V2nd, C3

[Ian Livingston]

Alice wrote:
We’ve talked a lot about how young P was begging, borrowing, and
stealing from Hawthorne, Irving, Melville, Poe (American Romance), and
from Hemingway, Eliot (TS), Fitzgerald, and Adams & Co. (American
Modernism & The Lost Generation). Now, one can not deny that young P
begs borrows, and steals from these authors. Anyone as familiar as we
are with the primary and secondary texts (of which there are thousands
and not hundreds now) can not fail to understand that young P is a
great thief.

Was it Yeats who said every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a
thief? Is that what you are getting at, Alice? Because I can't think
of any writer who is not influenced by the writers they have read.
Everything is old, but there's always something new to notice in the
really good ones.

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 8:06 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> of course, Nabokov taught a little Joyce and Flaubert and so on; he
> was not allowed to teach American Literature, apparently--an
> invaluable loss to literature that. Imagine those lectures? Could they
> be any more strident than DH Lawrences's Study of American Classics?
>
> Plater, William wrote _The Grim Pheonix_ an excellent study of Pynchon
>
> Lawrences's posthumos papers, also titles Pheonix.
>
> On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 10:57 AM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> insert after had little . . .  or nothing much in common with JJ
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 10:55 AM, alice wellintown
>> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I rather enjoy the "paranoid" and open-the margins reader response
>>> approach to literature; it can ring my bell, beh el elll, ring my
>>> bell. I wonder if young P, who writes not at all like Joyce, and
>>> certainly had little, other than his struggle with the catholic stuff,
>>> which, doesn't show any maturity until GR, had even read Joyce by
>>> 1963.
>>>
>>>
>>>> "Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but ... one reads
>>>> these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with
>>>> one who once..."
>>>>
>>>> I don't even have to care if Pynchon was thinking about that line when
>>>> he titled V.  It still rings my chimes.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Yippy dippy dippy,
>>>> Flippy zippy zippy,
>>>> Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
>>>> - Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")
>>>>
>>>
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."