Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[Joseph Tracy]

Disagree, a flow of precise and evocative images linked by a shared mood and desire. All those girls in real places longed for and  passed in the passing light. 
On Sep 13, 2012, at 6:04 PM, MalignD at aol.com 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 
> > 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.
> 
> 
>