Misc. on Pynchon via Eliot

[Mark Kohut]

As it was, he created another in his later poetry, allowing complex
webs of imagery to burn themselves out so as to make space not just
for contemplative silence but for an acceptance of the prosaic yet
unique present - the "annunciation" of the particular moment.
---------see TRP everywhere, esp AtD (and L49)-MK
The young Eliot is in many ways as absorbed by Dante as he is by
Laforgue, and it is a longer-lasting imprint.---highlighted for Monte.

"Think of it---M & D---like a movie"---Bekah's aphoristic
insight.....and read 'rush of details' below and try NOT to think of
GR. --MK

Crawford touches very briefly on one of the most illuminating passages
for grasping Eliot's poetic vision when he describes the poet reading
the film-maker and critic Jean Epstein's La Poésie d'aujourd'hui in
1921. The linking of the modern poet's sensibility with the aesthetic
of film is a striking insight, anticipating some of Walter Benjamin's
ideas about film as the characteristic art form of late modernity. And
if we think of Eliot's poetic voice in practically all his early
verse, it suddenly makes sense to read them as "filmic" - stills,
close-ups, slow motion, fades, cross-cutting of scenes, the
alternation of distant with close views, and so on. Epstein wrote of
the "rush of details" in film; it is possible to see Eliot's
fragmented poetic world as one of cinematic succession, neither
continuous nor simply disjointed, but challenging the reader to follow
and make his or her own sense as the time of representation elapses.

It would be intriguing to see how much of this survives in the later
Eliot: Geoffrey Grigson thought that "Journey of the Magi" (1927) read
like a despatch from an expedition to the Himalayas, and it is not
difficult to hear it as a voice-over for a dreamlike succession of
pictures.-----AtD and M & D?

Even the Quartets is strongly marked by a similar cinematic idiom at
significant moments - the pool filling in the light, the leaves
rustling with the hidden children, the river's cargo, the flickering
light of the bombers over London.

The above from this review of a new biography:
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/01/new-ts-eliot-biography-shows-how-bruising-home-life-led-poetic-breakthrough
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l