Science Against the Day Labor

[David Morris]

Bekah wants to blame the reader for her/his lack of interest in near
time-space.
Alice thinks the lack of interest resides with the author evidenced by the
product.

I vote w Alice, mostly here.

David Morris

On Tuesday, April 16, 2013, Bekah wrote:

> I was thinking a similar thing about distance,  but from the pov of the
> reader.  To someone in Kasane, Botswana TRP's California books might be
> really exotic.  To someone in California, circa 2006 parts of the pastiche
> of AtD are exotic.  To anyone reader the experience of Slothrop is exotic.
>  The natives and Jesuits sections of M&D  are probably some of the most
> exotic stuff TPR has written.    So to someone in almost any downtown area
> in the  US  the first page of BE is not going to feel the same distance as
> he will reading some page from the middle of V. or any other non-California
> Pynchon book.  (That said,  I really enjoyed Vineland but it was my first
> Pynchon so …)
>
> *
> Also,  how in the world can we tell where a book which starts out on a
> normal spring day in NYC will not end up in the labyrinthian sewer and
> Starbucks home-offices of unemployed Wall Street techies?     Look to
>  Pattern Recognition possibly with a political bend. ?
>
> Bekah
>
>
>
> On Apr 16, 2013, at 1:42 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> 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
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