Robert Stone, B&N

[Monte Davis]

Malignd writes:

> Did anyone attend the GR discussion in NY?

40+ people did, as did I, as did Laura Kelber, as did Rob ___ (a.k.a.
Decency's Jigsaw in the http://chumpsofchoice.blogspot.com/webread of AtD,
and at the dreaming http://wonderannual.blogspot.com/ , and sometime lurker
or else pseudonomiast here). We had coffee and a fine time afterward.

Gerald Howard MC'd. His contribution was 90% drawn from his 2005 "Pynchon
from A to V" in Bookforum (http://tinyurl.com/yjf8pze , thanks Keith). He
noted several times (as in that piece) that the Bantam m-m paperbacks of V
and Col49 and GR sold "millions." "People *cared* about serious books back
then" was his leitmotif for the evening. (I'm not disagreeing, or unwilling
to threnodize along; it just doesn't lead anywhere very interesting.) 
FWIW, he considers DeLillo and Stone something like Pynchon's peers in
ambition, DFW and Vollman something like that today. 

Robert Stone was ruddy and white-haired, relaxed, occasionally bemused when
Howard threw him some impossible Won't You Sum It All Up? lure. He more or
less accepted Howard's "you and Pynch were after the same big game: what it
meant to be American in those strange days," while emphasizing their great
differences in temperament and method. For his part, he said, the salient
similarities were deep and obscure and sometimes eerie. For example, he'd
been in the Navy in the mid-1950s, in Norfolk, on Granby St. (VA 460, aka
East Main, aka The Street) and in its arcade, where he heard an exceptional
street musician. He put said musician into a story "which I don't think I
ever even submitted." Then he picked up V. and got that old _doppelganger_
thang from the opening paragraph. I had a sense he could have gone on with
Kute Korrespondences in that vein, but they still weird him out, so he
didn't. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDUm2HoYXUI

Emily Barton, whose books I have not read but will, fell head over heels
with CoL49 first, and thought nothing could top it. In 1989 she was in a
college band called Imipolex G and tackled GR surreptitiously because she
didn't want the others to know she hadn't already read it (I been there, you
been there, we all been there)... and REALLY fell head over heels. I was
especially taken by her admission that "There are long passages I just CAN'T
read. The words go by and my mind glances off them and I can't tell you what
I was reading." FWIW, my guess is most of those stretches are in the last
150+ pages; same here. She also thinks M&D may be an even better book; same
here. 

She touched on but didn't explore an ambivalence of liberation/intimidation:
Pynchon is a benison to a young writer in showing that there's NOTHING
language can't do; Pynchon is also a curse in doing it so dazzlingly well
that you're cowed. Stone, 3 months younger than TRP and National Book Award
winner the year after GR, was nodding in agreement through this. (Imagine
feeling what Barton felt, with the added edge of "and he's *my age*!?!?!")
She's not happy that the students she teaches today have so little
Pynchon-fu. 

That's all I remember. I meant to record, but arrived hastily just as it
began and didn't feel like fiddling with the gear. Laura? (Rob?)

-Monte