This week in pointless trivia.

[rich]

why even read this new drivel when u have GR? oh how i pine for another
margherita erdmann. who u gonna compare? yashmeen? frenesi? the new mom? plz
gonna take awhile to forgive him


On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 6:46 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> What a long thoughtful post. Thanks.
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> Sent from my iPad
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> On Oct 6, 2013, at 4:33 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> > Mark Kohut sez:Some of us are waiting for the Group Read to try to show
> aesthetic value. Stating it without pointing to the text is just more
> opinionizing.
> > Some of us have even been told by some others that not much could be
> said or pointed to that could change a negative first reading. So it goes.
> >
> >
> > Ouch, Mark. I take your point. The fact that I said that nothing can
> change the fact that I didn't enjoy the book, certainly doesn't mean that
> I'm not interested in learning what others here have to say about it, or to
> learn about connections others have made that I've missed.
> >
> > I was opining to my husband last night, after we'd just finished
> watching the movie Gravity 3D (2013) (which we both hated), that it's often
> much easier to explain why you hate a movie (in this case: cornball
> dialogue, poorly-crafted characters, miniscule plot, cheesy theme, visual
> effects that didn’t draw you in, questionable physics), than why you love
> it. The latter tend to hit one on a personal, visceral level that's hard to
> delineate, while over-analyzing and ripping to shreds a bad movie is one of
> the great modern pastimes.
> >
> > But I'd have to say that the opposite holds true with Pynchon. I could
> go on for hours obsessing over every bit that I loved from his earlier
> works, but what I dislike most about Bleeding Edge fell into two
> categories: things that I felt were lacking (so that I could hardly point
> to them), and things that hit me on a visceral level.
> >
> > Of what was lacking, well, there wasn’t a single passage that made me
> want to read it aloud to my long-suffering family members, or that sent me
> on an emotional/intellectual reverie, or made me marvel at an amazing
> connection that I’d never considered (such as ionic bonds and fascism!), or
> that even made me want to rush to my computer to do a google search. Not
> one. That’s pretty bad for a Pynchon book. Of course, others here may have
> had a different experience, and I’m very open to hearing about what others
> considered the best passages in the book.Laura
> >
> > SPOILERS FOLLOW:
> >
> > Of the things that hit my guts in a negative way, that’s, of course, an
> entirely personal reaction, that I don’t expect others to share with me.
> But here are some:
> >
> > I mentioned in a previous post that Chapter 29 offended me, in its
> haphazard depiction of the events of 9-11. Well, it really did. If Pynchon
> felt it was too emotionally charged to write about, and decided to give it
> a perfunctory treatment (“And there it all is. Bad turns to worse.”), then
> why did he bother to set this novel in NYC in 2001? As a matter of fact, I
> thought his more surreal treatment of it in ATD (the city under attack
> sequence – don’t have the book nigh) captured the whole thing much more
> eloquently, and was one of my favorite sequences in the book.
> > I’m also offended by the idea that some reviewers have put forth, that
> this is some sort of novel of manners about present-day NYC, when in
> reality, it’s a description of a microcosm (the techie culture) that’s
> known only to the people who inhabit it. No one can write a novel about NYC
> without appending the famous Naked City disclaimer. On a personal note, my
> family has lived in this city for just over a hundred years, when my
> grandparents emigrated here from Russia (more or less). I am a New Yorker,
> no, I’m a fucking New Yorker, and I spring from the microcosm that consists
> of NY lefty Jews. I’m not saying this makes my view of the book more valid,
> but it explains why so much of it pisses me off.
> >
> > I’ve grown up in this community, and I can tell you that Maxine and her
> sister are not remotely the typical outcome. I’m not saying that no Jewish
> lefty family has ever spawned a gun-toter, or a corporate wife, but I’ve
> never heard of this, even anecdotally (friend of a friend kind of thing).
> I’ve known the Long Island variety of Jew that’s strayed more from the
> lefty politics (or, more often, descended from non-lefty Jews). But even
> among my less politicized LI cousins, I can tell you that almost 100% of
> the daughters of the Jewish left (those who haven’t drifted to the side, by
> virtue of mental illness or mood disorders) are teachers, therapists,
> healthcare workers, social workers, daycare workers, professor, writers,
> artists, actresses, folklorists, etc. etc. etc. Maxine and her sib are
> anomalies, not examples, and it fucking pisses me off when anyone says
> otherwise.
> >
> > I’m also getting pretty pissed off with Pynchon (who, otherwise, I
> consider one of the greatest authors of all time) for this
> Frenesi/Lake/Maxine/Tallis (and if the latter isn’t specifically fingered
> as Jewish, then why did he give her a Jewish name?)
> lefty-woman-who-fucks-fascists trope. Where does this come from? Where are
> the examples, and why does he keep portraying the daughters of the left
> this way? And why all the shopping and pole-dancing crap. Is this supposed
> to convince us that Pynchon understands women? It’s insulting and sexist.
> Enough already!
> >
> > I liked Oedipa Maas, who came across as the Everywoman/man. If Bleeding
> Edge is really meant as an updating of COL49, as I see it, then Pynchon’s
> opinion of women has taken a downturn. Oedipa was the intelligent
> investigator, whose reactions to what she uncovered seemed genuine. Maxine
> is Oedipa, genetically recombined with Doc Sportello and Lake Traverse. I
> don’t like the result.
> >
> > I will own up, as some have also said, that BE improves somewhat in the
> last 100 or so pages. But it’s too little, too late. Nothing disappoints so
> much as Maxine’s journey through the wasted remains of DeepArcher. This
> sequence had none of the magic of Oedipa’s night-time exploration of
> W.A.S.T.E. And it has none of the mind-boggling surrealism of the Kenosha
> Kid sequence in GR. It covered nothing that Tron (or even the scene in one
> of the Simpsons episodes where Homer hallucinates a virtual reality after
> eating too much chili) hadn’t covered better. And its flatness and
> directness made me think that Pynchon’s hoping for Movie #2, and is setting
> up the easy-to-follow visuals here, nothing more.
> >
> > Finally (if anyone’s actually slogged through this), where are the
> Preterite in BE? Lester the embezzler? Zach and Otis, the privileged
> private school kids? There are only two black characters in BE:  Daytona,
> who seems to exist only to remind us of the embarrassing comic-negro
> reference from early in COL49, and the messenger guy, who’s ephemeral, and
> only there to serve the rich white people. Where are the poor people? We
> don’t meet them in the quick trips Maxine makes into the boroughs. Has
> Pychon moved on, and situated himself (as Woody Allen did) firmly in the
> camp of the elite?-----Original Message-----
> >
> > From: Markekohut
> >
> >
> >
> > Some of us are waiting for the Group Read to try to show aesthetic
> value. Stating it without pointing to the text is just more opinionizing.
> > Some of us have even been told by some others that not much could be
> said or pointed to that could change a negative first reading. So it goes.
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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