NP, exactly - One for Jack Green

[matthew cissell]

Buon Giorno Lettori,

First, to Rich. I don't recall "knocking" Coover, for anything. (Do
you mean my comment about the blurb on the jacket?) I didn't gush, but
neither did I malign his writing. Alice, how did I "punk" him? I
didn't compare their respective treatments of Venice or their prose or
anything. I didn't play aesthtic judge with two writers on the
balance. But somebody did.

 Second, Alice states that PiV is "far better than" any of P's CA
books. Now how do you measure that? Or is it simply a subjective
outburst from a fading memory? When did you read it Alice? Maybe you
can explain to me ( and to Anthony Burgess via seance) why there is a
chapter called The Talking Cricket when dear old Pepe Grillo doesn't
even appear. Is that some PoMo writing technique - 'Absconding the
Other'?

  Did you just read my post as fanboy author-knocking without thinking
more about it?

   Let me put it another way. How many people today would recognise
the name of Shakespeare even without having read his works? Now what
about Kit Marlowe? In his day Kit was the man, but in terms of
cultural significance and symbolic capital Shakes takes top billing
today. The same is true of Bach compared to Telemann.
  You say you like Kit better than Bill? Grand. You prefer Telemann?
Fabu. But try to look past your personal tastes otherwise your
polemical stance won't hold water with a good bladder and a 5 gallon
bucket.

  For the record, I went to the same university as Coover and identify
more with the midwest writer than our Dear TP. I hold RC in no
contempt and if I disliked a work I would likely give it better
treatment than Michiko. My point was rather about the review industry.
Don't know how ya missed that, unless you were looking for something
else.

ciao ragazzi

il pazzo sulla collina


On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 11:51 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
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