Editing Pynchon?

[Carvill John]

>
> My main beef with ATD is its scatteredness, divergences and characters
> with stories that seem pointless and seem to contribute little to any
> bigger picture, and the sheer number of them. If an author is going
> to ask me to spend over 1000 pages with him, I ask him to not waste my
> time. I also started to feel that some of his elaborately detailed
> and poetic descriptions of places and thing were becoming
> "Pynchon-formulaic." I know, it's unfair of me to have a beef with
> Pynchon for sounding like Pynchon, but it didn't seem fresh, and to
> this day any passage from GR still seems vitally fresh to me.


Well, fair enough. It is scattered, or so it seems. I also though it was in some ways very linear, one episode leading to another to another, like falling dominoes, often joined together by coincidence of the 'oh lookee here, why it's old such and such' variety. In fact, this became so noticeable that I began to convince myself that this was either some sort of commentary on narrative structures (and tehre are other such self-commentaries in the book eg. when he refers to a 'four door farce'), and/or a clever disguise for, you guessed it, hidden structures.

But, also, some fantastic passages. I'll never forget the first time I read that bit about Merle, "Across the herbaceous nap below, in the declining light, among the brighter star-shapes of exploded ballast-bags, running heedless, as across some earthly firmament,..."

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114423



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