Very P but all impressionistic.

[Richard Romeo]

I happen to be reading GR again on way to re-reading the Big 3. I read it in the early 90s for the first time without reading the first two. So I was lost and stopped when Tchitcherine was introduced. So through the years I’ve found it easier to get through. I should also note that reading GR in my 20s compared to now in my 50s has given me better insight into Pynchon and to me as a reader. A global death wish is cool but not when u got a lot of gray on your head. I’ve come down from the Pynchon pedestal if you will and now during the present read have come to accept there are passages I will never understand and don’t feel so bad about not getting still to this day.  
But the novel itself has been the Holy Center (hehe) for me, Joyce and Gaddis prepared me well but Pynchon remains to this day the man not only via the literature but the many interesting people I’ve met along the way and hope to still.
M&D was my first new Pynchon novel and it may be my favorite due to that. It’s an older mans work and more relatable.
And I will take another crack at AtD which seems more relevant in the current messed up world we live in currently. It seems perfect reading for the Trump age.
I hadn’t felt like that before.
In the end I think it helps to lose the rose tinted glasses when it comes to
Pynchon’s writing. And I’m sure if we ever get to see behind the curtain there may be aspects of Pynchon which may make us feel uncomfortable (some of those letters, natch. Yikes!) as would be the case for any of us.

rich

> On Apr 20, 2019, at 7:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think that is RIGHT ON, in my experience too, even, time-changed re
> 'reading' GR vs the others.
> 
> M & D was very hard for me to read from the Get-go as well--stopped out on
> that as well.
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 7:17 AM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> It took me perhaps 8-10 years to read GR all the way through and the
>> whole time I still thought of Pynchon as my favourite novelist. I have
>> distinct memories of what I thought of GR before I'd finished it.
>> - There was a massive amount of context I wasn't getting, just because
>> I didn't have enough history (especially military history),
>> mid-century politics, American slang, and so on, and I felt I wasn't
>> erudite enough to get it
>> - I now think its mode is more poetry than prose, but at the time
>> seemed so radical I couldn't figure how to mentally parse it
>> - It seems so much bleaker and more nihilistic than anything else
>> Pynchon has written, and I think it's easy to forget that when you
>> come to a finer appreciation of the novel
>> And so while Against the Day and M&D might be superficially similar -
>> expansive, very peripatetic in a narrative sense, zany, full of
>> linguistic playfulness and generic subversion and historical
>> gear-changing - they're still very readable at the level of the
>> sentence (the latter is obviously mannered in an archaic way but still
>> pretty approachable). And they're not profoundly unsettling,
>> disturbing, graphic and hard to reconcile emotionally.
>> That's just my tuppence.
>> 
>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 8:49 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I have just read a long twitter thread responding to the question
>>> Which is Thomas Pynchon's best novel?...(person was reading GR).
>>> 
>>> 1) supposition: the twitter responders skew younger than most of the
>> Plist.
>>> 2) many of the plist have read most of TRP from GR on, as they were
>>> published
>>> 
>>> 3) Surprising me, there were a lot of Against the Day answers. As well
>> as M
>>> & D answers
>>> and not an easy plurality for GR. ---and a putting GR into some kind of
>>> context--from "needs multiple readings" to what seems like
>>> you had to be there, so to speak.
>>> 
>>> Just sayin'.
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l