Pynchon's back catalogue

[Campbel Morgan]

Is AGTD only an attempt to resolve this protracted problem?  I call it
a problem because Pynchon calls it a problem in need of working out.
The solution, as you define it here, is no solution at all; P's
reading experiences are his own life, what he knows. This is
addressed, with sophmoric phrazings, in Chapter XVI, "Source Codes and
Recycle Bins,"  of Foster's _How to Read Novels Like a College
Professor_  As a former college professor turned HS teacher,  I can
assure you that the book is not much use to young students of
literature, at least, not if we're talking teens at Harvard and Yale
...but is excellent reading, even if we must put up with the attempt
to address the undergraduate, for us readers of literature, i.e.,
people who read literature all day. The examples provided in the study
are far too many for any novice to understand; good for grad students
who fane familiarity with the cannon and its many schools of reading
it, deconstructing it, rejecting it, ....



John Bailey wrote:

> I think Pynchon's later work makes an amazing attempt to resolve the
> personal experience vs research thing - AtD is a world historical
> novel in which the personal experience of research is foregrounded -
> it's clearly written by someone who has only read about the places,
> events, lives in question and whose experience of reading is conveyed
> by stylistically referring to the way these histories were
> represented... especially in the non-'historical' forms of writing
> that reveal so much more than official histories. Pynchon must love
> the Boys Own Adventure, the noir, the spy romance etc. These
> 'secondary sources' exist have as much affective weight as other kinds
> of personal encounter.
>
> This is why pop culture occupies such a place in Vineland (and... the
> new one). It's part of the fabric of daily experience. It's our
> reality.
>
> That said... I like that AtD can point me towards The Princess
> Cassamina. In 20 years, it may still point readers in the same
> direction. But will a reader in 20 years time go and watch Scooby Doo
> or Gidget or Godzilla because of Pynchon? They'll be able to do it in
> a second, probably on their wrist-embedded holo-phones or something,
> but will they, with billions of other texts they could follow instead?
>
> But - not really a spoiler here - I can't believe I've never heard of
> Dark Shadows. Can US P-listers please explain this televisual anomaly
> and why it's never been mentioned in relation to P? I've watched a few
> bits on YouTube and read about it online, and its influence on Pynchon
> is undeniable.
>
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yep, great stuff Laura.
>> Tore's quote from that Donadio letter reminds me of the Slow Learner intro (which I go back to again and again and...):
>> Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me. Displacing my personal experience off into other
>> environments went back at least as far as "The Small Rain." Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then
>> to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with
>> fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me,
>> though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as
>> now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always
>> at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively,
>> understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.
>>
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________
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