Joshua Cohen's review of Bleeding Edge

[Mark Kohut]

from Joshua Cohen:

Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had
nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly
the direct opposite. . . . [F]or in fact the fiction both published and
unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which
had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken
up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all
really live.

I’ve read that introduction a dozen times, and most of Pynchon’s novels at
least twice, yet I’m still not sure what to make of this assertion. I’m
still not sure whether *V.* (1963) — which takes as its premise the search
for a mysterious, free-floating signifier that might be a woman named
Victoria, and/or Veronica, and/or an incarnation of the goddess Venus,
and/or the city of Valletta, and/or victory in WWI and/or WWII — becomes
any clearer with the knowledge that Pynchon wrote it after serving in the
Navy and attending Cornell, where he audited lectures by that shape-shifter
Nabokov. Nor am I sure whether *The Crying of Lot 49* (1966) — which
concerns the machinations of a certain Yoyodyne, “one of the giants of the
aerospace industry” — is enriched by the information that between 1960 and
1962 Pynchon lived in Seattle and worked for Boeing as a technical writer
for the Bomarc interceptor-missile project. Then again, it strikes me that
Pynchon’s defense-contracting stint finds direct expression in *Gravity’s
Rainbow* (1973), that treatment of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program.
But I’m still confused as to whether I should read the hero of that novel —
Tyrone Slothrop, an American G.I. whose erections foretell the ground-zero
impacts of V-2s in London — as an embodiment of John Winthrop or, because
Slothrop’s ancestor William Slothrop is portrayed as having published a
controversial theological treatise called *On Preterition,* as a surrogate
for the author himself.



MK: Well, young Cohen is smarter than I am and more creative but I'm
"sure". Yes, and Yes and both (but mostly a shape-shifting projective
surrogate of the author). Maybe he needs to feel the often-wrongness of
"the excluded middle' more?

A...And, reminding that he points out that TRP calls them mobile phones not
cell phones, I would fine-tune gloss like this: modern mobility is one of
the downsides of modernity so TRP makes that thematic point AND he is smart
enough to envisage a possible new

kind of phone that will not be called a "cellphone"? So, his words stay
undated.

And our bills and stuff say 'mobile phone"....



On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 4:42 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Interesting also because Cohen worked in "Book of Numbers" (2015) on
> similar terrain.
>
>
> ... The day after the book’s
>       galley was delivered to me — this was just after the Prism scandal
>       broke — I took it along to a dermatology appointment and started
>       reading it on the subway. Immediately a man stomped across the car
>       and without saying anything stuck out his iPhone and snapped a
>       shot of the cover. He was white, stocky, about 5'6", and jumped
>       out at West 4th Street — in other words, demographically
>       representative. Later that evening I found the pic posted online.
>       It had already received a few hundred likes. In the weeks that
>       followed, Bleeding Edge galleys appeared on eBay, being
>       auctioned — being purchased — for upwards of $1,500.
>
> https://harpers.org/archive/2013/10/first-family-second-life/
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>