BEER Group Read. Chap 2. Reg Despard, Artist?!

[Mark Kohut]

My point about DEATH in the book is set against an admitted steretype of pomo fiction that it often swims in our wretched culture to
show that wretched culture......but in BE, as in GR, P has DEATH in a story shaped like a modernism story (modernism detective story
anyway).
 
It is not GR in most ways but it ain't only the story of sitcoms as life....

From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 10:33 PM
Subject: Re: BEER Group Read. Chap 2. Reg Despard, Artist?!



Sez Mark (amid a plethora of good  points re modernism and Pynchon precursors etc al) 

>
> I mean there is DEATH in this book, right? Not just kitsch.....there is worldwide financial manipulation that sure seems to speak
> to the world's REAL recent past. 

With all due respect to NY and New Yorkers, GR's setting, wwii, was so full of death that all the attendant horrors of 9-11 would fit in a corner of one bombing raid or offensive and not alter the picture much...my point is not to minimize the horrors of 9-11 - I'm not an animal - but to note that Pynchon has talked about death before!  Ww2, the big one!  Everything almost any new Yorker went thru from 9/11/01 to 9/11/2002 would be considered a fairly easy year by the average European between 1939-45. If that is an exaggeration - which I'm not sure...then definitely the average Russian or Japanese...
His take then and now includes the following points that I've noted 
A) some people are making money off of this action (but see Eigenvalue in V. "No conspiracy but random caries.")
B) it's not that easy to find steady work after leaving Maggie's farm, as Ken Kesey wrote, but interesting to follow the tale of those who "try in [their] own way to be free" 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131017/6729f749/attachment.html>