Group Read foreplay.

[Mark Kohut]

Richard Powers' appreciation of GR

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html

"Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the
world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of
exchange?"

"I thought it was cigarettes."

"You dream." (Gravity's Rainbow)

I remember the thing homing in, soundless, of course, on its parabolic arc,
that purified shape latent in the sky. No clue, no advance warning until it
hit. I thought I knew how fiction worked, what fiction did, the proper
object of its only subject. Then those sentences, screaming across the
page, each one skywriting: You dream.

For three decades, I've retraced that arc once a year, that shape of no
surprise, no second chances, no return. And every time, I'm thrown back on
mute, wild surmise. The war is everywhere and real, our terrors threatening
to perfect us, the technologies of our desire extending into networks too
complex for anything but unhinged and macaronic fiction even to hint at.

For thirty years, early each winter, as the newspapers roll out their
end-of-year obituaries and take to listing the year's proudest, most
achieved disasters, I've read out loud, to myself or to anyone who will
listen, a passage from that book that ruined me for science and made me
think of writing as a life. Nine pages: that battery-ringed evensong
service, set somewhere in Kent—the closest thing I have to a private
religious ritual. I do it to remind myself of the size of the made world,
of what story might still be when it remembers itself, of the look of our
maximum reach outward, of the devastating charge of words. I do it to
remind myself of our only real medium of exchange.

Richard Powers is the author of eight novels.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160130/cb91fefa/attachment.html>