A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[robertberg5125 at comcast.net]

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 <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>Sent: Nov 29, 2012 10:31 AM
>To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>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
><alicewellintown at gmail.com> 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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