NP but RP and the cover of Vineland, so to speak and allude. Another (major) writer influenced by....

[Mark Kohut]

Forgot to show off by also writing about a poem by Stanley Kunitz, called
The Knot, I believe, which
is about a tree, the poem in short lines rising like a trunk standing tall
and which ends with the narrator
"flying into the boughs', I think, merging in some way with the nature that
is embodied as that tree.

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 6:09 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> After I had sent this, I reread the review in my delivered print copy of
> the Washington Post.
> (That review with the terrif, fitting, Powers' homage-like line: "a
> character like a double helix of Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall")
>
> but I just wanted to quote that line in service of telling you of the
> small art-like, newspaper design craftsmanship of the
> printed copy of Charles' review. I wish you all could see it.
>
> It begins on the front page of the Style section, left column, with a
> small embedded cover picture and finishes wide and high AND ILLUSTRATED on
> the left side again, p. C4---"it is like a feature story," said my
> life-partner--and the line illustrations, a fair number of them, are of
> individual tree huggers loving a tree, four or five of them high and all
> over and the whole illustrated review is
> like an overstory, metaphorically reseen, one might say.
>
> Lovely.
>
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 6:30 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> That's as good a summary of Pynchon's virtues at that length as I could
>> ever hope for. Powers himself is very VERY good, and I've just bought The
>> Overstory.
>>
>> The Guardian review reminds me of one of the greatest small, drawn-out,
>> enduring pleasures of my life. We had a small vacation cottage in northern
>> Maine from the 1960s until 2010. North of Bangor, I-95 -- just extended
>> there in the 1960s -- crossed a several-hundred-acre bog, the last trace of
>> either a post-glacial pond or a very successful beaver colony: in the
>> 1800s. Dead flat, featureless except for a few water-tolerant bushes, with
>> aspens and half-drowned evergreen saplings all around the edge, full forest
>> rising  beyond.
>>
>> I imagine the drainage system for the highway must have accelerated
>> drying: after the first five years I was sure the forest was moving in,
>> sapling by sapling. and started to memorize markers for sightlines: a road
>> sign, a distant radio tower, an odd-shaped spruce. For a decade moisture
>> conditions were right for sparse wild blueberries, while the trees crept
>> inward. The last time I saw it, in 2014, there were just a few clearings
>> and extra-wide bits of right-of-way left, with a good number of >50'
>> birches visible farther into woods. There was random underbrush, enough
>> windfalls to make things nature-ally untidy. In another decade or two, only
>> the most sharp-eyed driver -- or any forester -- will notice the tight
>> age/size mix of the roadside boreal forest there. The forest everlasting.
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 7:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> *Contains a wonderful high-praising review of Richard Powers' new novel,
>>> The Overstory, by Charles who just won a major award for criticism and
>>> well-deserved, I say. His reviews are wonderfully written, as well as
>>> being
>>> insightful: https://twitter.com/RonCharles/status/981202559959556097
>>> <https://twitter.com/RonCharles/status/981202559959556097>*
>>>
>>>
>>> *https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/the-overstory
>>> -by-richard-powers-review
>>> <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/the-overstory
>>> -by-richard-powers-review>*
>>>
>>> *AV:* One of your early influences was Thomas Pynchon’s *Gravity’s
>>> Rainbow*,
>>> which you first read at age sixteen and which you have “re-read portions
>>> of
>>> . . . every year.” What is it about Pynchon that you admire since your
>>> writing styles are dissimilar?
>>>
>>> *RP:* More things than I can name. One of the many pleasures of Pynchon
>>> is
>>> that he doesn’t have a single style, but manages to create a whole
>>> panharmonicon of voices and styles and tones and moods and registers,
>>> borrowing from high and low, sublime and ridiculous, combining the entire
>>> spectrum of what prose can do into a symphonic whole. I can’t pretend to
>>> do
>>> even a fraction of what he manages, but he has inspired me to open up my
>>> own stops and try to vary my own style as much as possible, depending on
>>> the needs and purposes of any given scene. Pynchon is also the master of
>>> casting the reach of fiction far beyond the concerns of the merely
>>> personal
>>> and domestic, out into the vast world of human concerns, professions,
>>> researches, and industries. I learned from him that the sciences and math
>>> and engineering are actually the stuff of human passion and obsession,
>>> and
>>> that the erotics of knowledge can make for a story every bit as
>>> mystifying
>>> and thrilling as the old questions of who’s up and who’s down, who’s in
>>> and
>>> who’s out, and who gets to marry whom.
>>>
>>> At Bard: http://www.conjunctions.com/about/news/event/?id=133678
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>