From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Keith Davis]

Gravity’s Rainbow blew my mind, more than once. It changed the way I read, to say the least. I’ve said here before, it also was/is an experience of enlightenment. I don’t know if that was Pynchon’s intention.

In the last couple of years, I’ve also discovered Ursula LeGuin and Gerald Murnane. Wow! Fantastic! Emily Barton is great...Beatty is great, too. Read The Sellout twice already. Smilla’s Sense of Snow was great. 

Blood Meridian is a crazy good book, but I don’t know if I could stomach the movie...babies brains being dashed out sticks in my mind a little too vividly already.

The other reading that blew my mind was Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.

And Nisargadatta...

Www.keithdavismusic.com

> On Dec 11, 2019, at 9:22 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I finished The Sellout yesterday and it might be a Great American Novel
> because I couldn't for the life of me get into it. Felt like there was so
> much I wasn't clicking with simply because I don't live in the country it's
> about.
> Absolutely deserves consideration by Pynchon fans, though. I think
> Pynchon's work is very often about the US in ways that people from the US
> might not see so clearly.
> 
>> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 6:18 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Follow-up. I was suggesting near-contemporary works ala Rich's original.
>> and, it is only the superficiality of the marketing hook---and it is
>> incorrect--if
>> the stunts-lit you refer to, refers to* Ducks, Newburyport. *It is that the
>> way
>> Ulysses or Woolf are, that is it is NOT. It is a grand style.
>> 
>> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:47 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> I don't have patience for literary stunts or one-joke novels - see how
>>> closed-minded I am? GR took my mind places it had never been. Maybe
>> there's
>>> nowhere else to go? I got bored quickly with Beatty's novel and don't
>> think
>>> my eyes could stand the look of Ellman's pages. Do I really want to spend
>>> 1700 pages with a reminiscing East German in NYC? I think not. I enjoyed
>>> reading Pnin, although it's Nabokov-lite. Currently reading The Fountain
>>> Overflows, by Rebecca West, which I'm enjoying despite its odd forays
>> into
>>> the metaphysical.
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 11:12 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 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
>>>>> 
>>>> 
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>> 
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