Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[alice wellintown]

> Any discussion here  of TP's actual writing makes me shudder with pleasure.
> I don't care a fig what he THINKS, or BELIEVES, or what books he likes.


anyone read the creepy article about a journalist stalking Grigori
Perelman, sleeping in his car outside the mathamatician's falt,
following him and his mother on a walk in the park? Few, one thinks of
P's old college roomate, a few creepy journalists, some unibomber and
wanda and salinger slips into silly specualtions, but few have made
biographical criticism, for there is little to go on, despite the fact
that P makes his family tree a Slothropian root, and the fact that
Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables crosses the scarlet A with a
Pyncheon,  and  other facts and bags on the cartoon, and what the
person thinks or believes is not what any here or in the P-Industry
have an interest in, so when we say P thinks or P believes or P this
or that, we are talking about the P that is our readings of books
written by the author we know little about and don't as Paul says,
care to know. What matters if we know biographical facts that
contradict our readings? What matter if the author were to caim his
reading better than ours? It doesn't matter. The books are ours now.
Books, like History, as Wicks sez, belong to the people.