anthony burgess pynchon fan/trp in valletta?

[peterthooper at juno.com]

---------- Original Message ----------
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>


Yes.  And Pynchon was never famous for realistic portrayals of locations.
That's not his gig.  Burgess was making a cheap shot.

David Morris


In _Slow Learner_ he mentions getting not just local color from Baedeker, but inspiration, or at least that's how I read it. I think you are right about locations not being his major interest, but he writes them well (IMHO as someone admittedly not all that well-traveled.) That is, when he puts Benny in New York, it seems plausible, etcetera. 

On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 6:04 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> And I've never been to heaven....so wha?


but you kind of like the music?

> On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 4:19 PM Krafft, John M. <krafftjm at miamioh.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > Have I missed something in this thread, or doesn't everybody know by
> > now that Pynchon's ship, the _Hank_, docked in Malta during the Suez
> > crisis? Burgess himself seemed surprised when I told him about that
> > Pynchon-biographical detail in 1974 (he visited SUNY Buffalo that
> > year). Hey, he  made a snide assumption, and Pynchon called him on it.
> >
> > John
> >


cool! Was he anything like Enderby?

I think Burgess did know his Mediterranean, (I remember from big Halsey and little Fauss, er, _Little Wilson and Big God_, his partial autobiography, that he was stationed on Gibraltar and had time for 100 cigarettes* a day, so probably also some jaunts, not to mention times not covered in LW&BG)

Anyway, the compliment though certainly partial may have been sincere to some extent.


*another installment of smoking in history; totally off-topic is yet another one, gleaned from Lionel Trilling's _The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent _, about how Mark Twain so exhausted himself in the flush of inspiration writing _Huckleberry Finn_ that he sometimes had to "take a day or two off, lying in bed, smoking and reading, to recover."
All the tobacco was organic back then.

How 'bout that Lionel Trilling anyway? There's a long essay in TMOtbI about, of all things, The Princess Casamassima.
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