my reading this weekend

[Daniel Julius]

Why does he put an exclamation point in the title, do you think?




On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 1:46 AM, grladams at teleport.com <
grladams at teleport.com> wrote:

> I have read most of Oil! by Upton Sinclair, since I want to see the movie
> but want to read the book first. It's amazing to get halfway finished with
> it in two sittings, Pynchon's ATD primed my reading mind so that this book
> is a page turner. Will return to ATD feedback later. But I'm struck by
> visions of the characters in this book and their preocupations meshing and
> being partly a thread inside ATD. Most obvious is the theme of pulling up
> from the earth this "stuff" so quickly, which took so long to get there,
> and suddenly with this rearrangement, for so much to change for so many
> people. And the way that the war was a handy trade market for Oil (and
> maybe how all wars are). Scarce are railways but still there. Flying
> overhead just out of view are the Chums I'm sure. All the little details,
> the riproaring speech snippets from Roosevelt marking human nature's desire
> to believe in a comforting propaganda, double edged sword of capital,
> advantages it gives some, the humanity that gets taken away from others,
> and how all socialists get washed out with tossed bathwater of any
> anarchist destruction. I'll one up myself with expanding the motif:
> dualities or maybe n plus one dimensionalities emerge as sides of a coin,
> the shiny corporate side buys the grease for the rails, the idealist soft
> side that bears itself openly to predators with sharpened grabbing talons.
> Other sides, anyone? Also noteworthy and familiar to ATD readers were the
> references to increasing debauchery of sex and free love. I was educated by
> references to the Trans Siberian Railway being a locale for allied help
> that was provided to both rebelling-against-the german-BohemiansCzecho
> Slovakians and Russian-non Bolsheviks
>
> sigh. back to my book
>
> Jill
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> mail2web LIVE – Free email based on Microsoft(R) Exchange technology -
> http://link.mail2web.com/LIVE
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20080528/b7606656/attachment-0001.html>