Amazing

[Daniel Harper]

On 5/10/07, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Daniel.
>
> Really hoping for that better job for ya...I'll recommend for some book
> industry ones if you need a recom.......
>


It's actually a non-book-industry job I'm looking at -- it's a position
working as a NASA subcontractor, keeping IBM mainframes running. Which I
have no direct experience with, so I'm not at all certain I have the job,
but which I have enough technical background for that I feel pretty capable
of getting it. (Wow, that's a messed up sentence construction.)

But, out of curiosity... what kind of book industry jobs did you have in
mind?


And, I feel as you do re TRP's works.....I'm older, never finished him
> before, have, like you been reading from ATD backwards and I now feel the
> same.
>


I'm 27, and doubt I could have even begun to make heads or tails of him more
than a year or two ago. I just didn't have the range of experience to really
understand the ideas Pynchon's throwing out at a mile a minute.

By the same token, I recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's a much
better novel than I remembered -- anyone who hasn't read it since high
school probably should give it another shot.


Good Luck,
> Mark K.
>
> *Daniel Harper <daniel.e.harper at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> Sorry I haven't been posting much as of late, but work and various life
> pressures have gotten a bit intense. (I'm looking at possibly getting a new
> and much better job, but it's far from certain I'll get it. My fiancee, who
> makes the majority of our household income, has been informed that she'll be
> laid off in two weeks, which is causing no small amount of stress in this
> houshold.)
>
> But in my spare minutes, I've been working my way through V. (about 60%
> done now), and I've found something remarkable: Pynchon's works aren't
> intimidating anymore. Reading through V., I find there's a lot that I don't
> quite understand, and the plot is convoluted as always, but the overall
> themes and the linguistic turns used by P just come to me as if they were
> written in a more "natural" way. I don't find myself missing whole sections
> of the text because it simply overwhelmed my ability to absorb it -- I just
> sort of read through the text and "get it".
>
> At first I thought it was just that V. is a simpler book than the others,
> but I picked up ATD and read a couple of random pages and found the same
> thing was true -- bits that I found difficult or impossible before are much
> easier now, and keeping my head on straight in the labyrinth plot isn't
> impossible.
>
> In other words, after reading some two thousand pages, including
> four-and-a-half novels, three short stories (saving the end of SL for after
> I finish V.), and several essays and articles, I'm coming to finally be to
> the point of actually being able to read Pynchon. It's an amazing feeling,
> and one that I would never have reached without just bulling through the
> other books at least once (and the assistance of the wikis and the P-list to
> keep me oriented didn't hurt).
>
> On the other hand, after I finish V. there's really only one more book to
> go. Sure, I'll be rereading this stuff for my lifetime, and I'll definitely
> be rereading ATD and joining in on ATDDTA after I finish GR, but the
> prospect of being in some sense _done_, with no more to look forward to, is
> slightly disheartening.
>
> In any case, thanks for all the help from the peanut gallery. And I'll be
> around talking about P for awhile, I hope.
>
>
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>
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