Recog ch 2 monomyth

[alice wellintown]

The mechanical effort, the labor of moving from one word to the next,
to the next phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter,
section, then back over parts perhaps mis-read or under-read, or in
need of another read for pure pleasure, all this is good Gaddis (or
Pynchon) reading. The slides and the asides slipped into the projector
now projecting a conjecture or a Freudian projection against the buzz
of coversation, of communication, of miscommunication, of the reader
who is reading through the maze with amazment when the light bulb goes
on and the lights blow out like candles and we feel ourselves such
dandy doers of big books.

Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.



On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> ed wrote:
>>
>> Translation: I find the staging of these characters in TR very distracting
>> but still waiting for comedy and characters engaging with other people.
>>
>
> you're waiting, like the George Washington looking lady is: waiting in
> a place where that sort of thing has been known to happen, ready with
> the lines!
>
>
> I'd be surprised if there aren't places in the book where at least
> some of that sort of stuff does become perceptible...
>
>
> I guess what draws me to this type of complex fiction is the sense
> that Gaddis (or Pynchon) put a bunch of time and effort into
> describing stuff in a certain way and once the sheer mechanical effort
> of understanding the private dialect is made, once your mind is
> swaying with the rhythm or chugging along on the tracks the author
> laid, then the humor and character interaction becomes visible which
> is nice, but then also you sort of get this feeling like you see
> things a little differently than before // but also there is a bit of
> pleasure in the actual crunching of the raw data and getting a feel
> for the mode of expression // and I guess I get a bit of fun out of my
> own misunderstandings too...
>
> I mean, media and friends and so forth, all the time you get these
> challenges of grokking the purport of what somebody is saying and it's
> intermingled with all kinds of physical impressions and there are lots
> of non-verbal immediate considerations -- but the complexity of the
> verbal portion isn't that high, isn't that challenging, it recaps
> stuff you've heard before in similar terms  --not that there's
> anything wrong with that ---
>
> but isn't it nice sometimes to just have a rich batch of words to process?
>
> like the mulcher is running and you have a nice big branch to put in there
>
>
> and then after reading I pretend I've learned something -
>
> ...another road where maybe I could find another kind of mind there...
>