TCoL49 - relevance - from lithub.com

[Mark Kohut]

"Yet The Crying of Lot 49 occupies a strange third space:"

This fine appreciator presents us another spin on this: the depth (or
fullness) of the space of the excluded middle metaphor.

The sublimity of the non-binary perspective: a third way.

The way, just in itself, the book so wonderfully ends between binaries, so
to speak.As an embodiment of this conceit.

Becky sends:
More at: (it’s quite interesting - read the last paragraph anyway - )
http://lithub.com/oedipa-maas-our-guide-to-contemporary-paranoia/


Also, Bloom reread it and wrote about it again sometime during the Bush
years. He argued
easily how it fit the times then, too.

I think that P's way of finding perfect patterns within American history
(and ongoing American life) in symbolic, mostly scenic form, is why.

(and, very dicily, riskily, speculatively, probably wrong again on my
part---why he didn't/doesn't like it since 1984.
Too symbolically patterned, he thinks now)

But this one is one where we "trust the tale not the teller".

Reread it, I suggest. It will flower in your brain anew.



On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> OEDIPA MAAS: OUR GUIDE TO
> CONTEMPORARY PARANOIA
> THE ONGOING RELEVANCE OF PYNCHON'S THE CRYING OF LOT 49, 50 YEARS LATER
> July 7, 2016  By Nick Ripatrazone
>
> A global postal conspiracy. Post horns graffitied across southern
> California. LSD prescribed as treatment for anxiety. Obscene radio station
> hosts. Beatles cover bands. Widespread paranoia. The Crying of Lot 49,
> Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, is quirky and eccentric even by Pynchon’s
> standards. Now 50 years old, the slim novel is truly a snapshot of
> mid-1960s culture.
>
> John Ruskin has said “all books are divisible into two classes: the books
> of the hour and the books of all time.” Yet The Crying of Lot 49 occupies a
> strange third space: novels that are timely yet timeless—books that are so
> suffused with the cultural minutia and noise of a moment that their
> saturation itself helps them to endure.
>
>
>
> Becky
> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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