Very P but all impressionistic.

[gary webb]

This thread is brilliant. I couldn't agree more John...

V. was my gateway drug into Pynchon. I found the Bantam paperback at a used
book store in Yellow Springs, OH ( as Dave Chappelle sez: "A Bernie Sanders
island in a Trump sea..."It's one of those nodes of american Bohemia which
seems to endure even though it's like 11 miles from Wright-Patt Airforce
Base. Yes, that very place where test pilots some to be astronauts came to
receive their rectal thermometers.)

I came to the novel fresh from reading the beats, Kerouac et al. It
wouldn't be long after V. that Gravity's Rainbow would beckon. As discussed
by all the great contributors, my readings of the novel have necessarily
evolved over time. I carried that bloody novel with me everywhere I went. I
still do, try to read once a year. It's something of an epic poem,
something of an Opera Buffa in the same mode as Don Giovanni... I agree
it's darkness is pitch black, but Pynchon will always find redemption in
comedy (later in family) ... One can see the discussion between Saure and
Gustav regarding Beethoven vs. Rossini as a guide as to the mind of the
author, I think P needed to get the Bethoveen's 9th out of his system, the
full reckoning of the cataclysmic wreck of Europe and its history up to the
mid 20th Century... But, P also wants to write the Barber of Seville...

But yes, I try to read the novel once a year. I can say the same about M&D.
I love the buddy comedy of M&D and the history come to life, and I feel
that Mason and Dixon are brilliant full fleshed out characters, the kind of
which P is accused of never creating.

ATD was my first Pynchon novel to come out hot of presses in my life
time... I haven't read it as much as the previous two, but having read it
recently I need to add in rotation. When I first read it I was really drawn
to Kit's story (being a young maths major) and his take on late 19th/early
20th math and physics, especilly the Göttingen episode. But, of course the
novel is much richer. The Cyprian/Yashmeen/Reef romp through eastern Europe
especially.



On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 7:18 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
>