Deflating Hyperspace

[grladams at teleport.com]

Hello, 
Thanks for this post by Paul, this would be excellent advice for anyone who
picks up Pynchon for the first time & asks themself why all these obscure
references and not the obvious ones? Also the one by Daniel Harper on
contextualizing. But this post connects somehow to the various posts about
the concept of a characters or readers relationship to a port and all the
possibilities -- diminishing to inevitablity, or else widening to all kinds
of crackpot theories -- whether departing or arriving.. 

Jill

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Monte Davis monte.davis at bms.com
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:26:00 -0400
To: paul.mackin at verizon.net, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Deflating Hyperspace


Paul Mackin:

> The talk--the "nervous in the  service" and "don't you know there's a 
> war on" go around-- is  absolutely pitch perfect. When I read the book 
> it was hard for me to  believe that  Pynchon had not been there.

I ran some of the details from GR past my father, who had been a USMC 
recruiter here in late 1941, then in Londonderry 1942, then Hawaii and 
island-hopping as a war correspondent 1943-45. He kept chuckling and 
saying "hey, I'd forgotten that" -- not just about the military stuff, 
but a particular third-tier actor who had a brief vogue in 1944, or a 
certain cover of a swing tune that was all the rage in March 1945 but 
would be quickly eclipsed in memory by another version.  

I admire more than I can express the way P nods to and never loses sight 
of the "received" version of an era -- what you'd get in a magazine 
article or History Channel documentary -- but lavishes research and 
narrative framing on obscure, real or reality-based details that cut 
across, sometimes against that version, yet feel more compelling. He's 
like a brilliant caricaturist who knows just the right visual elements 
of a face to abstract and exaggerate. I don't have any independent 
criterion for "just the right ones" until he's done it -- when I say 
"well, sure, of course."        

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web.com – Enhanced email for the mobile individual based on Microsoft®
Exchange - http://link.mail2web.com/Personal/EnhancedEmail