Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Don Higgins]

Hawthorne wasn't the only novelist to turn P's ancestors into fiction. See The Bay Path by J. G. Holland, though no one reads Holland anymore.

--- On Wed, 9/12/12, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 11:22 AM

On 9/11/2012 2:14 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>> 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.
> 
I practically memorized The House of the Seven Gables in the eleventh grade.  Our English teacher insisted.  It would be on the final--in detail.  No problem for a one-book-a-year person like myself.  It WAS a memorable experience.  Might have got me on to the pleasures of reading.

When TP arrived on the scene a couple decades later, his name had a familiar sound, but I didn't consciously make the connection.  In the meantime I'd at least learned that Phoebe isn't pronounced Feeb.

P

P


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