BEg2 chapter 3 Joseph notions

[Joseph Tracy]

My difficulty is that having read a novel once I cannot read it again with the same suspense. I begin to think about how a character is in the beginning middle and end rather than any given part. I begin to try to see how the writer shows a process of change and compare it to changes elsewhere in the story. I begin to see how individual facts contribute to the larger movement. Basically my interest moves to the thing as a whole. With Pynchon the parts have a unique relation to the whole, sort of like real life where meaning is derived from many patterns, sometimes appearing obvious and sometimes elusive to non-existant. I have from the start of the read, the 2nd for the plist,  indicated that I want our discussion to freeely move from chapter to the whole and I think that I  will follow that plan, particulalry in chapters that lose my appetite for close inspection. 

> On Nov 12, 2021, at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don't quite understand this request/desire. IF I have it right, I am not opposed to
> saying anything and everything we want to about all the characters but not all now all at once 
> without having read the novel again closely as we are doing. Seems to me, we stay on the chapter tracks
> here and say what we see and circle back and flesh out whatever we can and want about the characters. 
> 
> I will just add as a perhaps small difference with Joseph---or not, dunno--I take her thoughts about Horst as
> more accurate than projecting he is more on her mind than even she thought. I think the novel shows the 
> spontaneous, real feelings and thoughts of Maxine (and the others) in P's excitingly-written phenomenological prose. 
> When she reflects that maybe he was more there than she thought, I think she is discovering this anew AND P is 
> showing how those we have been close to--for human reasons--are always there and can come back. It is true of
> people I know; I have just read its virtual equivalent In Roth's My Life As a Man. Even a person's obit will link married
> persons for all eternity (almost). No matter how many years they may have hated each other. 
> 
> Which she never has Horst. There is no real resentment or jealousy in adult Maxine---not since middle school slights which still surface. As we have seen her
> so far, she is honest, psychologically mature it seems and a normally "good' mother and person in a fraudulent world. 
> 
> What we see and read is what there is. The prose is so....alive with nuanced observations and dialogue--not real but
> pop-culture stylized--exchanges. 
> 
> Speaking of P's City College pop culture joke, one way I hear it is this way: Its whole history of admitting anyone made it a
> kind of populist college. Attend, no matter your background or lack of one, and pass and you have a degree....
> Also, I just looked them up and Anthropology is their leading specialty. The study of people in action in their lives. 
> 
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2021 at 3:38 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com <mailto:michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Joseph Tracy wrote:
> 
>  I tend to want to explore one or more of these 4 figures within the
> full dimensions of the novel as a way to respond to this chapter.
> Is anyone up for that?
> Intensely opposed? If not I will have more to say about one  or more tomorrow.
> 
> 
> Please do. I’m up for reading about it and I can’t rule out responding.
> --
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