Grasping for V. Group Read P.S.

[kelber at mindspring.com]

At a B&N talk on Pynchon that a couple-three of us attended back in the fall, Robert Stone spoke about the opening scene of V..  He said it really pissed him off when he read it.  He had been in Norfolk, VA at around the same time, and he'd seen that EXACT musician, and thought, at the time, that he'd be a great person to write about.  So he was annoyed when he opened V. and discovered Pynchon had beat him to the punch.

It's easy enough to believe that some things in V. (not the alligators!) were based on TRP's personal experiences.  That itinerant musician in Norfolk, a case in point.  Pig Bodine, Rachel Owlglass, Esther and, if not its individual members, the group name:  The Whole Sick Crew - all have a ring of authenticity.  Why wouldn't he write about people he'd met in college, the navy, or the shores of Long Island?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>
>I t was easy for me to imagine Tom Waits singing Christmas Eve on old  
>East Main.
>
>
>
>
>On Jun 13, 2010, at 8:02 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>>
>> Myself of course I have to think of Heidegger first when I hear  
>> "waiting
>> presence", but this is a German thing you certainly wouldn't  
>> understand ...
>>
>> Regarding "emptiness" à la Pynchon: It's right in the first song,  
>> on the
>> first page of my Picador UK edition (p. 9):
>>
>> "EVERY [emphasis added] night is Christmas Eve on old East Main"
>>
>> Although the 1960s were a decade of rediscovering religion (cf.  
>> Peter L.
>> Berger: A Rumor of Angels. Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the
>> Supernatural [1969]; dt. Auf den Spuren der Engel. Ffm 1970: Fischer),
>> I read Pynchon's words as a catholic's criticism on secularization.
>>
>> If every night is Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve is profane (and thus
>> all the other days of the year, too).
>There is a sense in which this universal profanity provides fertile  
>ground for the seed of the holy. The Christmas carol stilling the  
>bar, snowfall in the rigging, Beatrice the Barmaid  as a shell for  
>Beatrice the divine feminine.
>>
>> Anyone in agreement?
>>
>> Kai
>>
>>>
>>> And, let's discuss: WTF does "emptiness into waiting presence"  
>>> mean?....I've just realized
>>> that in the analogy list, the first term is the good term  
>>> equalling Benny before he turns onto East Main---dog
>>> into wolf---so emptiness is the good term and waiting presence the  
>>> bad??? Waiting presence of drunken
>>> vomiting sailors, okay, but why 'emptiness" ?
>>> 		 	   		
>