"It's About work"---goes out to Alice

[Mark Kohut]

So fine...thanks Alice...must reread that book and
 
TR-relevance..I keep remembering that Advanced Gaddis reader, Erik Burns?, who
wrote that at base Gaddis wanted his characters to do their work and not
 
be so pseudo in every word.........
 
yes?

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: "It's About work"---goes out to Alice

A decent definition of work can be had in "One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich." The protagonist of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's story,  One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, manages to survive, to find some
meaning in work.
It involves an existential leap. It is an adaptive stoicism.
Who can forget that scene when the workers are building a wall? They
are rolling the stone like Camus’ Sisyphus. They are making meaning
from a meaningless task in a hostile wasteland. They look, sound, and
act like a work crew. They joke, they smoke, they sweat, and they
build. It is so wonderfully composed, that even in translation, we are
given to believe that self-realization can happen anywhere and under
any circumstances. The Captain, for example, learns to be a helper, a
low level laborer, and to bond with the other crew members. What is
his captains rank worth in prison?  In prison, his rank is
meaningless. He will need to learn how to toss bricks and sling
mortar. Social context determines what is valued in a person.

I remember, sitting on my grandmother’s couch reading it right after I
read the enormous Alive where the rugby players crash in the mountains
and resort to cannibalism. Boy, I wonder if reading so much as a kid
can make one morose and morbid. I mean, think about the books we read
as youngsters. I loved the boy books, Swift, then the Hardy books,
horror, sports,  and biography, but inevitably the cannon of grim
books pile up on your bookshelf, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse, Dickens and
more Dickens, the Red Pony, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, the
list of depressing books …A Tree Grows, To Kill a Mockingbird, I thank
God for books like these, Anne of Green Gables was a Joy, but so many
were grim; full of gulag and war and suffering and death and madness
and more death and madness. Why is that? Must we have martyrs and
heroes and the spirits of the noble dead and defeated to feel alive?
Even Emily D drove me to a black mood too often to keep up on my
bookshelf. I hid her under the bed. She hid herself under her roof.
Anyway, there is a time for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Joyce and I
doubt that it’s any time before middle age. Too much work on a young
mind, even a feeble body will find melancholy in study. Ah, but work!
Work! Swing thaty  Hammer if I had a hammer to swing. Yes, old Walt
with his beard bird eyeing the boyz in their bloody uniforms, rubbing
their legs for them, that too is work.

The great poet of the bogs, Irish chap with a nobel has made a living
with a spade tossing letters about hsi fathers and his father's
graves, dug with their own backs a bending over the black Earth.

Ah, but for a mug of it foaming in the nose hairs and down the hatch.
Work. It makes a man.
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