Very misc related to grace

[Bekah]

Oh my yes,  The Name of the Rose  was my first Eco.  I loved it!   It's the semiotics,  the signs,  the post-modern approach to intertextuality,  the story-within-a-story,  and the "symbolism" (heh) which take it far away from Holmes.    It feels like a Holmes on the surface because of the emphasis on deduction but … stick it out - it's different and far more interesting than your average detective novel or historical fiction.  

 I have to say I enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum more -  that was like The Three Stooges revisit the Knights Templar and spook themselves to death.   Very funny - but also rich in detailed historical tidbits,  semiotic theory, paranoia and intertextuality - almost a satire on the last one.  Sad to say,  Eco seemed to go downhill after that in fiction - like he was trying too hard to get a semiotic idea across (I mean -  orange doves? - I got it already!).   I've read all his fiction and a number (4?)  of his nonfiction books. 

 With his latest fiction,  The Prague Cemetery,  Eco was back to his good old ways -  Definitely see Borges at work in his novels (could even be the blind librarian in The Name of the Rose).   Wouldn't surprise me at all to find that TRP was influenced by Eco - they both seem to enjoy writing really dense works with twisty plots which include a certain amount of paranoia.  

Fwiw:   Umberto Eco is a noted academic medieval historian,  semiotician and a significant postmodernist theorist.  The Name of the Rose is usually considered to be a postmodern work.  The quote in the novel, "books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told,"  refers to a postmodern ideal that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality.[2]

Paraphrased from -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco  

Bekah



On Nov 28, 2012, at 8:06 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> Thanks for the recommendations, Bekah.  I'm currently reading Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, at the urging of a friend.  I picked it up and discarded it early on, years ago, because the Sherlock Holmes parody (homage? plagiarism?) bugged me.  My friend's convinced me to stay with it.  I'm betting you've read it.  Thoughts?
> 
> LK
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
>> Sent: Nov 27, 2012 4:21 PM
>> To: kelber at mindspring.com
>> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Subject: Re: Very misc related to grace
>> 
>> Very nicely put, Laura -  and I have to say that although I'm one of those who prefer the "progressive-knotting-into" approach,  I can sympathize with those who enjoy the "anarchistic, exuberant splatter painting"  effect.   
>> 
>> I guess I read for the ideas although I certainly don't expect anything really new - just new twists or points of view  (hopefully).   Other times I read for the style and structure and literary stuff.  Sometimes I read for the plot - sometimes I read just to escape my lonely head. 
>> 
>> A few of my year's best reads: 
>> 
>> New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani
>> Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift
>> Galore by Michael Crummey
>> The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev  (an older book)
>> The Agent Esmeralda by Don Delillo (short stories)
>> Reamde by Neal Stephenson
>> The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander 
>> 
>> Bekah
>> 
>> 
>> On Nov 27, 2012, at 10:05 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>> 
>>> ATD is, in part, a novel about anarchy, but it doesn't have the anarchistic feel of GR - not talking about structure, per se, but the whole feel of the novel (or at least the way it made me feel as a reader); like looking at a giant splatter painting that, as one steps back and reflects, has more meaning than its haphazard execution would suggest it had.  In GR, Pynchon uses the phrase "a progressive knotting into" to describe an evacuation.  This actually seems to be a good description of his approach in ATD: systematically bringing together disparate elements (story-lines) to achieve some cohesive whole (grace? A picture of the beginnings of the war whose end is depicted in GR?).  I prefer the anarchistic, exuberant splatter-painting of GR, but I can sympathize with those who like the progressive-knotting-into approach.
>>> 
>>> Laura
>>> -----Original Message----- 
>>> From: David Morris 
>>> Sent: Nov 27, 2012 12:48 PM 
>>> To: Paul Mackin 
>>> Cc: P-list 
>>> Subject: Re: Very misc related to grace 
>>> 
>>> I think he was exploring ideas, theories, philosophy in GR.  Probably less so in his later works.  I don't think he's just being "entertaining" in GR.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> Yes. The "Big Ideas" are means to ends--the ends being the inventive portrayal of the uncanny, the weird, the divine, the unknown,  not to exclude the scary and funny.
>>> 
>>> He doesn't write philosophical fiction or novels of ideas--he's not asking what is the purpose of our existence,  the meaning of life.
>>> 
>>> He might well have said they fly toward grace or somethin'.  It would have sounded too flippant but it wouldn't have changed anything.
>>> 
>>> So long as it works for him, and it pretty much has.
>>> 
>>> P
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 11/26/2012 9:10 PM, David Morris wrote:
>>>> Well said, Alice!
>>>> 
>>>> Paradox, Koans & Pretzil Logic R Pynchon.  Yin Yang is about all the blends of duality, rarely the opposites alone.  His BIG ideas aren't polemic, they're exploratory.
>>>> 
>>>> David Morris
>>>> 
>>>> On Monday, November 26, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>> Pynchon likes to take on the BIG ideas (Entropy, History, Virginity,
>>>> Gravity...Free Will & Grace) and turn them into pretzil logics or
>>>> force them into Koans that paradoxically turn out to be ironic book of
>>>> the dead (allusive parables) dead ends.
>>>> 
>>>> Now, I'm no expert on Grace, or Pynchon, but I suspect that his use of
>>>> Grace is an example of the propensity described above, and
>>>> specifically the paraodoxical BIG idea Grace/Free Will.
>>>> 
>>>> Why Pynchon does this or to what end is open to lotz of readings. I
>>>> suspect that he does it because he is lazy; he re-worksd old material
>>>> over and over again.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>