And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

[Mark Kohut]

Those two cents worth lots more on THIS "open market".....
I agree wholeheartedly with why such books attract scholarly
attention....now, in their time......(see Ashbery too in poetry)...

two minor points: M & D and AtD WERE hugely advanced (pre-pub orders
taken) into all kinds of outlets...i bought one copy of ATD at
a NEWSSTAND in Penn station.....and from a cardboard dump display in
the front of a Chicago Borders (or B & N) as a house
present the week it was out.....

I bet they did make some mass merchandisers like Wal--Mart, Target,
Costco (but I do not know fer sure) .......but distribution there is
surely why there were so many returns...

Read about the growth of Shakespeare's reputation sometime.....I keep
wondering if Pynchon will be close to as widespread in public
consciousness in 400 years time..........on a smaller scale it has
always fascinated me to see a non-mass writer get more
popular...sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once.....(ever read or
read about the Joycean-inspired CALL IT SLEEP was published to acclaim
and limited sales...then went OP until 'rediscovered' in the sixties
and became canonical?...)

Or of course, Melville in the US and world....50 copies of Moby Dick
sold first year......HM died in neglect...then an early 1900s
rediscovery that hasn't slowed much....he another 'novelist of
ideas'''

But there is the other strain....Chaucer, some think, a greater writer
than shakespeare but......not really a writer of 'ideas', rich with
voices (and their ideas) and conceptions, etc...as he is.......
and Kai's mention of
William Carlos Williams......and others...





On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Peter M. Fitzpatrick
<petopoet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is my two cents.
>
>      I love to read Pynchon because of his absolute bravery and uninhibited
> imagination. His "ideas" are never lifeless, neutral, or abstract, but
> embodied, political, and provocative. He takes chances that remind me a
> great deal of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. I don't think Joyce was
> particularly concerned with the hoi polloi or popularity and neither he or
> Pynchon will EVER be found among the books sold in the big box stores like
> Target, WalMart, Menards, etc. (this is an American phenomenon, where the
> likes of Cussler, Grisham, Patterson, etc, are found in the far reaches of
> almost every mass-market shelf space available, with one or two copies of
> each author present, changing with each new release.)
>       There is room for this kind of literature,of course, but there are
> those of us who demand a more inventive and boundary-testing fare. Pynchon
> does manage to ascend into pure lyrical poetry that almost demands aural
> interpretation - I do enjoy listening to an audio version of "Against the
> Day". Finnegans Wake is also best read aloud and listened to. These are
> poetic voices and are suitable for analysis of their poetics.  Much like
> Bakhtin devoted his life to analyzing the poetics of Dostoyevski, there will
> be scholars devoted to studying both Joyce and Pynchon. Yes, some of this
> smacks of the academic machinery that produces English department secondary
> source reductions that misinterpret and misconstrue. But that is the nature
> of interpretation. It is polyvalent and polyphonic (ala' Bakhtin) by rights.
> There is a reason such books attract scholastic attention.
>       They are ideas, voices, conceptions; "Weltanschauungs" in short.
> Simultaneously political, historical, and philosophical, I think we
> intuitively characterize them as novels of Ideas because they last longer
> than the commercial ones, thereby resembling Plato's World of Forms, or
> Ideals. Not quite eternal, no, but of more lasting value than say, a Janet
> Evanovich # 55,  ( I have read one or two of hers, by the way.)
>
>    -Pete
>
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 4:49 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If inclusion on course syllabuses is indicative of the respect teachers
>> have for an author, than our man P is respected in the academy. His works
>> are taught at all the tier one Colleges and highest ranked Universities in
>> the US, at State Universities and Colleges,  to humanities and
>> non-humanities students.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm glad there are some out there who respect our guy.
>>>
>>> P
>>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l