aw. Re: Lit Crit 2007

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          John Bailey:
          Yes. The bleed between "reality" and its representations is 
          such a huge focus in Pynchon - or, being novels, between 
          different realities. For instance - Neville and Nigel's spying 
          on Yashmeen could easily be a desire not generated by 
          their own lust (esp. given their pretty ambiguous sexuality) 
          but by the way the opportunity affords them a chance to 
          re-enact the classical Susannah image, with which they 
          would be pretty familiar I guess. They study philosophy 
          and classics.

          Mark Kohut:
          I must agree with Laura....over-cute, not Wodehouse nor 
          Waugh, therefore a parody of these parodists?........too 
          whimsical, too vacuum-packed for me if so......

          Me:
          . . . .episodes with abrupt shifts in style, tone, vocabulary 
          and every now and then a quodlibet-like effect of 
          juxtaposing or integrating seemingly opposing elements 
          like a vocal quintet from a comic opera-Rossini, perhaps
          or maybe just channel- surfing on a remarkably 
          serendipitous day with a dazzling program line-up of cable 
          offerings, skipping from "The Good,The Bad, and The Ugly" 
          to "The Gay Divorce. . . .

          Dave Monroe:
          No one ever takes my word for it.  Also, no one ever seems simply to
          make use of their local library, but ...

          http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/janadele.htm

          http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/D/deleuze_kafka.html

          http://tinyurl.com/2jwf3n

          Oops, gotta run ...

I find it quite serendiptious that the p-list is bringing up Deleuze/Guattari
[and their ineffable Italian Mob Wedding Fake Book] at this juncture of 
the novel's progress. Whatever else Our Bedeviled Author might or might 
not be, no other writer that I'm aware of presents so much history 
refracted through so much ex-post facto revisionism, filtering images of 
the past through the funhouse mirrors and paramorphoscopes of the 
present. And, at this particular juncture, what seemed like a single 
"meet cute, potential love interest" subplot is about to be subdivided by 
some previously unencountered variety of stage magic performed on the
high seas—"it's the old Liner-to-Battleship Effect. . . ." Obviously, 
stretching the boundries of what can and can't be placed in the "frame" 
of a "historical" novel must be serving some deeper purpose. This is 
satire writ large and I suspect further reading of and into Charles 
Hollander's aptly paranoic writings on Pynchon will doubtless yield up 
much of value. But now I'm curious about writings concerning Pynchon
that are filtered through some Postmodern chunk of Iceland Spar while
retaining some coherence and clarity. If someone would be so kind as
to point me in the right direction. . . .