Pynchon hearts Roth?

[Smoke Teff]

Thanks for this, Mark. Has P written anything explicitly paying attention to Roth? 

> On Jul 30, 2018, at 4:36 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Are you still a little surprised when you think of how much
> Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon worked into the trailer for BLEEDING EDGE?
> 
> "He's everywhere." Nice counterpoint to Pynchon being nowhere (in one
> sense) yet, as great artist,
> everywhere as well.
> 
> Did we all know that one of Roth's earliest stories, "The Contest for Aaron
> Gold" was published in *Epoch,*
> a Cornell University literary quarterly? Although this story was reprinted
> in Martha Foley's* Best American Short Stories 1956, *Philip seems not to
> have wanted it republished in
> hardcover volumes. This story was written in the same period that his best
> were being written, "Epstein"
> and "The Conversion of the Jews" and the others in Goodbye, Columbus and
> Five Short Stories.
> i'm going to try to find out why (and get it and read it)
> 
> We know where Thomas was in 1956. Already committed to his career.
> 
> I have been reading and rereading Roth since his death, Sabbath's Theater
> is a great book, his GR to loosely analogize,  but I want to
> just say a few words about Letting Go, published in 1962 but set in fifties
> America, one of Roth's neglected works.
> I am not even in the middle of it yet (but this one is a sentimental
> favorite and a reread)
> Sprawling all over the place in story, in themes, in characters, it can
> remind of how many feel about Against the Day. Close to as long and full of
> "everything" Roth may
> have learned about life and writing to that time and wanted to get down
> with vaulting ambition. I also recommend it, I say needlessly.
> 
> But here's another Pynchon-related reason for this post: in the first
> couple hundred pages, the word 'inconvenience" appears more frequently than
> statistics might suggest.
> One might say it is foreshadowing, such a common word to describe what will
> be very great inconveniences coming up for all the major characters. It
> cannot help
> but remind this reader of Pynchon's lifelong use of the word and concept in
> his fiction.
> 
> A..and, the phrase "mindless pleasures"--the working title for GR for
> newbies to this list-- is used and 'mindless' more than once--once as a
> major female character wishes to be a 'mindless sophomore' again.
> In a novel where lustful love defines all kinds of decisions most of the
> characters have made so far in their lives.
> 
> And once this character, a single mom of two who was not able to finish her
> college education, wittily says "Let's call Erich Fromm" about a friend she
> thinks should
> get herself some psychological self-understanding, so to reduce it.
> 
> They, the scholars, are finding bits of exact phrases in Shakespeare's
> plays, sometimes just two words from The Montaigne translation Shakespeare
> read; from the Plutarch and his Ovid
> and more. Words, like life and stories, are sucked up by great writers and
> reused even half-consciously if that.
> 
> It is a wonder to appreciate.
> 
> I think I can feel/see some homage to Bellow in some of the characters in
> Letting Go and the whole novel starts with a major signaling that it is
> structured like Portrait of a Lady; is Roth's most Jamesian
> in style and has the same major theme (and some sub themes), I bet. Which I
> can't see yet and my first reading was before I had ever read Portrait of a
> Lady.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l