From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Mark Kohut]

Well, I try to resist the buried nostalgia often caught in our historic
appreciations.

Although it is only new in English, Johnson's *Anniversaries* is within a
stone's arc of GR.
As is Lucy Ellmann's* Ducks, Newburyport *and is such a mental pleasure to
read. Like reading GR the second time, or AtD
after a lifetime of Pynchon.

As is Beatty's *The Sellout.*

And there are others.

Just because GR is SOO great, the great American novel of the second half
of its century, at least, doesn't mean
others won't rock your world.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:05 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes. I'm too cynical to indulge in hero worship, as a rule, though I've
> probably indulged in fatuous admiration most in the literary sphere. Still,
> I've never felt an obligation to love everything that Pynchon - or Doris
> Lessing, or Thomas Mann, or Melville or Dostoevsky - has written.
>
> But I doubt I'll ever encounter a book that changed my worldview as much as
> Gravity's Rainbow, and that's sad to think.
>
> PS - I balked at using the word "sad." A good old word that's been
> tarnished in the tweets of the Orange Pustule.
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 9:32 AM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Soon the curtain of one's literary heroes gracing us with new work will
> > close. The current obsessions of new and upcoming fiction writers I have
> > found are not mine, worthy as they are. I wont be one of those grumps
> > bemoaning the ascendance of a new generation of writers. But it does
> sadden
> > me a bit that soon there won't be anyone left for me to put on my
> personal
> > pedestal. Part of me realizes this is just natural. But I will miss the
> > excitement  I once had.
> > musing on a snowy winter's day
> >
> > rich
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>