at the same time,
looking at it a little askance, a little ironically. Both borrow from
high art and low and the culture at large to feed their art, and whatdya
know, they're both still at it, a couple of cool cats hard at work.
Dylan's recent work pulls together everything he knows about American
music over the last century, which is a lot. It's Bing Crosby and Willie
McTell down there on the killing floor, working it out. For "Against the
Grain," Pynchon draws on dime novels, juvenile fiction, the history of
American labor and anarchism, modern math and science and the
balkanization of common sense that created the first world war. Pynchon
and Dylan don't just have a foot in this camp or that one. They're each
like a one-man game of Twister."

- from Part II of Malcolm Jones's ATD review for Newsweek:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15841357/site/newsweek/page/2/


Heh heh. And 'Modern Times' might make a good soundtrack to (at least
some parts of) Against The Day. "They say low wages are reality, if we
want to compete abroad..."

Another Dylan/Pynchon similarity: forget the reviews and the mainstream
media perspective, forget them. A Dylan album only reveals itself with
time, and many re-listens. Same with Pynchon, maybe even more so in
terms of the percentage of the iceberg that's hidden on first
acquaintance.


Cheers
JC





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