Back to AtD. how does TRP feel about railroads? p.930

[Mark Kohut]

I have sometimes believed that P's listmaking is one way of 
 parodying the 'realist' tradition. That is, he
chose his Menippean Satire, his comic surrealism  (or whatever label)
because as many were saying back in the day---Roth perhaps most famously
in an essay juxtaposing 'news' and happenings with the observational lament that
it was very hard for the American writer to satirize American's real daily self-satirization. 
 
So, with his lists, P expresses something like: you want reality, I'll give it to you 'all compact' [Shakespeare]
and see if that explains much......
 

________________________________
 From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 4:48 PM
Subject: Re: Back to AtD. how does TRP feel about railroads? p.930
  
think the Pyncher went crazy with the lists in AtD. reminded me of a
critic's basting of Hemingway who just had to list all those drinks by
name instead of just saying a glass of wine or booze. Hemingway faked
his way thru life, he tried to live thru the fiction I guess. throw in
a couple of foreign words, your golden

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 4:32 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> He does like them coffee messes. Notice the one on the list of items
> in the crowd here in the passage.  And, so we might revisit that cofee
> mess in GR. Or not. He does like these lists and piles of stuff,
> layers, palimscests and crowds of folks, mobs, mobbing about, bobbing
> about till we run into someone who has some odd reason for being in
> this place at this time. A railroad figures large in the American
> Mystery (Tanner). The straight line, the time table (Gatsby) vs. the
> Circles of Emerson, the flux. Ahab is an iron man, sometimes he is
> bronze, but he is set on steel wheels. C.L.R James's book on Moby-Dick
> is worth a peek. If you signal up all lines, well, you've now got more
> than a foward backward motion, you have an above and a below, and
> there is no telling where you might travel. Now, to return to Huck and
> Jim after the river raft adventure, you are free to go anywhere, even
> to places unknown and unmapped.
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