[grladams at teleport.com]

I agree
It's almost like he hasn't got a good, honest editor. The nerdiness of
including dates after movie titles or including too much detail about car
modesl is something that distracts. A good example of him doing this can
probably be found in most works, maybe not as much in M&D, but in ATD where
brothers Webb are out on horseback and one of them lights up a Brand XYZ.
So in ATD it's important that we are faced with a really obscure cigar, so
obscure and the narrator is such a nifty insider that it's not even called
a cigar but instead it's a brand name. And if one brother took a swig of
whisky it wasn't just a swig of whisky but a real obscure obsolete kind.
waay too distracting when he does that. 

Jill

Original Message:
-----------------
From: rich richard.romeo at gmail.com
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:25:00 -0400
To: kelber at mindspring.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re:


but i think u noted this already Laura, and it bears repeating that
parodying something that is already the object of so much parody or is
a parody itself (TV, movies) is really is annoying, unoriginal and
pointless and really sinks IV

Pynchon seems to have a problem with being super smart which is OK and
he usually is good at balancing the dumb and the smart but if Vineland
was a half-hearted attempt compared to the monster works, IV is dead
on arrival--its mostly chaff or better yet the sticks and seeds

rich



On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 9:10 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> The movie reviewer-style referencing of movies and, perhaps, the used
car-sellers referencing of cars, add a layer of pop-culture cheesiness
(Velveetification?)to the story.  We're not getting the simple view of the
omniscient narrator, we're getting the view filtered through a lens clouded
by crappy pop culture.  The TV parodies are part of this.  Pynchon is using
a filter of crappy culture, like fog moving in, to show us why the budding
idealism of the 60s went under.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>
>>
>>Clement Levy writes:
>>Cars are quite an issue in IV, maybe, because they're an issue in LA
area. We may have another word about it.
>>
>>I DO have another word about it. P and the cars in IV are noticed more
(and described differently) than most realist writers, other detective
novel writers do. First, noticed all over the place in the prose. So many
did not ALL have to be seen, right?
>>
>>But most, they are described by make, model and year.....Now who else
getting down cars in LA describes them this way just about every time?
>>Most writers might say 'yellow chevy'; such-and-such Camaro.........
>>There is some kind of 'lovingness' [my word. find a better.] goin' on in
the descriptions, yes?
>>
>>It reminds me of the way he, uniquely it seems, indicates so many movies
with the date. For some reason he wants us to 'get' the whole NAME, Year of
a car.  That that 'defines' it or something?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>


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