Slaughterhouse//BtZ

[John Bailey]

"An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his
brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He
meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

Very worth reading in tandem. Both wander around time-space and
question its legitimacy, and both inject a solid dose of science
fiction and scatological humour and spiritual allegory and metafiction
into the conventional war caper.

Both have very distinct authorial voices, too, although P disappears
into his whereas V's project always seemed reifies the Writer in
question. While loving much of his work he seems to have been quite
keen to carve a firm and visible position for himself in the history
of American letters (not that there's anything wrong with that).

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 4:21 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l