3am ramblings (np) by which I

[Michael Bailey]

...by which I do not mean that Tender is the Night and Gatsby are not
really fucking good and well worth reading.
They are.

It's just, if you want to talk about a book that you read for
pleasure, Mr Thomas Pynchon is the Mack Daddy in my book.

there are others in the league -

Ulysses, well, this smart young guy who's really kind of a shit, to
his mom that is, I mean come on, but you know, you got to respect how
he stands up for Giordano Bruno, but still...got me doubts about that
lad, but still and all he's kinda likeable and you hope he can kind of
mellow out, he's got some really funny lines and he's lucky enough to
live in a lighthouse with a roommate who apparently is always in a
good mood, so right, he lives in a lighthouse which is pretty cool and
he thinks about the ineluctable modality of the visible, which is,
yeah, pretty melodious, and "all Ireland is washed by the gulf stream"
(or is that from Portrait), anyway he is looking for some kind of
stability and along comes old Leopold Bloom, it's kind of like that
movie Short Cuts, old Leopold and all these other personalities livin
in the city crossing paths not knowing it...it's a gas...and they
drink cocoa, Epps brand, and such as never: what is a home without
Plumtree's pooted meat, incomplete; with it an abode of bliss...

yeah, that's pretty cool, agenbite of inwit and all

not as easy to love, because it's so fricken sad, but definitely very cool

or

Whan that April with its shoores soote, yeah that is the genuine
article all the way thru, thank you very much!
Alas, alas, that evere love was sin!

if I had more time I'd start a C-list, that's how good it is!


or Wodehouse,
see there's this guy, and he's got a bad a case of fin de siecle, or
fin du temps, or something, as Meatball Mulligan had of la gripe
espagnole;
he doesn't want to get married to the wrong girl, he's got a lot of
buddies in the same plight, he's from money but doesn't really *have*
any, and he's basically quite a decent guy.  The thing is, there are a
lot of girls for whom the right guy got killed in WWI or the Bore War
or something, and it's only by the wondrous skills of his butler,
who's really quite interesting in his own right - what's his
motivation, we wonder, for reaching so deftly across the barriers of
class to solidify human friendliness - and gradually find out - - that
he can avoid the perils of soccage in fief and other scourges on the
land...

Jane Austen ain't bad; Mark Twain...heck yes, Dickens and George Eliot as well

ok David Foster Wallace, well now, yeah sort of...God what a fuckingly
tragic circumstance to be so miserable and so nice, I wish I could've
been his roommate and fed him happy ideas and made him take bike rides

Margaret Drabble, for sure, Jesus god bless her for Richard Jury and
Melrose Plant

Joyce Carol Oates = mistress of prose, I just can't always step up and
take the misery she dishes out but great googly moogly is it ever
worth it; the guy in Nolo Contendere who sits and eats the
cheeseburgers, the girl in Foxfire with the long running legs, wow
yeah!

and probably a lot of others,

and even old Gatsby I guess, fucking West Egg and the fucking
spectacles, fuck me, yeah, it's good, I'm not saying that.

I'm just sayin that Benny and Stencil are not anything like that
narrator guy and Gatsby old boy,
I think even Bloom and Stephen are a closer analog than that.

maybe not

"I don't know, don't really care; let there be songs to fill the air"
- probably Robert Hunter, eh?

if you set B & S next to narrator guy and Gatsby old chap, and make
like they are like as those fellows -
ok, then Benny is watching the ineluctable decline of the
self-conscious and selfish ("Stencil doesn't need you any more")
Brit despite the ill-gotten gains of whose empire remaining unhappy
and pursuing a delusion

but, nay, I say, plop them down on a plate with Poldy and
pernobilis/pervetusta Daedalus,
Hamlet I am thy Father's omelet, "Hamlet on wry toast" (from Crybaby
of the Western World),
and a different sort of afflatus arises, despite their imperfections
something of value for cherishment -
wouldn't want to spoil by revealing anything in particular - has
passed betwixt them


-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")