IVIV Hope Harlingen: (spoilers)

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I wouldn't write any creativity obits for Pynchon over IV.  I think it's just a pent-up bit of fun story-telling he needed to get down on paper.  I'm still hoping for a book of essays and, who knows, another novel.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>

>
>this is about the Belgian artist James Ensor but it sorta parallels
>Pynchon's career in a way
>
>Van Gogh and Gauguin died at relatively young ages, and while Munch
>and Ensor both lived to be old men, they died young in a certain sense
>also. They were clearly depleted by the work they expended in their
>prime. Ensor's most innovative pictures were made by the time he was
>thirty. By some point in the 1890s, and certainly by the early 1900s,
>he began to be less and less bombarded by his inner demons, and his
>later pictures, represented by a single room at the exhibition, became
>drier in texture and more obvious in their satire. In his last
>decades, he was given one honor after another (by many of the very
>institutions he had ridiculed as a young man). But in his studio—like
>Munch in his own later decades—he did little more than revisit, with
>increasingly less force, themes that dated to the 1880s and 1890s.
>
>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23036
>
>rich