A second on Pynchon's critical reputation

[Bekah]

I asked my NYC friend on the other list (the one who tried BE on a recommendation from me)   about the way Pynchon handled 9/11.    This was her answer:  

***

I think Pynchon did a decent job.   His view was the view of many of us on the Upper West Side.   We knew from television.  We knew on the day because we could see it on the streets. The people walking all the way from the WTC.  The stunned looks on everyone's faces.  The car radios turned on with the car doors open.  The buses filled to overflowing because there were no trains.

We knew when we eventually went down to the site.  The smell.  Trying to place where the stores we knew used to be.  And some of us knew because we lost someone.  I was among the fortunate.  I lost no one.  It was distant and foggy but also very real.  It made us pull everyone close.

The trauma lasted a very long time. We could not move past it for longer than I think he depicted. But Maxine was involved differently in some ways. The conspiracy theories. What she knew and understood of the days leading up to the event. How she was involved and yet not involved.  It was very personal. Everyone remembers differently.

My office was on the 7th floor of a school building on West 93rd Street,  a bit farther north than where most of the book takes place.  When I heard and finally digested (two very separate events)  what had happened (I was at a meeting with the District School Superindent when we first heard what happened and it did not penetrate--plane hit WTC building equals accident.  Continue the meeting after slight pause.  And then some time passes and another announcement--second plane hits WTC building equals what??  something outside the realm of understanding... our meeting halts..)   I go up to my office and in the hallway by my office, there is a small gated window and for some reason I look out the window and see---all the way from West 93rd Street-- I see in a distance--- an absolutely huge amount of very white smoke--and it is at that moment that I know absolutely and I run to the phone to call home to make sure everyone is okay.

***
Bek


On Oct 10, 2013, at 12:51 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Fwiw,  I mentioned BE on another list and one of the members who had never read Pynchon read it out of curiosity.   My friend has fairly good if unschooled taste in fiction,  but but her background includes a long-time and on-going involvement in NYC education,  the arts and politics - she's also Jewish and very liberal - about my grandmotherly age.    She really enjoyed the book - said P. hit upper West Side NY perfectly and I think she's interested in CoL49 but she has a lot on her plate.  She said the techie parts lost her.  Also,  she thought Maxine went with Windust out of the old "love-hate" metaphor.   I want to ask her about how P's handling of 9/11 struck her - I didn't know her then -  we met (online) in about 2005 or so.  
> 
> Like I said,  fwiw - and how I spread the word (LOL) 
> Bekah
> 
> 
> On Oct 10, 2013, at 12:39 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I, too, have long felt his reputation will grow and grow and who knows when is a prophet. My circumstantial-only reasons are,
>> yes, cultish ghetto bracketing now. [Even back in the Day, some peers would relegate to 'too difficult', 'science' stuff ala two cultures
>> divide.]
>> Learning how to read him. In the sense some have written of learning how to read Hamlet, or Poe. Melville a great US example.Cervantes too? Chekhov for his  stories, rising and rising in esteem.
>> Learnign to read in this way: Seeing better how the writer and his world spoke to-- and against--each other; the writer ahead of, yet deeply of, his time. 
>> All the writers who read him admiringly almost as if he were unquestionably necessary. So many-- with none of the mental reservations the
>> generation of taste-setting critics, like Wood, after the taste-makers of P's own time--Tanner, Poirier, Kermode--who saw his genius. Critics can have an anxiety of influence too.
>> Read about how Shakespeare was in his time seen as one of many fine theater-filling writers. Like most of any time. Very popular with the
>> History plays in England's self-appreciation but not so---Hamlet---with many of his best. Maybe always seen then as 'an upstart crow', a gifted
>> amateur who could not compete with the University-schooled writers like Ben Jonson, others. Steadily, over 400 years, he was seen
>> as "first among equals" of his time.....then as Shakespearean. (this history was excerpted years ago in Harper's or The Atlantic, this latter, I think.)
>> 
>> P.S For some, BLEEDING EDGE will rise in their esteem, I suggest. I know two good readers, one a Pynchon scholar, who have already raised
>> their opinion of the book.
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> From: Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
>> To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> 
>> Cc: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 10:21 AM
>> Subject: RE: Review: Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge" (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)
>> 
>>> Very much agreed on the second quotation, although I suppose Auerbach could retreat behind “not IMMEDIATELY apparent.” If one thing above all else unites GR, M&D, AtD, and the flashback elements of V. and CoL49 and Vineland, it’s the continuity and contemporaneity of what was “urgent” in their epochs.
>> 
>> Yes. My own feeling has long been that the passage of time will surely see Pynchon's reputation improve. Right now, he's regarded as a cult author, notable only for post-modernist gimmicks and whacky conspiracy theories. Later - and I'm not willing or able to say when exactly, but of course it will be after he has passed away - he will (like Dickens, Hitchcock, etc. before him) be 'discovered' by the mainstream and will thus become more culturally 'important'. 
>> 
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> 
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