NOT PYNCHON: "it's all about me"

[Protomen]

Was led to Cortazar's story not long ago by the small plaque under the aquarium in question, which I'd been staring at for a few minutes before noticing the extra label. Leaves no doubt where the story came from - at least I wasn't surprised when I found it to be entirely in extrapolation of a familiar feeling. I imagine there's always been one of them like that, stuck body flat against the window, looking into you with the gills contracting at wild intervals - actually the lack of pattern is such that you have to look a long while to rid yourself of the impression that all the gill pulses were in reaction to what was going on "outside"...!

In retrospect the entrancement must also be (deliberately?) heightened by the fact that the axolotl - of all the reptiles, frogs and insects in the small and rather dark 'vivarium' - comes at the end and is the first and only one that looks back.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: NOT PYNCHON: "it's all about me"
Local Time: 20 novembre 2016 1:16 PM
UTC Time: 20 novembre 2016 12:16
From: mark.kohut at gmail.com
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>


Seems I may be teaching a course next semester at my local university on
EITHER some modern short stories or THE SIXTIES.

I pitched the short stories one as not famous stories--what do I know,anyway, about
what is canonical or not at colleges today?--- but interesting ones that might not need
the usual kind of classroom glossing that most are used to....no symbol-finding
(which I love, ya know) and no overly historical "understanding" necessary to get and like.

My key theme will be......the stories will connect with your life straight on ...
not just your literary ideas --if I'm right and we all share how, behind my
wide flashlight beam. I hope.

Or Sort of like a Group Read of my chosen stories.

Anyway, I am soliciting suggestions from this group that usually has some.

To start, one story I have self-chosen is Cortazar's AXOLOTL--the one reputedly translated by
Pynchon in that original US collection--because of the theme of entering another mind/world--a metaphor for what some fiction can do, is why.

I may add Salinger's A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH--called a perfect story by Nabokov--and
Murakami's 'answer", A PERFECT DAY OR KANGAROOS...because...stories talking about each other might be a new thing to many....


Re: The Sixties, the only book I will (loosely) "require" is The Crying of Lot 49, which won't surprise
anyone. I will be signposting the decade myself. Real work required by me but, again, any thought will be attended to if you care to take the time to express them.

(I have already decided to start the SIXTIES in 1959, per Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden. And, I think, to use Orwell's great observation that there are at least two major cultural strains in almost any block of history.)
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