Bleeding Edge better 2nd or is it 3rd time?

[Joseph Tracy]

What I have seen with our too slow, too scheduled reads is that participation fades quickly and the group ends long before the novel is done. This has happened several times. Taking the novel in faster larger chunks should not not limit granular focus or in-depth explorations of the story or a theme. The question of disgreement is merely a suggestion. Avoid arguments that can’t be resolved. Accept variations of thought, heresies, punk attitudes, Pynchon piety. For my thinking there is no correct or incorrect interpretations, particularly with an honest attempt to understand. There are no TP bishops or popes; people read as they read, think as they think. The value of diversity is not final proof but the broadening  and balancing effect of different ways of seeing.
There is a wonderful Ursula Leguin  series of short stories about transilience, a technology that allows a ship and people to move many light years instantly. The fiirst story is callled Shobie’s Story.The first group to test it end up with different members each having a totally different and sometimes divergent experience following the transilience which only begins to be resolved when they gather and each tells her or his story.  Another story includes a charismatic person who tries to control the whole thing and ends up with delusions that lead him to electrocute himself in a misunderstood religious ceremony.

Anyone else up for this?




> On Oct 19, 2021, at 4:08 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am afraid you lost me at ..."my idea is to move faster than we tend to do." Nope, slower is always better imo. it is feeling the detail, all of it that matters most. Rendering the generalities that arise in touch with the reality of the text. Otherwise it is 
> bloviating with one's higher order "truths', which may be truths but exist independently from a connection to the text. 
> 
> You also lost me here: " I also suggest we try to avoid the you’re wrong I’m right approach and  handle disagreement with more respect or simply to try to enjoy the variety and put down one’s own thoughts."..Have you been a part of our most recent but
> now in the wayback time, Reads? They have already been what you want. There is so much to notice and say. You, Joseph, as I've said to you directly do mini-essay riffs I like when you put down your thoughts. Your test-based thoughts. Also, it seems simply a fact that there can be scores of different readings, more than scores, but there can also be simply mistaken ones that need pointed out as mistaken. Otherwise the words of Bleeding Edge have no meaning at all. 
> 
> IF you may be thinking of some of my rude language regarding non-Pynchon writers, like the way I call some moronic commentators you quote, morons, know I do not do that, never have, on a Group Read and won't. If you quote one of them moronically I will note that. 
> 
> I'm up for a reread of Bleeding Edge. I hope it would be more than we two. But if you want to comment via a faster read, continue as you did to start this. Nice observations. 
> 
> Mark
> 
>  
> JT: No worries about spoilers etc. freely seeing the text as a whole in commenting on any given passage, theme or event. It really is quick as an audio book. The reader is good with narrative flow and dramatic voicing if sometimes weaker with longer ruminations. 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 12:26 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> I am listening to Bleeding Edge via Library audio  book system today. It seems different with 20 years of distance from actual 9/11 and from  the time of  publication, both funnier and darker, in some ways more eerily  prescient( maybe not so eerily). I have HS students born after 911.   Pynchon's approach of viewing the event through the lens of the internet and digital technology that is such a large part of our cultural reality gives it a McLuhanesque spin that is worth some thought. In some ways New York is one of the last outposts of dense non-digital neighborhoods and human contacts but is increasingly, as all places, mediated by cell phones, commercial media, isolation and less by social gathering and conversation.. Still there is an intensity of color in NYC that P works with expertly. 
> 
> If anyone wants to engage in a read/listen/conversation and all the attached risks, my idea is to move faster than we tend to do. I also suggest we try to avoid the you’re wrong I’m right approach and  handle disagreement with more respect or simply to try to enjoy the variety and put down one’s own thoughts. No worries about spoilers etc. freely seeing the text as a whole in commenting on any given passage, theme or event. It really is quick as an audio book. The reader is good with narrative flow and dramatic voicing if sometimes weaker with longer ruminations. 
> 
> Anyone? Mike? How many would make a quorum?  
> 
> --
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