authors under the influence

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

" Oh yes i seem to remember it was considered pretty filthy stuff, though certainly by 1973 Sex was no longer thought of as a dangerous class leveler, as it had been seen to be in Proust's era."

Yeah, "The Ice Storm" does come to mind.

"That change might well be considered an important historical marker.  We'll just have to wait and see if the transition is something Pynchon takes up in the new book."

1973 seems as good a line of demarcation to me as any other.

"This thread and the way it's metamorphosed into a discussion of Proust may in the end turn out to be P rather than NP."

Everybody out there who's read GR at least twice, raise your hand if you think "Against the Day" is going to offer up even more star-studded episodes of "Drugstyles of the Rich and Famous" a'la Slothrop, Saure Bummer or Mucho Maas. Seriously folks, Peter Lorre's gotta be in there somewhere . . .

I'm thinking 1893 to some time in the twenties pretty much covers Marcel Proust's adult life. It will be particularly interesting to make a map of Pynchon's literary references, perhaps using colored pushpins whose hue somehow spiritually represents the authorial voice of each writer. I will find it particularly interesting if Proust isn't on that map.


"In my own youth we still had only an expurgated version of Lady Chatterly. In America the class aspects could be left intact; only the explicit sex was removed. (not saying we don't have different classes in America--it's just that our upper classes are not expected to set a good example)"

I'm afraid I may not be able to ever get all the way through "Lady Chatterly's Lover". In 1967, my sister and I were smoking a Banana peel in a typical Briarwood tobacco pipe [I dried the banana peel on top of a 300 watt lightbulb, outgassing extraordinary compounds in the process—it was the best of times for unintentional alchemy], one of the sorts you might see stuffed into the iconic face of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. I believe this was the very first time I became truly aware of hippie music, with Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" as exhaled by Judy Collins wafting in the background via KPPC. My sister read me "naughty" passages from "Chatterly", and we both broke out in hysterics, rolling on the floor and full of ourselves. Interestingly, talking to someone at work on the subject of romance novels today, I got a similar result by reading aloud a randomly selected passage from "The Guermantes Way". Of course, I was affecting an Eric Blore sort of tone . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Blore