Against The Day

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I'm not happy with all the choices TRP made in this book, and, no, it didn't recreate the mind-blowing experience that reading GR provided.  But the two or so weeks I spent crashing through my first reading, and the current, year-plus, contemplative rate of reading have been enriching.  At his best (and even at his worst) TRP is thought-provoking and mind-expanding.  Throughout, there are incredible bursts of brilliant prose, and however obscure he gets, there's not a pretentious or gratuitously depressing moment in the book, faults too often encountered in contemporary lit.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: "grladams at teleport.com" <grladams at teleport.com>
>Sent: Jun 21, 2007 11:17 AM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Against The Day
>
>Hello,
>Even though overall I like ATD, there are ways in which TRP's style is very
>heavy and grates. I went through and started to count but then the number
>was too high to matter -- One certain phase-- usually positioned at the end
>of a description "almost as if." Ok so things can't just "be" they have to
>be "almost." And the double refraction reference keeps coming up a lot, and
>it's interesting to consider all the possibilities, like we did in a thread
>a couple four weeks ago- but it has become a hobby horse, same with
>singling up all the lines, couple three, the boffo names (I liked Lube
>Carnal though..). I change my internal reading accent into a silly English
>accent so that helps. I think that his hobby horses that he likes to ride
>on seem tired, and they get in the way of the flow of a good read. 
>
>Somewhere between the La Blanca and the Mescaline, Frank(?i think) and his
>new anarchist friends are out on the range and someone's thinking back to
>how sweet it would be to have an obscure brand name. Beer, they don't just
>think of beer. The pure flow of reading kinks for a moment. There are a
>million better examples of obscure references, even worse flow stoppers but
>that one is handy.. I like it when there could be two meanings, such as the
>chemistry reference on pp. 371-2 Thanks for the Grundy explanation I have
>visited a place called Grundy so that reference always distracted me too.
>So we are a very few number of readers that have made it to the end. And
>even fewer will have looked up and discussed all the references. (is that
>what waste means maybe?) 
>
>So it's not reading a novel really-- but it's a novel experience. I've
>participated in this experience so that a)I can play with my mind, the
>sfumato thing b)there's familiar faces in my email each day c)pynchon's
>philosophies have melded into mine so I hear, underneath all the
>complicated writing, things that mean something personally to me. And the
>way when we start out on a project or trip, there are yes, infinite
>possibilities, which narrow down to the slip or quay where it all stops. I
>love that metaphor, I'm wondering if we all wish like I do that we could
>have a new departure, get out of the situation mankind has found itself in? 
>
>When I'm about 60 years old, if all goes like it has, there will be 14
>billion people on this earth. Are we arriving or can we depart again? Isn't
>that what the fantasy of time travel is? Once some things get discovered,
>we miss they way it was when we could get all flamed out wondering about
>something. It sucked, for me, for example, when they dragged a colossal
>squid out of the water to examine it. Bits of ludditisms, the electric
>light replacing the gas light, the history that would lie underneath
>shiftings of utilities and monopolies, the stuggle between workers and the
>capitalist rulers-- but even that reaches full circle. 
>
>I can see why for example, the Sabbath is holy, and it's revolutionary to
>keep it that way, not that Pynchon says so, but because we have got to
>remember the common denominators that keep us all human. Stripped of
>technology, down to who we are, how we can get along. The people who can
>read this novel are probably directly or indirectly inheritors of the
>wealth that has allowed us to go to graduate school, use computers and
>technology all day long especially with the list, so it is important for us
>to read this, it's like a lesson. And when you are stuck on a train for 2
>hours a day, ATD is able to be relished, a gift indeed,
>
>Jill
>
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