Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[Paul Nightingale]

Hardly sentimental, I think. The passage invokes disappointment, a desire to
be elsewhere, doing something else. The ‘footloose brother’ is the one who
escaped. And you have to consider the preceding exchange between Merle and
Dally.

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of malignd at aol.com
Sent: 12 September 2012 21:07
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

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.