GR Overrated?

[Richard Ryan]

Preach it, David baby!  Jonathan Franzen - league bullshit, this...
On Aug 12, 2011 5:48 PM, "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>
>
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