Misc. on Pynchon via Eliot

[Mark Kohut]

For some new to the list who have not been through here some of the history
of Eliot's known influence on TRP:

On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 5:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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