melville and pynchon

[Mark Kohut]

Melville's first two 'travel fictions" were bestsellers, then he got deeper, better and his public [critics and readers] rejected him......
"Moby Dick".........."all that whale bull, Mr. Melville, come off it"]...
Moby Dick sold 50 (fifty),copies in its first year......Sue Warner's Wide Wide World, approx the same time, went thru 16 printings of at least 2,000 each, for example.................

Melville died in oblivion......................

rediscovered only by a few American scholars starting in the 1920s......and
his depth is stil being explored.......

Pynchon will grow and grow as Melville has since the 20s, I say.......
or since Faulkner, almost all his work out of print until one guy started his revival right befor he won the Nobel......................


--- On Sun, 7/27/08, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: The 85 Weirdest, Day 69: Thomas Pynchon
> To: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>, "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, July 27, 2008, 5:29 PM
> More prized
> than read, Pynchon will likely go down in history famed as
> the guy who
> played himself on The Simpsons with a bag over his head.
> 
> You know, Herman Melville, too, was despised by the critics
> and the
> uneducated mob.  if it weren't for a few people who
> were able to get beyond
> the point of trying to make something brilliant seem lame
> so they could look
> smart, Melville might have fallen into oblivion for much
> longer than he
> did.  The self-centered mind sees little of the world. 
> "Weird" might be
> seen as a great compliment from someone who sees no further
> than the t.v.
> Of course, it is true that few people grok Melville even
> today.  But he
> remains the grand man of American fiction and more people
> have heard of the
> white whale than any of Melville's contemporaries would
> have dreamed
> possible.
> 
> And I do believe that TRP has given us metaphors that will
> long outlive his
> detractors or memory of who they were.  Has anyone
> researched the history,
> for example of the "peace sign"?  Of course, on
> Churchill's hand it was a
> V-for victory, but it was next taken up by anti-nuke
> radicals in London in
> the late fifties.  It was from there it filtered into the
> popular non-verbal
> lexicon.  How much metaphorical breadth will the V accrue
> in our lives?  In
> the generations that follow us?  How much of its depth will
> be revealed?
> 
> On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Dave Monroe
> <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
> > Weird Tales
> > Sat 26 Jul 2008
> > The 85 Weirdest, Day 69: Thomas Pynchon
> >
> > The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our
> big list of
> > "The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85
> Years." We're breaking it
> > down online, too: one honoree per day, in no
> particular order, for 85
> > days!
> >
> > If not for space and time, everything would happen all
> at once. Maybe
> > that's what happened to the reclusive THOMAS
> PYNCHON (1937– ) decades
> > ago, as his books are chock-full of everything.
> Anarchism, Boy's Own
> > fiction, Tesla, the aether, very very smart dogs, the
> Hollow Earth,
> > and dirigibles — and that's just in his latest
> novel. More prized
> > than read, Pynchon will likely go down in history
> famed as the guy who
> > played himself on The Simpsons with a bag over his
> head.
> >
> >
> >
> http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2008/07/26/the-85-weirdest-day-69-thomas-pynchon/
> >
> >