A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[malignd at aol.com]

Again, read The Hamlet.  The Snopes family.  It's laugh out loud funny.



-----Original Message-----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: malignd <malignd at aol.com>
Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, Dec 1, 2012 4:44 pm
Subject: Re: A Good Grace is Hardly Found


Never say never, but his funny quotient is far, far lower than OConner's.  He's brooding. She's not.


My favorite Faulkner is Light in August.  I don't remember any funny scenes, but there may be.  I've read As I Lay Dying, and the funny there is very much a comedy of errors.  OConner's funny is much more over the top.


 All that said, I think Faulkner is In a class of American Fiction authors of less than 5 others at the very top, and are contenders in the earlier world too.


David Morris

On Saturday, December 1, 2012,   wrote:

Faulkner was never funny??  Have you never read The Hamlet?  Or, in a different vein, As I Lay Dying?



-----Original Message-----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: malignd <malignd at aol.com>
Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, Nov 30, 2012 9:45 pm
Subject: Re: A Good Grace is Hardly Found


FO is IMO akin to Faulkner, Southern Gothic.  But Faulkner was never camp or funny.  OConner was more modern, maybe proto POMO.

On Friday, November 30, 2012,   wrote:

I get it, but I wouldn't ever cross my mind to compare either to Flannery,  Didion's journalism is quite good; her fiction not so much.  I read a boxing article by JCO once that was good, but her fiction is ... not to my taste, let's say.



-----Original Message-----
From: robertberg5125 <robertberg5125 at comcast.net>
To: kelber <kelber at mindspring.com>; pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, Nov 30, 2012 1:47 am
Subject: Re: A Good Grace is Hardly Found


Not sure about jumping in this thread but one of my worst 2 or 3 reads in the last, oh, 61 years have been J Didion/ J Carol Oates downers I kept waiting to let me off the hook.

Connected by DROID on Verizon Wireless


-----Original message-----

From: kelber at mindspring.com
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, Nov 29, 2012 15:54:14 GMT+00:00
Subject: Re: A Good Grace is Hardly Found


As a person who struggles with severe bouts of depression, I avoid relentlessly-depressing writers like O'Connor.  Had to read her in high school (Everything That Rises Must Converge), and vowed I'd never willingly subject myself to her darkness again.  As a rabid Pynchon fan, I'm not looking for fluffy feel-good shit.  But I don't want to read a series of stories whose sole purpose is to prove, however eloquently or wittily, that everything sucks.  I'm also wary of novelists who throw in gratuitous horrors to give their otherwise tepid work dramatic weight.  Which novelists am I talking about?  I don't even know - I avoid writers who might even potentially be capable of doing this.  Books with blurbs using phrases such as "after a horrifying tragedy, Hubert has to come to terms with ..." and so on.  Pynchon writes of horrors, but he simultaneously hands out steady doses of intriguing mind-expanding prose and side explorations, by way of anesthetic.  And I know he loves dogs too much to kill or torture them gratuitously.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: rich 
>Sent: Nov 29, 2012 10:31 AM
>To: alice wellintown 
>Cc: pynchon -l 
>Subject: Re: A Good Grace is Hardly Found
>
>thanks for the suggestion alice. considering my mood lately maybe I
>should read more of her. and apologies for being a dick
>
>rich
>
>On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 6:07 PM, alice wellintown
> wrote:
>> No probs, bros, I don't spect nothin less round this here list of
>> late. But it was a great thing I wrote about grace; if you know what I
>> mean. See, grace and free will are tropes that P just be playin wit.
>>
>>  Now that O'Connor is another thing all together. She ain't messing
>> round with it; she's dead in the eye serious. What a fine writer is
>> Flannery O'Connor; her shorts are tight, her legs, even when they be
>> stretched wooden ones, be  long.
>>
>> http://www.csub.edu/english/engl375/o'connor.htmlx

 

 

 
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