Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[Rich]

Could that be because the images are glimpsed
in transit, from the road so to speak? Bit of a stretch I admit

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 12, 2012, at 4:07 PM, malignd at aol.com wrote:

> Must disagree.  Although this is rich in images, it reads to me very sentimental and self-consciously poetic.  The girls the boys the chickens the hogs and heifers the farms the towns the blue birds, the Lizas and Chastinas etc. -- all straining-to-be-evocative plurals.  Not one observation of a single concrete image. 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
> To: 'David Morris' <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Cc: 'pynchon -l' <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wed, Sep 12, 2012 10:27 am
> Subject: RE: Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff
> 
> 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.
> 
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