The Burial of the Dead

[rich]

M&D did not impress because it had
been done by others,
_______
such as--the Sot Weed Factor?  a good book but hardly had the
warmth/depth of M&D imho; Lempriere's Dictonary?--ditto

rich



On 8/13/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> The mediated violence, sex, paranoia, and obscurity in his works, is
> the product of a particular violent, repressed, society, one
> flickering faster than anything Fitzgerald or Henry James or Hemingway
> or Henry Miller or Ralph Ellison ever experienced, and thus never
> thought to articulate. The mediated and paranoid flux, obscured the
> origin, the content and context, and the description, definition,
> direction of his art. After the Great Gap and Vineland, the critics of
> his art described and defined it. M&D did not impress because it had
> been done by others, some argued convincimgly, better, and it did not
> baffle and amaze with the kinds of intuitive readings of the American
> and Postmodern condition that critical readings of GR attributed to it
> and to Pynchon's art. That American & Postmodern condition, wrenched
> almost out of any recognizable shape in such a short period was
> articulated in the works of Gaddis and Pynchon and others but these
> artists, at least in the critical world, were always pushing against
> the inadequate and outdated and, against concerns, such as the Bomb,
> the population Bomb, the "problem" of the "non-white" peoples,
> technological dehumanization. Around Pynchon & Co., a new critical
> language developed and, as the two-cultures broke down into fragments,
> then into atoms, then into one big union, new schools and cultures
> were constructed to define, describe, evaluate.
>
> And, Pynchon published AtD. A work that is better than anything he's
> done thus far.
>
> The rest is just smoke and sand.
>