RE: Book Review of Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

[Monte Davis]

Well said. It's a certainty that he'll outgrow it. a likelihood  that he'll
be more embarrassed ion retrospect than by any counterblast we come up with.
and a distinct possibility he'll come to value P more highly than Vonnegut.

 

PS to all: no more harshing on Henry James! This means you!

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Phillip Grayson
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2012 3:24 PM
To: Mark Sacha
Cc: Phillip Greenlief; rich; Prashant Kumar; Dave Monroe; pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Book Review of Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

 

I don't know, I liked it a little.  I assume this is a youngish kid, sorting
out his aesthetics.  I think I did more or less the same type of thing when
I was 20-22, venting about Henry James and Charles Dickens and other amazing
writers that I was trying to get around.  I was lucky enough that I still
got the internet through a phone line then and just wrote these rants to
myself, but they were prolly fairly similar.  

 

Of course it's hilariously off-base, and he makes the mistake of quoting TRP
at length and then assuming that it's evidently bad writing, when, well...

 

But I think smart kids have to go through this contrarian phase, and it's
good for them.  The fact that he can't support his arguments and just falls
back on rhetorical tics is something he'll prolly/hopefully get over before
too long.

 

Preferring Vonnegut to Pynchon isn't a necessarily terrible thing.  I could
buy that, respect it.  He won't write about Vonnegut, of course, but
teenagers are better at being angry than anything else (except I was good at
basketball), so it makes sense to lay it out like this.

 

It's a silly, shallow failure of a criticism, but this is something we've
prolly all done as readers.  It's not a bad first effort at thinking about a
serious book you didn't respond to.  I knew this brilliant kid in college
(who's now a very good lesser known poet) who photo'd himself chopping Henry
James books into kindling.  Obviously neither of these are very
sophisticated criticisms, but I think it's good for young kids to get
passionate about these things; I'm not opposed to it all that much.

 

phllp

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Mark Sacha <msacha1121 at gmail.com> wrote:

I imagine it taking him much longer to compose that rant than the alleged
six hours it took him to read GR. That he poses this obviously fabricated
figure as an argument for the novel's lack of substance is absurd,
especially judging by his bio, which seems to indicate that he considers
himself a serious critic. But I guess it's more cogent than some of his
other arguments, which include supposed "hipster" sentimentalities, that
it's "low-grade MFA writing", or that it's "boring as shit".

 

 

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net>
wrote:

From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>


one wonders why go to all the trouble blathering on about something you
hate.



 

PG:

 

absolutely - in my own experience of composing reviews, i have never been
interested in tearing something to shreds - i'd much rather write about
something i'm excited about and would like to share with others. he
certainly is working very hard to tell us how right he is and how wrong
pynchon and all his admirers are ...

 

the things that bugs me the most is the smarmy glee that he seems to exhibit
while dis-ing TRP. typical holier than thou, i'm the smartest motherfucker
in the room antics that so turned my stomach in graduate school.

 

 

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