SL Red Herring salad

[Mark Kohut]

So, maybe there is insight by Kai into WHY TRP might have dissed this thoroughly 
by 1984. He cannot help feeling what he originally wanted it to be...and as 
published falls short (In his mind)?



----- Original Message ----
From: Albert Rolls <alprolls at earthlink.net>
To: Pynchon-L <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tue, March 29, 2011 3:37:21 PM
Subject: Re: SL Red Herring salad


In 1965, Pynchon "is in the middle of writing a book that he characterizes as a 
potboiler. When it grows to 155 pages, he calls it 'a short story, but with 
gland trouble,' and hopes that his agent 'can unload it on some poor sucker.' 
The book turned out to be his highly praised second novel, 'The Crying of Lot 
49.'"

-----Original Message-----
>From: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
>Sent: Mar 27, 2011 5:07 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: SL Red Herring salad
>
>Red Herring in the SL introduction? This is bananas. First, maybe some of the 
>confusion can be cleared up by addressing the apparently troublesome word 
>"story". In english this word has less to do with some strict genre format (eg, 

>sonnet, short story, novel) than with the idea of a narrative of some sort. 
>Let's look at some of the language games it is involved in: to tell a story, 
>make up a story, to write a story, what's your story,etc. So it seems clear that 
>
>TP can call it a story. But that really isn't the problem, is it?
>    "Tom must be kidding", think about it. an author who rarely addresses the 
>public decides to take the piss out of his readers? Hey, i guess that stuff 
>about his interest in the Beats was also a red herring. (Perhaps Jed was being 
>ironic?) C'mon. Do you really find it so hard to accept? Didn't Joyce burn 
>Stephen Hero? Can't a writer look back on something with less than total 
>contentment? I think this is more about somebody's reading than it is about TP & 
>
>the veracity and accuracy of his SL intro. 
>
>    Me? I'm with Mark. It is to be taken straight. If you don't want to that's 
>your business; a good part of literary theory stems from just that. The author 
>said What? Everyone knows that understanding literature is too important to take 
>
>an author's word for the gospel truth, we must interpret what he says as well as 
>
>what he writes.
>        As Freud once allegedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." 
>There's a lot of good information in the SL introduction. Maybe, just maybe, 
>when he wrote the introduction he felt exactly what he wrote. I guess that for 
>some that is too simple for such a complex writer.
>
>Simplicissimus
>
>
>