Science Against the Day Labor

[Lemuel Underwing]

yeah I think that was probably for Against the Day as he was writing them
sort of together wasn't he? I remember reading something from the early 80s
that mentioned both M&D and AtD


On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm going to repeat, just cause I got nothing else to say, that I would
> think he used this for AGAINST THE DAY. ....slang usually spreads most
> after it is codified; codification means wider usage.
>
> Dickens' Scrooge, for example. Pynchon's own first OED citation for
> "shrink", for example,
> From 1967 but used by all of us since.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Apr 19, 2013, at 12:24 AM, Don Higgins <bencanard2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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