Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Pynchon

[Mark Kohut]

Get me Rewrite: Lose that "just"...

He got so many stories and characters from his Navy experience.
And he so disses academia vs real experience.

he writes that in American society in the Eisenhower years
"there seemed to be no reason why it should all not just go on as it was."
[notice his use of 'just']....Talk about Entropy, cultural stasis as
entropy and a
cultural judgment shared by many other writers and thinkers, I think.
And how he embraced and learned from the break-out artists.

(Again, one of my favorite images, not shared by many, is Phoenix having
to walk back and forth between the walls in the master's house in The
Master)

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:06 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just Zeitgeist synchronicity.   Just? as in merely?   What was in the wind
> is probably more important than sources, no?
> And more so, as Pynchon explains in that SL Introduction, once he begins
> to gain confidence and stop all the fancy dancing kid stuff and get out On
> the Road, a Wandering Scholar. BTW, F S Fitzgerald quit school and did a
> stint in the army too.
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Perry Noid <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Oh wow. I never bothered to compare the publishing dates. Something must
>> have been in the air I suppose.
>>
>> On Tuesday, January 19, 2016, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Mumbo Jumbo was published in 1972. I cannot easily find out what month.
>>>
>>> Gravity's Rainbow was published early in 1973.
>>> Which means the GR manuscript was turned over to Viking by summer
>>> 1972.
>>>
>>> Which makes the mention late in GR a shout-out to a book he likes a lot.
>>> An incorporated blurb as it were providing a cool aside about a new
>>> writer.
>>>
>>> There is evidence---Catch -22 probably---that even then Pynchon was able
>>> to read
>>> some new novels in manuscript or galley form. But if he couldn't read
>>> Mumbo-Jumbo
>>> this way, then he must have read it as he was finishing up and or
>>> proofing GR
>>> himself.
>>>
>>> If he could have read it earlier than 1972, most of GR was finished
>>> anyway so
>>> no major influence. Just Zeitgeist synchronicity.
>>>
>>> which leads to the next post.
>>>
>>
>
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