[Page]

It is not "Marquez." It is Garcia Marquez, just as Mario Vargas Llosa is 
Vargas Llosa, not simply Llosa.

If you are going to be snotty, snooty and snarky, you have to get the 
details right.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 4:54 AM
Subject: Re:


> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:51 AM, Carvill, John<john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:
>>> Josiah
>>> I couldn't help thinking about Dick the whole time I read IV.
>>
>> Really? I kept thinking about pussy.
>
> Pynchon, unlike Roth (A Dying Animal, which packs more than Pynchon
> can into a novella)  or Marquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores,
> which) & other horny old men, doesn't write about Pussy or Dick. Or
> sex for that matter. It's not absurd for an old man to write about
> licking pussy and spotted dicks. Is it? I don't think so. Let them
> write. Let us read. But IV is not about flaccid old dicks and young
> sweet snatch. It's about an old writer who is trying to write
> un-conventional cultural-historical and topical,  so he has to act as
> if the available novelistic methods and ideas are continually about to
> turn into mere convention,  and so has to try to outwit that
> inevitable aging of his art. But Pynchon's art, when it rewards our
> efforts to read it, and we must read it with careful, even active and
> imaginative cool, and then re-read it (Nabokov) and we need to "read
> musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening
> for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to
> the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes,
> deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging
> how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a
> sentence with mathematical finality" (Wood), takes time to read
> because it takes time to write. Sure, the young Tom, as some letters
> suggest, was not so slow of study or composition, but the positive
> paranoia of his texts, the cultural-historical connections,  and the
> imaginative trips, the poetry and prose that grabs a reader by the
> love beads and pulls her into a paranoid adventure, take time to
> compose. IV is a rushed job. It's plot lines are frayed not worth
> tying together. Not that plot lines in postmodern parody should tie up
> in an Aristotelian bow, but Pynchon does it anyway, with characters
> who fill us in,  and fill us in,  and fill us in, (the narrative
> choice problem again)  until we a so full of fill, so exhausted by the
> telling,  that we are desperate to be shown anything. Even Shasta's
> acting under the influence of junk in her beautiful body and stars in
> star struck eyes.
>
> If a feminist is willing to hump his/her way through IV, he/she will
> discover that it is more feminist tract than VL. That the novel buries
> the feminist message (again, the feminist movement was a very positive
> contrast to the violent male dick wagging and rocket launching in the
> plotted months of the novel) under reels and reels of film and TV
> smack & snack munchie attack and Pynchon's masturbating the boy
> readers with girls on leashes down on their knees, cocks in their
> mouths, as in VL, is another problem. As noted here when Rich Romeo
> asked why we would dig into this pile of crap and explicate it as if
> it were Shakespeare, the training, or total lack of training which may
> be better (hang in there Robin) that teaches readers to read for the
> substrative message, that is, that the surface reality of the text is
> not the reality of the text, not only because, as encountered or
> perceived it involves a contribution from ourselves as well as from
> the text or object, or because something in the text or object
> produces individual or existential effects in readers, but because the
> world as it appears to each existential reader is the manifestation of
> some underlying reality or substrate buried in the deep text that must
> be un-earthed by the clever reader. Not only does reading this way
> smudge everything into shades of grey and both/and moral ambiguities
> and indeterminacies, it is without an objective criteria for the
> classification of texts and the evaluation of them, and this is the
> end of reading. Go watch the Tube.
>


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