"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours"---Bob D.

[rich]

Robert Coover will be 90 in Feb. He's still at it, god bless him

https://www.printmag.com/post/the-daily-heller-breast-pocket-book-by-robert-coover-illustrated-by-art-spiegelman-looms-large

rich

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 2:06 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Plisters,
>
> Last night, I dreamt about Thomas Pynchon. Or really, what we most know,
> his work.
>
> It seems also to have been about Bob D because of recent exchanges with
> Joseph,
> and involuntary thinking about him, Bobby. And one venerable Pynchon lover
> who went on record recently
> wanting a new Pynchon work and virtually criticizing/challenging him for
> not producing one during the Trump years.
>
> It is a simple dream. I am standing around with a group of Plisters, most
> unseen in my dream mind's eye and one of them,
> naming no names here, said Yes, he had read the new Pynchon. I was
> surprised, of course, but I knew no one else had and I waited with the rest
> of us
> for this person to say something about it. He was silent however. We all
> held our bated breath in my dream until I was suddenly
> somewhere else in another room where the new Pynchon work was gift-wrapped
> and kinda in suspension or on a single shelf I could not see.
> A little above my height, and again, there were others here but I saw no
> one.
>
> Then a pair of hands quickly took the wrapping off the new work---it was
> still not close to me/us in reality. (I knew where this came from; from
> a bad novel in a book group that I have stopped out of for good because of
> moments like this: a person opened a gift and then put the wrapping
> back on and this was another thing I did not believe as written. Most
> gift-wrapped gifts are simply ripped open and unable to be put back
> together
> virtually intact. Imo. No words to make us believe in any why of an
> exception. Also, the hands opening image probably comes from learning of
> the incredible
> success of a YouTube genre where people--mostly kids, I guess---love
> watching presents being opened, hands on only, so to speak. )
>
> In my dream, the hands tried to put the wrapping back on but I said, maybe
> shouting, "See, you can't do that". What was revealed, however,  was not a
> book, but
> some kind of wooden toy. Compact, square, with small sides like raised
> edges on three of them, one the left (as we look) higher and sturdier than
> the right
> and the back just barely higher than the open front, as accessible as any
> surface and not facing me directly but eyes left.
>
> Then I laughed aloud and said, "See, he surpassed all our words about his
> next book---[this is certainly more Dylan in my current mind than Thomas,
> in that
>  how he spent his career overturning his last work all the time basically
> has permeated my mind]----and then I was laughing more and telling
> everyone:
> "Thomas's last work is beyond words, he is telling us....It looks like a
> puzzle but it is a simple construction.".........[I think Joseph saying
> straight on that the reading
> of glaring in that passage of Mike's was not arcane nor hidden, which
> touched a memory of mine about something Tom said in a letter which went
> like this (paraphrase)---
> Some people read too much into what I've written; all of it is right there
> on the page, he wrote somebody if I remember correctly.]
>
> I think Wittgenstein on What can't be said---the mystical, to not get too
> specific---is in this dream here as well.
>
> Then I woke up feeling healed another morning, so to speak.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>