Recog ch 2 monomyth

[alice wellintown]

One finds beauty in Gaddis as subject, as we've discussed, the
aethetics of post-war America etc., as objects, often described by a
character or as viewed or imagined, a view that begets a reverie, by a
single imagination and, and most in his voice or in the voices that
make an opera, the sounds, the radio-drama Gaddis has produced.

His Master's Voice:
On William Gaddis's JR
by
Patrick J. O'Donnell
University of West Virginia

http://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/index.shtml

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Below reminds one that we---talking about myself, kimosabe---
> should do more pointing at what strikes as ......uh...........
> beautiful in the book?
>
> but, also leads to this question in Gaddis/Pynchon-like fictions:
> When is finding a good possible reading part of the text's beauty?
>
> I.e. Can simple probable interpreting be an aesthetic judgment itself?
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, April 21, 2011 7:15:21 AM
> Subject: Re: Recog ch 2 monomyth
>
> 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...
>>
>
>