aw. Re: Where did ...

[alice wellintown]

CL49 was required reading in the liberal arts colleges back in the
70s. GR was called the new great american novel and was said to be the
best or most important novel since Ulysses, it was often compared with
Moby-Dick for obvious reasons. I didn't know of V., and I was typical.
In the late 70s and early 80s, CL49 was cannonical, it was bound in
short novel collections, it was taught in colleges  and universities
as a new form of the novella, american fiction, as 60s literature, as
experimental fiction, as Hawkes, Vonnegut, Barthelme...were
taught...then Pynchon was gone to write VL and the new wave, a
superposition of women authors and non DWM authors hit the colleges
and book shores. We recall that strange mixture of excitement and
disappointed when Tom Pynchon, like some, I'm Big in Japan Dylan, went
Japanese electric landy land POLITICAL. Keep it in the characters,
man. But Tom, once so much older than, although Grover had his
politics, was younger than that now. His wife made him do it. He would
introduce his Cornell collection of juvenailia with a screed,
defending the poor and powerless masses, the working man's dead would
haunt romances hereafter. He sold out on IV, a movire that fears and
loathes its own trippings down the burnt out alleys of memories where
fog from the faded pages of hard boiled bitch goddesses wrestle with
the buxom best sellers, but finished his USA, his American series.
And, I thinbk, it is done.