V-2nd - Chapter 10: Partridge in a Pear tree

[alice wellintown]

Insisting that Pynchon is a rocket scientist is absurd; he isnot and
never has been a rocket scientist. Moreover, he is, and has been since
his stint at Boeing, a writer. In his essays Pynchon discusses the
difficulties writers face. Like Emerson, the place of the writer in
America haunts everyhing Pynchon writes. It's as if he is haunted by
Bartleby. The rocket naming of parts (Henry Reed's poem) stuff is
satitrized in the linguist in GR who, like the linguist in Melville;s
Moby-Dick, tries to read the whale. I aslo would not characterize
Pynchon as a hippie. In any event, to say that all hippes are
romantics is like saying all Greeks are Platonists.

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Strictly speaking, Pynchon is a rocket scientist. Anyway, that's the reason
> Boeing hired him, he could suss out the nomenclature and explain the
> interaction of the various gizmos to the plutes carrying and caring for all
> those nuclear tipped Bomarcs.
>
> As for Pynchon's broken estate, all hippies are romantics at heart.
>
> On Nov 2, 2010, at 4:43 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> And, we don't need to be rocket scientists, in fact Pynchon is no
>> rocket scientist and, althoguh people like Hale (great critic of
>> Pynchon and other texts), reading his texts as science books is more
>> often a distraction. ANd, though he tells readers that he is a student
>> of Bartleby and Byron and Blake and Emerosn and Whitman .....they
>> simply refuse to take him at his word. anyways....
>
>