Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Madeleine Maudlin]

I thought I might enjoy an attempt at cross-textual interpretation, and so
I stepped around my desk, picked up Against, sat back down here at the
comp, and opened at random, to see if I could be insightful.

Page 538.  Which is kind of annoying in itself, because obviously it goes *
against* my personality to open a book randomly in the middle section--I
normally exclude all middles, religiously, logickly.  The Mad Dog himself,
being, in his younger years anyway, a logico-religico-fanaticus.

Hegel, Mad Dog, and that wizard of drunkenness himself, the Sorrow of
Quaternia...part of a book once penned and laying now in the d igitarian
hind-quarters of a malfunctioning laptop deals with Hegel's discovery of
the Absolute Spirit after meeting *the Cybe* in a monastery in the Urals
with some monks and Holderlin--whose various punnames associated with the
Rainbow I'll save you, because I'd have to invent them now but just
glancing at his name you can see it would be *fecund*.

Absolute Spirit could well have something to do with the Pleiades, wouldn't
take much imagination, by which I mean insight, to make that cosmic leap, I
don't know who Pleiade is in Against but I see the name on 538 but Eco
gives birth to one of the great bar names in all literratour from Pendulum,
The Pleiades, swinging from star to

Not too far a stumble from that barstool across the galactic way is that
Mad Dog himself, the Dog Star, the Anubis at his feet, the dog circling
at-guard the feet of Anu.

Which will remind ourselves no doubt of that wicked and recondite dream of
Gilgamesh, what has fallen from the sky, what has fallen to the earth, the
Gilga so drawn to it but yet for all his Godlike genes he can not seem to
move it, like a white dwarf anubis it stays at his feet.


On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 12:21 AM, Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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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