Slaughterhouse//BtZ

[Smoke Teff]

It was my first time reading it since having read, well, almost all of
Pynchon. Most things do not hold up after Pynchon. Not the case here. *GR *and
*Slaughterhouse *elevate each other. For me, anyway. Latter is much vaster
than I would've thought. It's actually kind of fascinating to see how the
two books have so much thematic overlap, in vision, but diverge so much in
execution.



On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 12:46 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

>  I will give it a go soon.  Odd how I can't remember the book though
> I've read it so many times. Like Blue Beard, a novel that may be
> alluded to in Bleeding Edge. The Montauk stuff
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 1:20 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Is anything concrete known about Pynchon having read or enjoyed
> Vonnegut's
> > book? He must've read it before GR.
> >
> > A few weeks ago I recommended reading it alongside BtZ and I repeat that.
> > It's very fast.
> >
> > Sharing a few passages I marked that seemed relevant.
> >
> > p. 208
> >
> > "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic
> > confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much
> the
> > listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war,
> > after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
> >
> > 227
> >
> > "There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one
> flame
> > ate everything organic, everything that would burn."
> >
> > 213
> >
> > "Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had
> > twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its
> fruit
> > was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the
> > roots and made very good fertilizer."
> >
> > 213-214
> >
> > (about a different story of Trout's)
> >
> > "But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was
> that
> > it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human
> beings.
> >
> > "It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They
> had no
> > conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was
> > happening to the people on the ground."
> >
> > 215
> >
> > "Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised,
> reviewed,
> > or on sale. 'All these years,' he said, 'I've been opening the window and
> > making love to the world.'"
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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