GR Overrated?

[David Morris]

Her criticism is hypocritical on many levels.  Her "if you like it,"
then I'll describe what you like is so full of shit (if she doesn't
like it, how could she know?).  It's a not-very-clever way of putting
down a reader she want to call pretentious in their tastes.  It's akin
to Sarah Palin's putting down intellectuals as not being "real folks."

David Morris

2011/8/12 János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com>:
> I don't think cleverness or the sheer mass of knowledge is the key to
> the magnetic nature of GR. It is just a welcome relief after all those
> writers who are proud of being not at home in the modern world. What
> hipnotizes the susceptible reader from the very first sentence has
> nothing to do with cleverness; it's a) the beautiful, complex, and
> sustained music of the language, b) the kind of dark lethal eroticism
> of death (thanatism?) that you can't find anywhere else. Noone who is
> grabbed by these at first reading can grab all the clever aspects for
> the first reading. Now I understand a lot of intelligent people ar
> simply indifferent music-wise like relatively few people can
> appreciate,say, Brahms,
>
> János
>
> 2011/8/12 Henry M <scuffling at gmail.com>:
>> "Authors, critics, and editors on 'great books' that (they say [hm])
>> aren't all that great"
>> http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/
>> .
>> .
>> .
>> Amy Bloom, author most recently of Where the God of Love Hangs Out:
>>
>> Gravity's Rainbow
>> Critics and regular (and erudite) people and the three members of the
>> 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction admire the hell out of this book.
>> (The other 11 members of the board disagreed violently and no fiction
>> prize was given that year.)* Gravity's Rainbow did win a National Book
>> Award and it did make Time magazine's list of the All-Time 100
>> greatest novels.
>>
>> If you like it, you say: This all fits together like the cleverest and
>> most tessellated of rainbows. You love the circular plot and the way
>> its structure echoes the rainbow-shaped trajectory of a V-2 rocket,
>> and the recurring motifs of those same rockets, plus dense dialogue
>> broken up by bits of silly poetry and chunks of Tarot, a rash of
>> paranoia and, of course, a lot of kazoos. I myself admire the 400
>> characters and the numerous special effects. The riffs on behavioral
>> psychology and sexual slavery almost did me in.
>>
>> For people who like this sort of thing, as Muriel Spark wrote, this is
>> the sort of thing they like. I prefer Muriel Spark.
>> .
>> .
>> .
>>
>> AsB4,
>> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
>> Henry Mu
>> http://www.urdomain.us/kcuf.htm
>>
>