Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[alice wellintown]

Yeah, sentimental and flabby. And? You prefer something else. Agtd is full
of sentimental and flabby passages, yes, and lists, and characters, with
stupid names, and asshole tightening silent but deadly fart jokes and songs
that any sober scholar wouldn't be caught dead singing to a serious
symposium...and...? You prefer Updike and Roth, Philip, not the better and
bolder Roth, author of call it sleep, a sentmental and flabby masterpiece.
 Maybe you shouldn't bother, with so many other books at hand, if you hate
sentimental and flabby, and you'll have to put up with pages upon pages,
days upon days of it when and if you read Pynchon, maybe he ain't your cup
of tea or glass of single malt.
On Thursday, September 13, 2012, wrote:

> Must disagree.  One can be sentimental about disappointment, about
> anything.  This is flabby writing.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wed, Sep 12, 2012 11:18 pm
> Subject: RE: Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff
>
>  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
> >
>
>
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