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

[Paul Mackin]

On 8/11/2011 5:41 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> So fine...thanks Alice...must reread that book and

Don't know if Ivan would agree but I think Philip Levine's answer to 
what work is would be:

Work is a subset of Looking for Work. (just as reading is a subset of 
misreading, sort of)

P
> 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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