Science Against the Day Labor

Thu Apr 18 23:24:15 CDT 2013

Still hoping for a latish 19th century novel, from before the period in which AtD opens, maybe post civil war, considering the rumors about a Civil War novel. If it comes, the research would have started at least as early as the second half of the 1960s. There's a letter from 1966 in which P. asks about "a good dictionary of American slang for the period 1876–1888." He had been working with "Wentworth & Flexner," but complains that they fail to provide proper context for the way the words had been used. Weisenburger mentions it in his acknowledgements to the second edition of his Companion. Maybe P. abandoned the project or maybe it's something he has put down and picked up over the years, trying to get it, a procedure he seems to have followed with M&D, which he had been working on at least as early as 1975, when he mentioned it to Candida. In any case, I was very much hoping that "Bleeding Edge" refered to is cartographic uses because only then
 could the book be a nineteenth-century novel. 

The California novels are still better than a lot of novels out there, even novels that get positive reviews from people who have given bad reviews to, well Vineland, which is the only one I can positively say this about. There problem is that they are not GR.

________________________________
From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> 
Cc: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>; alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2013 3:46 PM
Subject: Re: Science Against the Day Labor

Well I'm not going to go so far as to say that IV or the other California books (near time-space) are as incredibly good as his massive and more historical fiction (far time-space) like GR and M&D or my favorite AtD.  I just don't think the difference is because of P's lack of interest - (but it's surely not only because of the reader's lack of interest either,  as I guess I seemed to imply.) 

I think the quality of the California "trilogy" suffered because of something else - the author's patience perhaps - other things going on when he wrote CoL49 (GR)  and Vineland (M&D).  Have you noticed a pattern?    V.  then  CoL49  prior to the masterpiece of GR - total 10 years;  then Vineland prior to the masterpiece of M&D  - total 14 years,  then  10 years before the masterpiece of AtD.  Finally IV prior to (masterpiece of hopefully)  BE - total 7 years.  Still,  BE is seems to be another near time-space novel of the detective genre and I dount there's been enough time to do the intensive research,  superb development and excellent writing of the biggies.  :-(  

Bekah

On Apr 17, 2013, at 6:04 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130418/bdf66170/attachment.html>