Russian V cover

[Monte Davis]

What you said. At 14 I bounced off V., but at 17 loved (and grasped a fair
amount of) CoL49, which sent me back to V. and ensured that I'd jump at
whatever TRP did next.

Who knows what will be formative? On my parents' shelves was The Most of S.
J. Perelman ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Perelman ), a big
anthology of his  magazine pieces from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. In my
mid-teens I knew hardly any of the movies, books, and magazines that fed
his satire, parody, and pastiche. And it didn't register for years that
he'd written Marx Brothers screenplays, had been close to his
brother-in-law Nathanael West, and had given Heller's Catch-22 a crucial
boost. But I was enchanted by the wordplay and agile shifts of voice. I got
a high-school friend hooked on him, too; our conversation was filled with
tropes and tags from his writing... and still is when we see each other.

Based on Pynchon's high-school juvenilia, sampled at

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays.html

I'm all but certain that he had read Perelman himself fifteen years
earlier. Be that as it may, Perelman was ideal training for my own reading
of Pynchon. Michael Wood aptly began his review of GR ":In Thomas
Pynchon's *The
Crying of Lot 49* (1966), an unlikely Jacobean tragedy is staged by a group
of California players and described in the jocular manner of S. J. Perelman
revisiting an old movie..."




On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
>
> > the age marker (to be read only after you're 18 years of age; i don't
> have a problem with that for i can't imagine anyone reading TRP _before_
> this age anyway) <
>
> My daughter, who read "Moby-Dick" in translation before she was ten, had
> her first TRP with twelve. Of "Vineland" and "Against the Day" she read
> about 150 pages in German. She liked it but realized the limits of her
> understanding. Four years later, when she spent a school year in Estonia,
> she picked up a copy of the original "Vineland" in a Tallinn bookstore,
> started to read and finished it in between days with enthusiasm. It was her
> breakthrough to American literature in original. Now she plans to study
> English (along with history). This morning she came back from her last
> class trip which had led her to Dublin. And you know what she brought home
> with her? A copy of "Ulysses"! Of course we have one in the house, but she
> wants to have her own.
> It's not bad not to understand everything as a young reader. Me I profited
> a lot from my juvenile misreadings.
>
>
> On 13.06.2014 10:25, Max Nemtsov wrote:
>
>> this is how it will look like: http://spintongues.wordpress.
>> com/2014/06/13/pearls-after/
>> sorry for the poor quality but you've got the idea
>>
>> the gray stamp in the lower left corner is the censorship stamp that is
>> demanded by the new russian anti-bad-words law: apart from the age marker
>> (to be read only after you're 18 years of age; i don't have a problem with
>> that for i can't imagine anyone reading TRP _before_ this age anyway), it
>> should (by law) now contain the inscription "Contains Unprintable Abuse"
>> (something like this, for the russian state duma, as everyone knows by now,
>> is comprised of clinical idiots who can't distinguish between obscene
>> words, explicit lyrics, foul language and, well, abuse). to the credit of
>> the publisher, they designed the stamp in such manner that it reads rather
>> Yoda-like: Abuse Contains (upside down) Unprintable
>>
>> and yes, it must be sold sealed in cellophane
>>
>> from your beleaguered translator
>> Mx
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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