NP, exactly - One for Jack Green

[alice malice]

Not that P can't play, mind you, but Coover can too, and you gots to
give credit where it's due, like P did early on when he said Read
Reed. Coover has such a pen, ....man, ...how can anybody try to punk
him like that?

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:51 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pinocchio in Venice far better than any of P's California books. A
> brilliant tna d beautifully composed work of genius. Sorry, P fans,
> but knocking other great works is simply not the way to elevate P's
> rep. Hell, P is a lot like so many white boys who went to school on
> Jazz.
>
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:00 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hardly fair to knock Coover for that, man
>>
>> rich
>>
>>
>> On Monday, March 16, 2015, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>   TP's reputation was established early, built mostly on his novels
>>> (since this is what inicially brought him to the wider public) and of
>>> course the 'other bits' e.g., the mexico escape story, Corey accepting
>>> the National Book award on his behalf and so on. So, if Pynchon is
>>> accepted as a great writer then his first three novels are canonical,
>>> and of course they are widely studied. It may come as no surprise that
>>> with Vineland (and its percieved change in style) there was a shift
>>> toward more negative criticism, for example Frank Kermode's review.
>>> But do you know how many weeks VL was on the NYT best seller list? 13
>>> weeks and it got to #2! Folks, that's the best TP has done by the
>>> popular standard of the NYT BS list. (And, yes, I know that book sales
>>> are not all that counts.) However, this isn't exactly about TP.
>>>
>>>     You see almost one year after VL came out, another writer from
>>> TP's cohort wrote a book that recieved the following:
>>>       "Of all the postmodernist writers, ___________ is probably the
>>> funniest and most malicious, mixing up broad social and political
>>> satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays
>>> that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our
>>> relationchip to it"
>>>
>>>    Now, who can name the critic and what s/he was writing about? Do
>>> you give up? It was...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Michiko Kakutani in the study with the fountain pen that killed the...
>>> oh wait sorry. Scratch that. Michiko did write the above glowing
>>> criticism but it was back in 1987 for a different book by the same
>>> author, the publisher just decided to put it on the back of the then
>>> new book. Oh, what book you ask? Well the Michiko blurb was put on the
>>> dust cover of Robert Coover's 1991 "Pinocchio in Venice". You say you
>>> haven't read it. Well, you can probably live without it. Anthony
>>> Burgess gave it a fair but not glowing review. But let's see how they
>>> stand up to the test of time. One way to do that is by checking
>>> Nielson numbers or something like that. I use Amazon numbers since
>>> they are easy to get.
>>>  Today Vineland is at #89,153.  Pinocchio in Venice is at #750,363; &
>>> it never got on the NYT BSL.
>>>
>>> Along with this backward glance I'll mention an article from the
>>> Guardian newspaper, "Rereading: Vineland by TP" (July 31, 2010). In it
>>> Andy Beckett writes, "Its [VL's] warnings about the capacity for
>>> repressiveness of US governments also read well now." This
>>> rediscovered appreciation for  Pynchon is understandable, and not only
>>> due to the times we live in. When VL came out (appearing as the latest
>>> position of the author) it could only pale in comparison for those
>>> like Kermode who found it lacking when put next to GR. However, now VL
>>> stands in relation not only to those novels that came before but also
>>> those that came after and as such it has an interesting linking
>>> position in the constellation of Pynchon's work.
>>>
>>>   It should be clear that Michiko has bet the wrong way on what writer
>>> stands tallest in the cohort that includes Pynchon, Coover, Barth,
>>> Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, Gerald Vizenor, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Robbins
>>> and many more. She should be happy Jack Green isn't around today.
>>>
>>> ciao
>>> mc otis
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l