This week in pointless trivia.

Sun Oct 6 19:53:31 CDT 2013

Yeah, why read anything besides GR......

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 6, 2013, at 8:17 PM, 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.
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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
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>> >
>> >
>> > 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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