Re: BEg2 story thoughts, ‘cause …

[Joseph Tracy]

Really cool thoughts on Pynchon’s changes over time. I feel and think very similarly, though obviously have my own emphasis and manner of expression.  Literature is still one of the arenas where discordantly anti-colonial, anti-patriotic  or  simply personally estranged or shockingly honest voices can claim a place within western culture. Culture changes, and Pynchon has always been reaching inward and outward to let those changes inform the full spectrum of our consciousness as they play out in the current moment and the history that shapes our moment. 
   BE , Vineland and Inherent Vice seem light to many but they seem profoundly layered to me, and what Michael has done, along with others,  in this BE read is dive into the details of place, the world of tech culture that has saturated our experience, and how individuals adapt to but also question the gravitational pull of big money, paranoid politics, addiction to militarism and surveillance.  Pynchon has grounded it all in an event that has had huge force  but seems also to have been buried in many ways in the sweep of history, the details and questions buried in narratives, each of which are incomplete and troubling to many who have taken a closer look. We are comfortable with this murkiness in GR or V because of historic distance but the most troubling questions of those novels, carried closer to our present moment are still with us and still shake the ground we think we stand on.
  
  
  

> On Apr 13, 2022, at 3:03 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