Re: Speaking of Pynchon… (SLPAD)

[Mark Kohut]

I have always smiled at the "cancelled checks" joke. Unexpected and not
about writing as craft but
about writing showing what one spent money on. Which is a skeleton of one's
history.

And the way TRP writes 'dwell upon", older righter way than 'dwell on'.

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 2:57 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I was thinking of subjectively & non-rigorously going into Slow Learner a
> page a day, unless somebody wants to start a group read of something…
>
> Intro: not going to copy every page, but I think fair usage will let me
> grab a lot just this once.
>
>
> “AS NEARLY as I can remember, these stories were written between 1958 and
> 1964. Four of them I wrote when I was in college—the fifth, “The Secret
> Integration” (1964), is more of a journeyman than an apprentice effort. You
> may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read over
> anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks. My first reaction,
> rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we
> shouldn’t dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of a
> wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those
> episodes of middle-aged tranquillity, in which I now pretend to have
> reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I
> can’t very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if
> through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today,
> how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter
> even stepping down the street to have a beer….”
>
>
>
> 1958 & 1964 - I was growing from a 3 year old little weirdo into a 9 year
> old bespectacled full-fledged slightly bigger weirdo…
>
>
> I wonder how many of us reread our own oeuvres, eg* our p-list postings.
>
> Laura Kelber once told me to reread mine. Not to dwell on the physical
> symptoms that idea *still* rouses in me - the text here gives us a clear
> good example of WPWD.
>
> (might do it anyway: I’m brave, moreso than then anyway, & sometimes do
> have a spare moment)
>
>
> The recurrence of the “86” meme - shoot, I had an insight about that the
> other day!
>
> I don’t think it was I Ching-related (how the 8s turn to sixes or something
> like that)
>
> Anybody got any good “86” stories?
>
>
> * I once tried to tell a friend that “e.g.” stood for “es geht” in German.
> He gave me the fisheye, so I looked it up to prove it, but as we all know,
> that initiative faltered on the reef of actuality.
>
> I’ve got a million of ‘em (slightly & not-so-slightly embarrassing stories)
> - like peddling the same kind of action about the 2nd “r” in “entrepreneur”
> -
>
>  ☝️ unlike the ballroom in St Patrick’s Cathedral, there is one. I had to
> stop being a denialist.
>
>
> Excelsior! & so to bed.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>