This week in pointless trivia.

[David Morris]

I'm barely 1/3 into BE, but your question begs me to ask you if you have
read Gravity's Rainbow.

On Sunday, October 6, 2013, David Robsom wrote:

> For those who didn't enjoy BE, is your dissatisfaction perhaps linked to
> the temporal setting? Treatment of 11 September aside (objectionable to
> some maybe for obvious reasons), do you feel that the time period doesn't
> lend itself to being a great P. novel?
>
> Pynchon is great at capturing cultural trends, but American culture wasn't
> exactly thriving in the early 00s. Did the banality of the moment bleed
> into the book? Did 9/11 expose us as vapid? If BE is a cultural critique,
> it's a pretty harsh criticism. If that's P.'s goal, maybe he wants to
> generate these feeling of distaste.
>
> I dunno too much.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 6, 2013, at 20:17, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> 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 f
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131006/336efaca/attachment.html>