Re: BEg2 story thoughts, ‘cause …

[rich]

I've written a small tribute to our man, with similar feelings, which I
will share at the right time. he has returned home in a sense, but older,
wiser, a gathering sense of the enormity and beauty of what life offers and
the cruelties and tragedies it also brings to all of us at one time or
another. It's no surprise the family lense is seen so positively compared
to the earlier works. 'the slow-cooking, family dinner tongue', yeah that
works on many levels

rich

On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 3:04 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Because I’m feeling like not being super focused -
>
> BE - New York, I like to compare & contrast with V.
>
> In V., you could be a young roisterer & live in NYC in any number of cheap
> digs, not that they were great but they were there. A reality reflected in
> much fiction & many lives, artsy kids would move there and find a garret or
> something.
>
> In BE that’s less and less an option. Now you have to play the market like
> Horst or have a career like Maxine, (and she still has to “rely on the
> kindness of stranglers”)  even a garret is way expensive. On the plus side
> it’s a bit cleaner & safer.
>
> My big glow of “oh I’m so perceptive” was in comparing the pear tree
> metaphor in V. with the actual pear trees in BE, a shift in perspective
> from the young P. thinking in terms of um, Toynbee or something, &
> “decky-dance,”
>
> To, like, the mature P. with a darn good career under his belt despite the
> decline of the West & thinking in less desperate terms while still
> realizing the dire straits are quite real & sharing some of his good
> fortune by various usable descriptions of actual good and bad scenes.
> Usable in terms of enjoyment, but also in terms of text that a person can
> use to organize, reify, critique & expand his or her own experience. There
> may be a way thru the maze, or
> something, one thinks, after such a read.
>
> All good novels do this, to some extent. (And they have to do a lot of
> other stuff, sure) But I find Pynchon’s work to contain a high ratio of
> usefulness for our place & time & tendrils of usefulness for my own outlook
> qua me.
>
>
> But, also - not just V.’s pear trees do we see a morph of - how about that
> flaming tongue in the Jacobean play in CoL49, compared with the simmering
> tongue cooking in the Tarnow apartment, its aroma pervading and imbuing
> like all get-out -
>
> Such a figuration, the unholy Pentecost of the young writer’s furious
> communication, words phrases and thoughts around violence and madness, held
> aloft afire with enthusiasm - like GR - a potent (and again with the)
> societal critique…
>
> Whereas with BE the maturity, the new takes on familiar tropes, not denying
> the horrors in our world or stinting in deploring them, but also having
> found more areas of relishment, at least a few cozy corners, and sharing
> them. The slow-cooking, family dinner tongue.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>