Inspirations for the Chums of Chance

[Mark Kohut]

I will try that on my next reading or next backunderstanding, so to speak.  
  Unlike Robin, I cannot see "tone" or style as easily as she may, and I have heard about TRP
  writing in various styles purposely. What I think, perhaps projectively, is that certain themes
  and attendant research in certain sections---and the sheer massiveness of ATD---leads me
  to think he worked on it over, well, most of his lifetime.
   
  For me, his basic Western revenge plot might go back to the time after Warlock and, yes, V.  That this was one of the three books he was working on when he wrote a letter to his editor  about having three ongoing.......long stretches of it are the most natural narrative in ATD, yes?......I think he packed it with all those allusions and Spanish references over decades.
  I think the GoldenDawnish British stuff, yes hard-going for me, might developed while he researched GR............
   
  And the whole Time stuff was another idea for a book that came to TRP after GR......
   
  Just thoughts.

Sterling Clover <s.clover at gmail.com> wrote:
  I'd be terribly interested in your (or others) sense of which 
passages felt in "older styles" and which more fresh, whether this 
was section-by-section, or moment by moment, etc. The Latewood and 
Golden Dawnish britishish stuff I found the toughest going, and so 
for that reason associate more with the stuff in V. I never really 
got into, altho this is also because I've reread V. least and longest 
ago. But I wasn't thinking in terms of actual prose structure at the 
time, so there may be some giveaways or at least great red-herrings 
there. I suppose in some ways those sections, so to speak, also felt 
the least, gentle? tender? sonically conjoined? something like that.

--S

On Jan 19, 2007, at 12:41 PM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> "Am I the only one who thinks TRP may have worked on this novel much
> longer than 10 years?.....There was his early letter to his editor 
> speaking of
> three ambitious books....one of which was GR, we must presume......"
>
> You're not the only one. Tone shifts throughout "Against the Day"
> and it seems like many passages are written in Pynchon's
> older styles. I'm sure that the researches that went into V., COL49
> and GR figure heavily into AtD.
>
> While I have no doubt that "TOM SWIFT AND HIS AERIAL WARSHIP
> or The Naval Terror of the Seas" is the primary inspiration for
> the Chums of Chance, there's a touch of Harry Potter in there as well.



 
---------------------------------
The fish are biting.
 Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070120/1e89a956/attachment.html>