Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[Rich]

PS

Also liked the fact that he got around to referencing the Midwest

Rich

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 12, 2012, at 10:27 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> Less likely, I agree. But oh, when he does (AtD p. 71):
> 
> "They pushed out into morning fields that went rolling all the way to every
> horizon, the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring,
> and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and codfish, and
> the sharks tended to operate out of Chicago or Kansas City-the farm-houses
> and towns rising up along the journey like islands, with girls in every one,
> Merle couldn't help but notice, the extravagantly kept promises of island
> girls, found riding the electric trolley-lines that linked each cozy city to
> each, or serenely dealing cards in the riverside saloons, slinging hash in
> cafeterias you walked downstairs into out of the redbrick streets, gazing
> through doorscreens in Cedar Rapids, girls at fences in front of long fields
> in yellow light, Lizas and Chastinas, girls of the plains and of
> profusely-flowered seasons that may never quite have been, cooking for
> threshers far into and sometimes all through the nights of harvest, watching
> the streetcars come and go, dreaming of cavalry boys ridden off down the
> pikes, sipping the local brain tonic, tending steaming wash tubs full of
> corn ears at the street corners with radiant eyes ever on the move, out in
> the yard in Ottumwa beating a rug, waiting in the mosquito-thick evenings of
> downstate Illinois, waiting by the fencepost where the bluebirds were
> nesting for a footloose brother to come back home after all, looking out a
> window in Albert Lea as the trains went choiring by."
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
> Of David Morris
> Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2012 9:35 AM
> To: alice wellintown
> Cc: pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff
> 
> I believe you re mostly correct in these statements.  Pynchon can still
> write beautiful and elaborate prose (but I think he's less likely to make
> page-length sentences as in GR).  But I got the distinct feeling in AtD that
> it was in the service of not much.  It almost felt at times that he was
> imitating himself or following a formula.
> 
> David Morris
> 
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 5:11 AM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> So, I suspect that it is not the prose style, surely superior in the 
>> elder P of AGTD, that turns GR-Fanboys off. It is other things, like 
>> characters and themes and settings and, dare I say, plots. But it is 
>> not the style, not the words and sentences and imagery and the craft. 
>> No way! AGTD is superior hand at work. No serious reader or writer can 
>> deny that.
>