CofL49, misc. thots to try to think-thru MB's thots

[Mark Kohut]

Michael Bailey writes:
a) some evidence exists that this book is a less "labored-over" effort
than Mr Pynchon's longer novels.
what implications do you see coming from this?

- parts of it were released in different forms and fora, nice for the
writer (more payments coming in)
- same is true of V., which isn't necessarily saying that this method
is reserved for journeypersons (Joyce Carol Oates still uses this
practice, for instance), but OBA doesn't seem to be doing it anymore


Nice...yes, he needed the money, we hear....the prize-winning "V." still
did not sell very many copies*, nor could the paperback license have been
that much money and TRP was now not working anywhere else. 

so, I suggest he did not take time to work as hard as he did later in burying
layers of meaning in every word. He wrote it more "off the top"..........

which is why some of that Greyhound observing kinda stuff is so poignant? As well as
the California observing?
Which is why the conceptual concerns that obsessed him, and about which
he did a lot of reading----comparative religion, Jungian psychology, universal anthropology/sociology; 
some great poets, etc.----fed his vision like an IV drip? . Sometimes visible on the page?  (Who would have
described via metaphor the narrow, repressed 50s, early 60s as a tower---but someone using
those general anthro concepts?...[Wrong here?...correct me] 

Misc. * I would really like to know how many copies his early work sold....I knew of a book salesman
who called on a regional wholesaler in Michigan, which was going out of business in the 70s, who found, he claimed---
and bought--- a BOX of first edition V.'s, missing only a few. 

After Gravity's Rainbow**, a huge sales success, TRP could live on the earned money, travel and with advances, grants and royalties
make a living wage, it seems. So, no need to publish in parts for cash flow.

**I also heard of another sales executive---more-b.s-full, in general---who said that in having to clean up major warehouse
problems with Viking---he found a BOX of  first edition 'Gravity's Rainbow''s. This in the late 80s or 90s. I heard this in the 00's.