BtZ42 Read

[ish mailian]

Orwell, some say he hasn't the skill of a novelist, is here too. Not
that the politics of the imagery is that obvious or flat, as in
Orwell's _1984_, but the paranoia of a State that has an iron hand and
squeezes the lead into the population as it crams them into a box car
of death and suffocating emergency is there.

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:46 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> As in Mumford, who has the skills of a novelist, the imagery works as
> it does in Adams, who also has the skills of a novelist, as history
> and tone.
>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:43 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As in Dickens the imagery is violent and dark and grim, and yet, like
>> Dickens, a satirist who is more comic than corrective, Pynchon's grim
>> humor (I guess we can't say Black Humor any longer) is essential, a
>> rhetorical strategy that he will never relinquish though his critics
>> find it either too hysterical and juvenile or too punny for its won
>> good.
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:39 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Doesn't this opening remind anyone of the opening to Chapter Two of
>>> _Against The Day_?
>>>
>>> The imagery in _AGTD_ may be a poaching parody, of Upton Sinclair and
>>> others of the period, as McHale argues, and following that analysis we
>>> should look for film parody and poach here, but here in this opening
>>> of GR,  I am inclined to read this opening a not a parody or a poach,
>>> but as the imagination of a writer who has been influenced, as
>>> critical studies argue, by everyone and everything, but who has hit
>>> his stride and is writing in a style that is rightfully and especially
>>> his own. The anxiety of influence, so glaring in all previous works is
>>> ground to dust. Though Mumford and Dickens and Orwell echo here, in
>>> the imagery, Pynchon has a style all his own and what a style it is.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Ray Easton
>>> <raymond.lee.easton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I loathe statements about literature of the form "it feels to me like..."  (
>>>> pace, Mark -- not aiming at you, but only at myself! ), but I do have to say
>>>> that some of what follows after the dream "feels to me like" the beginning
>>>> of Ulysses.  Felt so my first reading and has every time since.
>>>>
>>>> I cannot figure out why, though -- and the why is what matters.
>>>>
>>>> Sent with AquaMail for Android
>>>> http://www.aqua-mail.com
>>>>
>>>> On March 16, 2016 6:37:02 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Distinct feeling of Mulligan at Ulysses opening now that you mention it.
>>>>> Wholly changed but in comic tone and meaning
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 4:02 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And the first rebirth is a Pirate, followed by Bloat.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> “There are proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to
>>>>>> overwhelm them with coarseness and make them unrecognisable; there are
>>>>>> actions of love and of extravagant magnanimity after which nothing can be
>>>>>> wiser than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly…“ Nietzsche, BG&E,
>>>>>> 29.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And what is Pirate‘s relation to Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus,
>>>>>> anyway?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
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