Science Against the Day Labor

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Tue Apr 16 21:35:23 CDT 2013


Alice!
You are so right with this insight.  And it don't bode well for BE, I fear.

On Tuesday, April 16, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

> Isn't it the distance of the author as well? In other words, the closer P
> gets to his own space and time the weaker his narratives, characters, prose
> style, themes ... his writing and story telling. So, Mondaugen's Story, and
> the SWA chapters are by far the best of his V. novel. It's not that the
> Benny in the Navy, out of the Navy, in NY chapters are not wonderful firts
> novel stories, but the SWA, and yhe Malta chapters are much better. CL49 is
> not great. It has been made into the cannonical cul-de-sac par excellence
> by the academy, but it is top heavy with fiction-making ideas and can't and
> won't hold up. GR, of course, is a materpiece. Not perfect, but in it the
> author hits a magical note and blows the roof off the theatre/theater.
>
> That distance, not the readers, but the writers, serves Pynchon well. No?
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 10:02 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> re: BE
>
> I wonder if the folks who loved Pynchon's reconstruction of 1970 LA where
> I thought there was more of wow I remember that than wow I've never read
> anything like that before will feel about BE, NYC 2001. If you weren't
> there, will it still be as fascinating?
> fwiw.. when I started to recognize things Delillo mentions in his later
> books, small things, guys selling stuff on the street, guys I've seen alot
> with my own eyes, for example, his books became less mysterious and
> therefore not as interesting.
>
> I hope that doesn't happen with BE but the excerpt would lead one to
> believe is another light-hearted attempt, dialogue heavy--you know here
> kids will be ok and she'll have many a scrape, and be plucky and annoying.
>
> what I find sad is reading it, Pynchon has moved closer to the mainstream
> writers. Coover's book sounds alot more interesting:
>
> *The Brunist Day of Wrath*, Robert Coover's long-awaited, massive sequel
> to his award-winning debut, is a committed and committing, awe-inspiring,
> humbling look at fundamentalisms of all sorts in a world where religion
> competes with money, common sense, despair, and reason; stranded in their
> midst is beauty, is art.
>
> *"Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so . . . " The
> young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins, candidate for the West Condon
> Presbyterian ministry, whushing along through the rain-drenched
> countryside, the bus nosing out of lush farmlands and dark wet forests onto
> the gently undulant and somewhat barren coal basin that is to be, if his
> interview goes well, his new home, finds himself meditating upon his
> church's Great Awakening—a great disaster, as he was taught (he himself is
> just awaking from a thick early-morning doze, his head fallen against the
> bus window, muddled dreams of collegial dispute)—and upon the sequence of
> disruptive church schisms and rationalist heresies that followed upon the
> Awakening's excessive evangelism through the convulsions of the American
> nineteenth century, so shaped by Presbyterian thought (and, one might say,
> confused by it as well), out of which musings he hopes to craft his
> inaugural sermon, and humming meanwhile that children's hymn of simple
> faith . . . *
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 6:52 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Readers of Pynchon works know that his first novel includes the incredible
> story of an engineer who travels to Africa. That story, and the astounding
> short, "The Secret Integration" are satires of the use/abuse, and
> ultimately, the disaterous failure of science and math to plumb the
> complexities of life and to use its abstractions to order and control, to
> silence, and make a pornography of,  the beautiful songs of Earth.
>
> So how, in P's development did we get to GR and Blicero. Well, we need to
> look into CL49. The inventor, the scientist, the inventor, the
> bureaucrat-engineer.
>
> Before we do, let me say that I was glad to see P take up Labor in
> Vinland. I had argued that this was his theme, but until VL showed up, it
> was a difficult thesis to support. But I was, as were many, disappointed in
> this work, as I have been in all of his california works, and, as I suspect
> I will be in BE.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If God does not, as Milton sez in his famous sonnet, exact day labor light
> denied, this hasn't prevented men from exacting day labor from men, light,
> and even life, denied. Science was not much around to make safe the lives
> of the working men and women we read about in AGTD. Empirical practice was
> the method adopted, trial and selection, the railroad, the mines, the
> textile mills, these had not science, and many lives were lost because
> safety
>
>
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