V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

[Mark Kohut]

Since we're all getting so David Copperfield-kind of personal here, as old 
Holden would say, on this reading of V. --and why the hell not, if books are not 
personal then what are they good for?.....................

I stopped out of reading V. when I was around Laurie's reported reading age 
below...maybe a year or two older since I was not as advanced as she was, I'm 
sure...at Pig B.'s upcoming.....overpowering with lust scene sometimes called 
rape...............rape....the word scared me as the worst thing one could do 
after murder.....

I did not get, maybe I did get but didn't know it, how Pig and these supposedly 
cool, hip, beat types---I'd read more beat lit than Pynhcon--could do that in 
their books. 

I thought I was supposed to like the whole sick crew...and I didn't....but I 
figured, since it was true, I was just a sensibiity-retarded 
square.....imprisoned by my parochial upbringing.............................

I almost did not read GR a few years later 'cause of this take on V.....this 
'take' being he was being overpraised by the amoral trend-setters but he was 

morally deficient....................

So there. 



 


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, September 14, 2010 7:31:31 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

I don't disavow the book, though I recoil from such things as Benny's musings 
about whether Fina wants or deserves a gang-bang.  I was 18 when I first read 
the book, and I absolutely loved it.  Don't recall recoiling from any of it.  
Either Benny's attitudes were more in keeping with the (creeps) I knew (though I 
don't think so), or I was the perfect audience for young Pynchon. I accepted 
Benny's/Pynchon's attitudes at face value, and oddly, didn't care, perhaps 
because I was as naive about these things when I read the book as Pynchon was 
when he wrote it. I disagree, Mike, that Pynchon was deliberately trying to make 
us dislike Benny, or at least, trying to show us how flawed Benny was.  I found 
Benny's yoyoing and rootlessness, and everything else about him, completely cool 
at that young age, and I'm guessing Pynchon did too.  I'm sure he recoils along 
with the rest of us now.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>Sent: Sep 14, 2010 1:19 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6
>
>egads, is it 7 already?  time to make the donuts...
>
>working backward in order to work forward, Benny's sickening behavior
>is not (I'd say, in my finite wisdom) just an excrescence of
>post-adolescent cleverness on the part of the author, but a deliberate
>and well-written depiction of the sort of failure that he's trying to
>depict...
>
>...all too well-depicted, I'd say (from my amateur viewpoint), in that
>just about all our readership (and we *like* Pynchon) recoil from the
>text and disavow the book...
>
>there's a phrase in a Wayne Dyer book, or one of those guys (yes, I
>read self-improvement books - in my defense, a friend put me onto that
>one), where he says something like, "Don't cut off my finger, look
>where I'm pointing!"
>
>who's that drummer guy, in _Vineland_, who talks about, "That's what I
>do, take the rude buffets of life and give them a beat" or something
>like that?