A Question about IV

[Mark Kohut]

Rich,

Your original posts aren't always coming through to me--I guess I'm clogging my own pipeline with my constant posts about IV, smile---but
i will only say: I know you did not think much of IV. You and others
may be right-on--at the last stage of judgment which James said came
after understanding, as one of Alice's earlier avatars posted. Even this fanboy has some problems. And even this fanboy says it is lesser than most 'cause limited in what can be embodied by the genre. 

But, the case I would make for attempted understanding is that this book,
like many an artist's slight or failed books, still reveals. TRP SEES in certain ways, patterns and it is fun to find them. I think anyway.

--- On Sun, 8/30/09, Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net>
> Subject: re: A Question about IV
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, August 30, 2009, 7:32 PM
> Rich, I guess I'm just acting on
> reflex.  IV was fun for me the first time through,
> baffling in some ways, and I know from past experience with
> his books that when I ig in and read it closely, there's a
> lot going on.  This is one of the ways I learned to
> read, in the French department at Berkeley, in the
> traditional explication du texte you go through and look up
> all the words and references, and examine the sentence and
> paragraph structures, etc. etc., it seems a natural enough
> way to engage a text.