Bleeding Edge - audio

[Charles Albert]

Working my way through Possession at the moment. After some initial qualms
about whether I cared enough about Ash and LaMotte to wade through the
stanzas (the Romantics have never been a personal fave), epics, fairy tales
and petty bickering, I have begun to appreciate the stratagems and themes.

Love the allusions to Blackadder, and Pynchon. Was particularly struck by
the confluences with the latter in LaMotte's Melusina. there is an
extensive  treatment of those "agents" who shuttle between the temporal and
perpetual, and make frequent appearances in Pynchon's works.

And I'll make yet another pitch on behalf of Ozick, whose Messiah of
Stockholm has long been an object of adoration.

love,
cfa


On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Joan Didion is very good!   I feel as though I have not read nearly enough
> by her.
>
> But I don't think *most* serious women authors look that much to Pynchon
> for influence,  but rather (or also) to writers like A.S. Byatt
> (Possession),  Cynthia Ozick (The Shawl),  Toni Morrison (early works),
>  Shirley Hazzard (The Great Fire/ Transit of Venus),  Zadie Smith (On
> Beauty).  Maybe also Margaret Atwood or Jane Smiley.  (keeping myself to
> living authors).
>
> I recently read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - it's her best to
> date,  puts me in mind of Zadie Smith.
>
> Bekah
>
> On Aug 20, 2013, at 6:00 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > So, on the females that P may have influenced, and on that fog faded
> passage at the close of IV, that restless lass out on the road in a
> stinray, I think of Joan Didion. Yeah, and I think that P could take some
> lessons there. And her essays on the fog, the wind, on California....
> >
> >
> >
> http://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/joan-didions-1969-corvette-stingray/
> >
> > On Tuesday, August 20, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
> > You can't be serious. The closing passage of V. or of "Mondaugan's
> > Story", of "The Secret Integration", of GR, of M&D, of AGTD, but not
> > of those Brady Bunched books, made for the stoner nostalgiac who rides
> > thru the fog that blends with the kool smoke when he rolls up the
> > window and tunes into the radio vibes and joins in the sing along
> > jingles or slouches slothfully, a Thanatoid veteran of the Tube wars
> > who California dreams himself out on the shoulder of the Big Sur gone
> > west young man then veers south toward the boarder where perhaps a
> > blonde mermaid in a vet, a hippie bus, maybe even a cop on a
> > motorbike, just deciding to be cool this time, whatever...fades
> > away...and finds the America that was always there, just under the
> > dust in the back seat of a used car on Lot 49.
> >
> > Give me a rambling,  swollen, 1,085 page disaster – what Michiko
> > Kakutani calls “a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story,
> > pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being
> > illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex”...give me
> > what is “Pynchonesque” – that thing that makes Wood mad, And keep the
> > family portraits on your wall, and let the yarns spin and fray and
> > fray and..., rage, rage, Thomas Pynchon, rage agains the night and
> > rage against the day.
>
>
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