Bleeding Edge - A Rolling Assessment

[Bekah]

Welcome back,  Robin -  still in Fresberg?  

Bekah

On Sep 25, 2013, at 9:30 PM, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> The first three novels were read 1979-1981. There's the huge anticipatory for the next thing. I got Vineland the week of issue at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, now defunct. It appeared some time in the general vicinity of Judi Bari getting her ass blown up, thought it was mighty relevant at the time. It was another one of TRP's books that left me feeling like the author had been stalking me much as VCoL49 did. But then again, he seemed to be everywhere I was. Mason and Dixon was picked up at Moe's, Berkeley,  a day or two before the "street date'. Absorbing that book coincided with a major nervous breakdown and joining the P-List, not necessarily in that order. For a period of about four years I was trashed. When Against the Day came out in November of 2006, my Father had died the previous July. I was working at Borders—now defunct. Borders got the book a week or so prior to the street date, I took a copy home asap. When Inherent Vice appeared, I had been fired from Borders. Got a copy pre-publication anyway. All these connections with book stores, book culture. all blown as of 2013.
> 
> And now, disconnected from bookstores, now working for the IRS. I order Bleeding Edge from Amazon, it shows up a week late. So I read every review. Spoilers galore and a obvious pattern emerges. The negative reviews? NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist. The further to the left, the more positive the review, the farther to the 1%, the worse. Not surprising. But the book itself . . .
> 
> It arrives yesterday. I'm about 60 pages in. This seems affectless, like it was written on autopilot. There's jokes, but I'm not laughing. I did what I did to defend I.V. in the group read. it was one of those situations where I recognized enough of what the author was pointing to. It was like old home week. But this New York City must be a species of metaphor, this dialog must be some sort of a code, 'casue I'm not getting it. Left, right or center, as  writing qua writing, thus far, this is the worst Pynchon I've absorbed. Must be something about the city . . .-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l