pynchon in American Gods; American Gods in me

[Markekohut]

Shakespeare drew on no work of the fictional imagination more than Ovid....Montaigne, Plutarch for non-fic ( w Hollinshed's history)

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On May 16, 2013, at 7:03 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> JT> how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry
> us. how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry
> us.
> 
> I like your characterization of AG, and especially this: not a bad capsule
> characterization of Joseph Campbell, incidentally.
> 
> Track down a copy of Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_Service), in which three English and
> Welsh teenagers reenact (as their parents did) a triangle from the
> Mabinogion. The book is nominally "young adult" -- sure, so are Huckleberry
> Finn and Animal Farm and Romeo and Juliet. Short, pared-down, more dialogue
> than exposition or description. Ambiguity as intense and central as that in
> The Turn of the Screw: almost everything that happens could be magic and
> undead 800-year-old spirits, or could just as well be stressed-out,
> fantasizing/hallucinating kids behaving in ways unconsciously learned from
> their parents. Explain it with archetypes, or just admit it: a myth is
> living them.
> 
> If something more "adult" and "sophisticated" and "realist" (heh) is
> required, Robertson Davies' splendid Deptford trilogy
> (http://www.amazon.com/Deptford-Trilogy-Robertson-Davies/dp/0140147551)
> covers a lot of the same ground, with explicitly Jungian gloss built in.
> 
> Ovid's Metamorphoses is the prime wellspring. There's a reason it's been
> the source -- direct or indirect -- for more Western literature and art than
> any other single classical work. Ovid knew that we can't help encountering
> (and being) Narcissus, Eurydice, Midas, Medea, Icarus, Arachne and the rest
> at transformative moments throughout our lives. Slothrop glimpsing Katje's
> "terrible Face That Is no Face", a goddess' mask..? Roger realizing that for
> postwar Jessica he will be "a mistake thank God she didn't make"..? Pure
> Actaeon and Diana.      
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
> Of Joseph Tracy
> Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 1:19 PM
> To: P-list List
> Subject: pynchon in American Gods; American Gods in me
> 
> This scene takes place after the main character has died  after 9 days tied
> to the world ash ( in honor of the murdered Odin)and is doing a review of
> his past while entering the underworld. He is remembering his mother's death
> bed and seeing himself reading a book by her bedside.
> 
> "Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to
> inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from
> the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in
> Gravity's Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother's death into London
> during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no
> excuse."
> 
> Gaiman, Neil (2011-06-21). American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition: A
> Novel (p. 421). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 
> 
> Gaiman's prose is a storyteller's. He doesn't do long complex sentences or
> formal experimentation. But he knows what he is about and American Gods is
> rather like doing a vicarious back flip off the high dive into shallow water
> and missing the concrete because shallow can get pretty deep, surprising and
> exhilarating. I'm finding it enjoyable both as escape and as a consideration
> of how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry us.
> 
> I'm just back from Okinawa and San Francisco and think I have slept off the
> jet lag. Okinawa is both different and familiar with both medieval castles
> feminist shamanism  and jet fighter bases. I was born in San Francisco and
> the geology and flora of the entire region are home but the city itself has
> always been an impenetrable mystery of immense dimensions. Still, it soothes
> me at the same time it indifferently mocks my estrangement. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>