We were all right....Mason & Dixon

[John Bailey]

There were lots of successful group reads in the past.

I blame the changing culture of the internet. Back then there just
wasn't that much to do online, so more people could spend an hour or
three with a book and a browser and a leisurely mind.

Of course I'm romanticising but in the global shopping mall that the
Deep Archer and most of the web has become, the P-List is a rag and
bone shop. If we had more funny quizzes, lists like the Six Most
Amazing Ways Pynchon Will Improve Your Sex Life, ways to tag each
other in emails, ability to autogenerate our favourite P characters as
avatars, some kind of dedicated app, a gamified reward system that
gave us badges for posting more, a font of our own, a Game of Thrones
crossover week, a photo feed and sold advertising space that can be
blocked so users think that the real product isn't our data, maybe
we'd have a chance? Seriously, why isn't someone selling our data
here? We're nothing!

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 6:36 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> I blame myself.  I was simply in no condition to participate on a
> regular basis @ the time.
>
> Meanwhile, some day, the Inherent Vice group watch?
>
> http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/awards2014/pdf/iv.pdf
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> When enough are not newly reading and responding, the silence is loud.
>> And one needs to be following the bouncing ball
>> when one posts who is, otherwise it is not new.
>>
>> Too many too busy or otherwise out of the Group Read. Life in late
>> capitalism ain't easy.
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 2:34 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> I believe you're on to something with why the group read fizzled, Mark T.,
>>> although I think we had it going pretty good for a while there.  I'm not
>>> sure it's impossible to maintain that managed flow-through you describe, but
>>> (speaking for myself) it does seem to require some obsessing to do the
>>> discussion justice.  It's tough to be obsessed for several months straight.
>>> Maybe we should have built some time-outs into the schedule?
>>>
>>> Out of curiosity, is anyone still giving M-&D- the deep reading treatment?
>>> If so, where are you?
>>> I've slowed down a lot in my M-&D- reading, lightened up some, picked up
>>> other books, etc., but I've got notes up to chapter 35.
>>>
>>> I hope everyone (in the Northern Hemisphere...) is having a bitchin' summer!
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jul 19, 2015, at 11:44 AM have a nice day, violet wrote this message:),
>>> Mark Thibodeau wrote:
>>>
>>> I think the reason why group reads of Pynchon tend to break down (and I say
>>> this with a guilty conscience at my own part in the unraveling of the last
>>> M&D group read attempt) is that his work is SO RICH and full of constant,
>>> almost fractal levels of allusion and multi-contextual referencing (moreso
>>> perhaps than any writer aside from Joyce) that trying to maintain some kind
>>> of managed flow-through is literally impossible to do.
>>>
>>> Any reader takes from a work of art only that which he or she is capable of
>>> taking. We all bring our own personal contexts into some kind of
>>> intermeshing with the context of the work that we're approaching. Someone
>>> steeped in pre-Revolutionary American history will have a different reading
>>> experience from someone who knows a lot about, say, the history of science.
>>> Both will find it a masterwork, but for different reasons.
>>>
>>> For that reason, I think Pynchon slots in with those writers who are both
>>> difficult AND rewarding.
>>>
>>> MT
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Misc.
>>>>
>>>> just read an interesting essay by Stanley Greenblatt, Shakespeare and
>>>> Beyond
>>>> Scholar---this essay is on Milton, however---that applies to many a great
>>>> writer
>>>> including our writer from Long Island.......
>>>>
>>>> Thesis: The depth of full scholarship analysis of such as Milton, say
>>>> another
>>>> long book on all the subtleties and breadth and depth of his politics
>>>> explored thru
>>>> his major poems......tends to kill why he is great.....
>>>>
>>>> The poetry on the page.
>>>>
>>>> Discuss.
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> > is an incredible book....
>>>> >
>>>> > Throw out more stuff about....
>>>> -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l