The Small Rain redux, part 2

[Mark Kohut]

is Levine's "problem" that, as P sez in the intro,
these folks don't yet get, have not internalized that they
are mortal---hence the sleeping late, sophomoric jokes,
and Levine gets the scene where we get to see death,
so he's getting there but in the encounter he is all cool
with no caring (yet)..in Pynchon's phrase....so when he
quips about sex and death, It IS still as bad as a
magazine piece.
When internalizing death maturely, caring develops?


On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 6:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> " there was in her eyes something that might have been a dismayed
> and delayed acknowledgment that what was hazarding this particular
> plowboy was deeper than any problem of seasonal change or doubtful
> fertility,
> Precisely as he had recognized earlier that her capacity to give involved
> nothing over or above the list of enumerated wares....[they are enumerated
> in one
> of TRP's first but short lists]...and THEREFORE [my caps] he assumed
> toward her
> that same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex
> novels, or
> for the burned-out but impotent good guy rancher in a western. He let her
> undress
> apart from him, until, standing there ion nothing but T-shirt and baseball
> cap, puffing placidly
> on the stogie he heard her from the mattress, whimpering." p. 50 SL
>
> Discuss. if you want. One tack: reliable or unreliable narrator here?
>
>
> "....they lay not touching. "In the midst of great death, " Levine said,
> 'the little death".
> And later, "Ha. It sounds like a caption in LIFE.In the midst of LIFE. We
> are in death. Oh god'.
>
> Discuss in regard to narrator's problem. Maybe.
>
>
> Tangential. Joseph Heller once said his novel *Something Happened* was
> about time, a friend
> told me. I looked up the interview. It was about TIME, he said, working
> there.
>
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