meta [part the second]

[Carvill, John]

Nice post, Robin. You've covered a lot of ground, and I don't really have time to do a lot of your points justice.

Suffice to say: although I got tired of your Chandler obsession, and we seem to disagree about whether Pynchon may or may not have written some passages of GR whilst tripping, that certainly doesn't mean I disdain your opinions or posts in general. I certainly do not.

As for Doug, jbor, etc. - more than enough has already been said.


> The first time I encountered Pynchon's writing was around 1970.

A long, long time before I got there. To be fair, though, I was only 2 years old in 1970!


<< Whatever you, out there in P-list land, may have derived from CoL49,  
the very first thing that stuck me was "I have been here before." The  
places Pynchon was describing in his novella were places I have been.  >>

That must be great, it must give the texts a special frisson which cannot be achieved by us Old Yurpeans. I'd love to see California some day, but as I've noted before, it's a totally unknown alien landscape to me. Whereas somewhere like New York feels familiar to us before we've ever visited.

<< This bit of Pynchon biography was recently re-posted on the P-list. I  
found this particularly relevant:

	As to whose books he liked, that was interesting. He loved
	Heller's Catch-22, thought it the very best novel of its time. . .

	. . . He thought the world was mad with its weaponry and
	paranoias, and that hasn't changed much . . .

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n24/bill-pearlman/short-cuts  

>>

Yes, that's worth noting. Personally, I started reading Catch 22 when I was about 20, and loved it of course. Lent my copy to someone, never saw it again. Finally got another copy about 9 years ago, took it on holiday to France, sat in the sun one day with a beer and a Cohiba, in the centre of Antibes, cracked open Catch 22, really looking forward to it. A huge anticlimax ensued. Just couldn't enjoy it, it seemed like the same joke repeated over and over and over. Not helped by Heller's immensely smug introduction, which my original copy hadn't included. Ah well.


<< it's clear that  
he [Terrance] is approaching the texts with a deep background in the critical  
texts attached to the author's work. T 'n A approaches the texts more  
as literature, I approach them more as revisionist history. >>


Well put. I read all your posts, whereas I just skim Terrance's. He's obviously smart, well-read, well-versed in lit crit and Pynchon studies, etc. And I often have a hard time making out exactly what he is saying, generally I suspect he's not saying all that much, in a concrete sense, like he's never *quite* getting to the point. This phenomenon has been widely noted here over the years.

All the best
J