V-2nd - Chapter 10 drove the little Triumph to the party...

[alice wellintown]

After the flip flop clock crazy cornell car bodies and "What for
Christ's sake?" we return to Slab; the sentence begins with "While"
and ends as a fragment. Then, a series of // paragraphs.

And Charisma, Fu, and Pig Bodine

And Rachel and Roony

And Stencil sat dour

And Mafia Winsome

And who knew where Paola was?

These remind us of Hemingway and Eliot. The And // structure, the
curling of images, the useless words of newspaper scraps are echoes of
Eliot's Preludes again.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/eliot_preludes.html

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 6:04 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> V. is a remarkable book. I like it.  P-the-younger is an impressive
> author and, obviously, works his ass off to produce a great first
> novel. It's a fun book, even after 40 plus years. What's not that
> impressive is the style, the diction, the syntax, the grammar, the
> sentences, the dialogue, is often flat and lumpy, not the the prose we
> find in the works P writes later on. I think P writes better when he
> follows Hawthorne's advice (given in those famous prefaces and the
> custom house chapter) and gets what Hawthorne calls the "atmospherical
> medium" working on an historisized moral message that aims at the
> truth of the human heart. He does this in Mondaugen and it works. He
> tries it in TSI with mixed results. Sphere is a mixed bag. He not
> post-war cool, he does care about the people he sees suffering in
> their relationships and he sufferes. He reminds us that Pynchon is
> never far from Christ.
>
> On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Michael Bailey
> <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>>> alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>
>> one thing that strikes me in Chapter 10 is at that party where the
>> girl takes Sphere's eye.  "Give me back my eye," he says.  This seems
>> at first to be an interruption of uncontrollable, almost
>> unconscionable levity on the author's part.
>>
>> But then Sphere turns down a tryst, goes running back to Ruby, and
>> before that, Sphere's buddy remarks on him having eyes for the
>> kitchen, or something like that - so one gets a picture of somebody
>> being turned on, noticeably, and resisting it, for a reason.  And it
>> also refers back to Shakespeare, "tell me where is fancy bred?"
>>
>> I have this harmless contrarian theory that V. is actually pretty cool...
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a
>> violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural
>> liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the
>> whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all
>> governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical." -
>> Adam Smith
>>
>