On Group Reads
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Tue May 11 11:55:50 CDT 2010
Seems like a discussion of what to read next has generated more posts from more people
than we have been seeing. I think that's good. (I like lots of posts....I use this email address
for Pynchon and just a few other things.....I think it is very easy to skim, skip or delete threads
that are of little interest to me---or when I am too busy)
I like the suggestion of a non-Pynchon book such as Augie March or others. But...
But, getting no younger and set in my ways, I sorta always want a Pynchon book to be being read
on this list. Sorta its essence.
If we want to read different ones, I hope posting can be more often than once a week which makes me fear
a too general level of remarking............I prefer close reading, as I've said too often
and the back-and-forth of findings and interpretative resonances.
I have also kept up an irregular--and very miscellaneous----reading of books, writers, etc. who we know or think influenced TRP.
The better to 'get' him; the better to 'feel' his work, imho. For me.
I wonder if anyone else wants to do that? Along with reading a Pynchon work?
Another thought: Have we ever considered reading the miscellaneous non-fiction pieces?........and commenting on their resonances,
allusions, what we think we know about TRP from them. Where he said his mind was..at very times and about various things? (Bits do come up A LOT in any discussion of a fiction....often a good dispute-settler)
That said: I am also rereading--and writing stuff on---Against the Day and, yes, it is THE BOOK we have so much more to learn how to read, I think. Tim Ware said at the first Pynchon conference which had papers about it, that it will take, maybe, ten years to learn how to read. At least [and the wiki and this
list have shortened however long it will take......I once read a terrif essay on Hamlet in which the scholar argued that it took @200 years for we English language readers to learn how to read---start to 'get' Hamlet. Modern communication technology will compress that-----(and, no, he's not him anyway)---
but it is SO RICH.........
I will say once ogain that there is lotsa circumstantial evidence that TRP began writing ATD when he finished GR. He put everything in it---including GR---
which contains everything itself, in Tore Rye Anderson's great aphorism about both of them.
So, THAT's my first vote......the others are second thru last.
By the way: that readers like self-described Robin and/or Alice have their particular foci........................is another wonderful thing about this
list...............I look forward to another connection from Robin or Alice (and everyone who posts from a certain perspective. Ane we all have a perspective.) Pynchon is larger than, if not life,of course, then most commentators on................
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