Not Pynchon but a book he has read: BEAUTIFUL LOSERS. If interested.

[Mark Kohut]

posted because of some themes and bits
relevant ...to TRP and the times.....
If interested:

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS.
1) feels at times, in parts, not unlike P, with crazy set pieces,
riffs...comic exuberance
up the kazoo.....also and most, though, Joyce...some Finnegans Wake-like
page-length word riffs it would seem,
And Lists, lotsa fun lists....a whole chapter list of titles which are like
surreal prayer questions....and others...

2) a mix of high diction and low talk...
          A) there is a 9 stage comic deconstruction of the ads of Charles
Atlas kicking sand on a weakling. And what happens next. Can remind in
structure of the Kenosha Kid bit

3) narrator, an aging scholar of the ancient tribes in Canada is questing,
invoking, writing to and about Catherina Tekawitha, perhaps a kind of White
Goddess, or Eternal Feminine or Adams' Virgin sexualized...those ancient
cultures hold some kind of wisdom too....

4) Sex, lust, love....you'd have to say are the overarching subjects and
themes.....narrator tormented about whether buddy and the wife he loved
ever did it....agonizing over ownership of those "few inches"....one
supposedly historic scene where a group of tribesmen are taking a woman
down to the river violently, to have their way......suddenly, Leonard
writes, they recognize she was an Other...and don't....loved it, so
surprising....

5) a buddy novel, the narrator more reliable than his unreliable buddy, who
rags him and makes shit up, a best friend from childhood.
Sex, love, some wild back-and-forth on whether they are 'fairies' because,
 gripped with lust
they might wank each other off....buddy says Face it....narrator says NO!

6) permeated with the lost, the losers, akin to preterites....sub-basement
(MobyDick) and invisible man allusions....."I just want to cast a
shadow"....."where are the hiding places hiding?"

7) "Dribble, dribble went the foam and spit between toothless jaws"

8) David Morris, this goes out most to you: .....Cohen too surely read LIFE
AGAINST DEATH...major comic scene on constipation which becomes a
motif........right before
 a hilarious scene where buddy tells the narrator he and wife---while
narrator was too long in the bathroom (nice touch)!.....licked each others
fingers and put them into the others' ears......more intense pleasure
than......with "Down with the imperialism of genital orgasms" flying around
in the mix...Polymorphous perversity indeed....

9) "Where is Grace today? "  Concept keeps appearing with nods, words to
some kind of sought karmic balance...in a terrif doc from 1964 I just
watched Leonard is on a panel being asked about his poetry, particularly
its statements, its messages, which one can see is not what he thinks his
poetry is 'about" m.......he finally answers 'when I wake up every day I
ask if i'm in a state of grace then I explore".....

10) And tell me this doesn't bring to mind The English Candy Drill: "Why
isn't candy being fed to History?"...p.57

I think this would have been a nice book to fail at another Group Read
with.....
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