the lacka-Merle center

[rich]

maybe like the Simpsons the world has caught up with Mr. Pynchon. in this
day of everybody seemd to know everything it sure isn't his fault. so, he's
left the road of paranoia for more character based fare and thus what was
his strength is now just another writer. to me who revered Pynchon for so
long that is a major disappointment. but it was inevitable anyway, we all
change. i think of him as a long lost lover now, remembering the good times
and anxieties and discoveries and confirmations and betrayals and all that.
even death if you want to call the end result of all that. who knows? the
man I still think of fondly but not so much anymore. all those insights,
searches for meaning is now like the man voyaging once more on his
thousandth acid trip. in the end he doesn't mean. when I was still an
acolyte I remember being in a Wendy's with Jeff Baker in Pasadena asking
him about Slothrop's maps. his reply was it doesnt matter. i didnt
understand him back then; I do now.

rich

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Bled Welder <bledwelder at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  That's a good word to describe what I keep bumping my head against while
> reading this, lackadaisical.  All 165 pages to date; 900 to go.  Somebody
> mentioned the same sort of feeling a few days ago too, and I agreed then.
>
> There's a lack of hyperenergy, or a void of edginess in the narrator's
> voice, that so screams across the pages of GR.
>
> It's not as if Pynchon has become bored with himself, is it?  To continue
> with a metaphor of which I am so fond, it's as if somewhere in the late 60s
> the man grabbed a fistful of psychedelics and he penned GR during the
> volatile, edgy, nervous, what-the-hell's happening-here of the Ascent, the
> grabbing onto the world for dear life while noticing how it's morphing into
> radical unnoticed essences and elongating and dispersing toward infinities
> within and without infinities, the center is no longer holding...then with
> AtD he has broken through the stratosphere into the pure air of the Aether,
> or vice versa, however the layering goes, and has assumed the sitting
> Egyptian pose of Absolute Reception, no more struggle, no more fight...
>
> An argument for the Ascent.
>
>
> > Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:55:11 +0200
> > From: hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi
> > To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> > Subject: Re: the Merle center
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 28 Feb 2012, barbie gaze wrote:
> >
> > > The reality and fictionality of characters is an essential concern of
> all
> > > Pynchon works. I'm a bit surprized to read that P-List readers of
> Pynchon's
> > > works find fault with the massive AGtD on the grounds that it has no
> > > central character or consciousness or whatever. Pynchon has, as Paul
> noted,
> > > improved his writing over the years; he is a better writer in AGtD
> than in
> > > GR or M&D (I won't include V. because it is his first novel and he is
> not
> > > yet a mature and great writer early on, and I'll skip over the
> California
> > > series because these are not serious efforts), but he has alos
> improved his
> > > story-telling and his characterizations.
> >
> >
> > Hmm, perhaps the basic reason why AtD doesn't work for me is that I find
> > it lackadaisical. It's as if it tries to actualize "weak interaction" or
> > some such in both its story-telling and characterizations, and it may
> well
> > succeed in that. I, nostalgic, miss GR's intersubjective magnetisms and
> > gravities. And besides gravity, GR has gravity-fighting lightness that in
> > my view is not to be confused with AtD's overall feebleness. These
> > qualities I see in GR also make its narrative and characterizations work
> > for me much better than those of AtD. But maybe I really should reread
> AtD.
> >
> >
> > Heikki
>
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