Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[Henry Musikar]

The funny thing to me is that Pynchon's writing in no way appears to be
written under the influence of drugs, but alice's does, with the
sophomorically dense wordplay that I've noted in the writings of others who
confessed to being under the influence, e.g. Lennon's books, written when he
was so tired, he hadn't slept a wink, and his mind was on the brink.

Henry Mu
Sr. IT Consultant
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/ 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Michael Bailey
Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 11:27 PM
To: P-list
Subject: Re: Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when
men are prepared for it")

 alice wellintown wrote:

>Would that a reader understand not drugs and the foolishness of
>youthful experiements that crack and chip away at the indoctrinated
>exceptionalisms and predjudicial pedantries of the privleged college
>crew who may choose to discover the class issue in their own slow
>learner yarns by jolly jack tarrying, wondering in the towers of
>scholars, touring the ghetto, chatting with volubtuous feminist, and
>reading Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience

long as it is, that's still a sentence fragment.
I'm tempted to doctor it up, because I like where I think it's headed:

"Would that a reader understand that Pynchon's fictions are about
not drugs but about the foolishness..."   would that be an acceptable
interpolation after "Would that"?

or, "Would that a reader understand not drugs [et al]...but instead
the sensuous convolutions of prose, the reactions to poets and thinkers
and other novelists, the observations of daily life, the savoring of
experience,
and the essential good-heartedness that shines through all of his work!"
Would that be a reasonable completion of the sentence that begins with
"Would that"?
-- 


- "The whole point of life is to have a story" - Jeremy Cioara