IVIV Pynchon's beautiful prose

[Mark Kohut]

That lyrically beautiful passage IS ALSO, yes?, a wonderful inverted-Hemingway homage about institutions, about all the crystal palaces---'concrete geomety"...'louvered light [all those slants of light in P's works]....from INSIDE, from "the darkened rooms"...................

The palm trees, from the tropical tropes of positive associations in Pynchon, create the bad vibes interiorly, so to speak.

I think this is a beautiful passage in Inherent Vice, in pynchon. 

It is also impossible not to feel the opening of GR again.

--- On Sun, 2/7/10, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IVIV Pynchon's beautiful prose
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, February 7, 2010, 2:31 PM
> It's impossible to read the passage
> quoted here and not see that this
> work is a return to earlier Pynchon; not Gravity's Rainbow,
> not even
> Lot49 or V., nor even a return to the great apprentice's
> short story,
> The Secret Intergration, but to the Slow Learners; this is
> T.S.
> Eliot's rattle in the palms, liquid, rain, rain, rain that
> never falls
> over this dirty town where the yellow fog creeps over the
> paving
> stones as a thousand shuttered rooms raise louvers and
> Hemingway's
> rain that floods and kills and brings the cholera and
> syphilis and the
> dead baby at the end of the Farewell to Arms.
> 
> Crap, for the most part.
> 
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> > This review managed to find some beauty in IV.
>  There's more of it in there,
> > imo, in a novel where Pynchon pulls many threads that
> dangle from his
> > earlier work.  Like Robin I'm happy to continue to
> read and ponder this
> > novel.
> > "The leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together
> with a liquid sound,
> > so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvred
> light, it sounded
> > like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete
> geometry, the palms
> > beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour,
> enough to get you to
> > open the door and look outside, and of course there'd
> only be the same hot
> > cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight."
> > http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1002&msg=147326&sort=date
> >
>