Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Michael Bailey]

bandwraith has shared an example - prairie in the sleeping bag

not just to rich, but may i pose a general request - to those of the 'GR
was the peak' persuasion and others -

it would be really interesting to read specific examples of the type of
excellence embodied in GR, set with (or against) passages from a later book
that might be considered cognate in one way or another...

with a commentary as to the subjective difference in reaction, how they
were a falling-off or a development

-- and perhaps also, one's reasoning about why  (if any...i myself don't
always have reasons for liking or disliking, i started out liking The Wire,
eg, but found myself to a certain extent barfing on it, taken as a whole,
for reasons which i have no plans to verbalize - although i sympathize with
Ishmael Reed's outrage about the way it, and shows of its ilk, serve a
master narrative (pun intended) about black neighborhoods and culture)


----my own humble offering of GR vs other...

kirghiz light - tchitcherine's business in that part of the world is
explained, the glottal stops, the magic of the alphabet (graffiti appear -
'kill the police commissioner' - and somebody does!)
-- a rapid pace is set up, arcane references and a bit of gallows humor
sustain it, and it suits the depiction of Tchitcherine's participation in
forced development - then the change of pace, they ride out into the
desert, hang out with people whose tribal solidarity is still in place and
whose rituals center around love...where after dinner and qumys and
flirting we can settle down and listen to the story of something beyond the
world...


now in Vineland, you have Zoyd trying to get his money from landscaping
contractor Marquis de Sod, you have the marquis himself's backstory as a
Brecht specialist who took some acid and wound up as a career changer...
quickly, knowingly developed with an expert touch like that of a pro
basketball player on the ball (a simile made in a different scene in
Vineland) -- a surprisingly vivid picture developed passim, skipped like a
stone tossed on a lake...

you have a pun as good as, perhaps better than, "for demille young
fur-henchmen'...

you have the spouse/secretary, isn't she, dropping humor like 'more
garnishes than a salad' and suchlike
and you have Zoyd sharing a buddy-ness with the marquis that is not so very
different from the tribal awareness that Tchitcherine has to ride out to
get a taste of...ie the development of a gemeinschaft consciousness...right
there in the horrible garrison state that America - we can't honestly deny
it - has become by 1984...

you have the meteor, set up as decor beside someone's pool -- memento mori,
reminder of the constant possibility of death from above...

-- all of which sets up, more expertly and in more depth (i'd argue, if i
were an arguing kind of guy) than ever before, yes imho better than GR, a
scene in which the liberatory impulse of (inter alia) such movements as the
French and Communist revolutions founder against the hostile reality of the
landscape (this is akin to the purport of the Long Sentence in V. in the
Sudwest chapter too, talking about ad hoc arrangements among humans however
inequitable still being relatively friendly compared with the relationship
between humans and their environment) -


how we do go on!  "such larks"
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