Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[alice wellintown]

with only a bit of hyperbole, the greatest story in american english
is Bartleby.
On 9/13/12, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Alice,
>
> Which of Melville's books were you referring to as the "greatest work in
> English"?
>
> Thanks,
>
> kd
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:01 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com
>> wrote:
>
>>
>> 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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>