Happy Birthday GR....sent 6:15 AM Australian time.....a good, good piece....

[Mark Kohut]

Needless to say, I disagree. Great books are universal or they aren't
great. if any of us---including the Board of
Trustees of Columbia University cannot read the Brigadier Pudding scenes
then they can't feel some of Pynchon's
insights; those scenes are *meant to *embody,as ongoing metaphor, the ways
we eat shit all the time as sick denizens
of our power dominatrix world. Sadomasochism as daily life, so deeply
unfortunately.

New mothers, new parents--and most of civilized England refused to read
Swift's *A Modest Proposal* since they could not
stomach it, so to speak...The one about eating babies to stave off the
starvation of being ground by those in power into virtually disappearing
as a human being, ala Slothrop.

I cannot read books nor watch movies where children die any longer, *my
acknowledged admitted weakness* since I obviously feel so
helpless and full of fear about my grandchildren. Hardly close enough--3+
hours away-- to even feel deceptively protective.
But I can remember when younger, arguing hard against peers and friends who
said they could not read a well-praised novel by
a fine writer---Rosellen Brown, I believe---about a family's loss of a
child, perhaps in a moment of negligence by one and how they
lost everything else...

All great literature---god did I feel Oedipus's blindness the last time, an
adult, I read that play---must crack the frozen ice within us
as Kafka put it or else novels are just entertainment. IMHO.

On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 6:01 PM Dee Kilroy <deadendkid76 at gmail.com> wrote:

> re: "Readable"
>
> While I wholly agree with that, that which is Readable By All is not meant
> to be Read By All.  My boyfriend has a copy of GR he's never cracked, nor
> am I encouraging him to crack it.  As a book that contains multitudes, some
> of those multitudes are distasteful to readers w/ certain sensibilities.  I
> can read about the scat & not be put off; whereas I don't think my
> boyfriend would want to endure the suffering of Brigadier Pudding-- much
> less truck with the underage sex scenes.  As a gay guy I love Pynchon, but
> I'm not going to pitch P to anybody in my community any more than I would
> push William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Dennis Cooper, or Samuel R.
> Delany.  Some writers are meant for a discerning, limited, readership.
> Hopefully not an obscure one!
>
> Much as I love P, he's perversely uncommercial.  A Gilbert Sorrentino with
> more enduring mass-appeal celebrity.  (Not an insult!)
>
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 11:21 AM Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Unreadable? What idiot could not make it past the first sentence without
>> falling into a well of Readable? I am no scholar in terms of 20th C
>> literature, but I am fully prepared to argue that GR stands as one of the
>> Great Novels of the 20th century. So does V., and so does The Crying of
>> Lot
>> 49.
>> Lest you dismiss me as a Pynch-ophile, let me add that my second favourite
>> American author of the previous century is William Gaddis -- whose books
>> (all too few) I have read several times. IMO, JR is a masterpiece, but so
>> was The Recognitions -- how appropriately titled, given itss
>> un-recognition
>> as great art.
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 3:38 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >
>> https://theconversation.com/amp/join-the-counterforce-thomas-pynchons-postmodern-epic-gravitys-rainbow-at-50-196657?fbclid=IwAR2pKRckXm7QxRt6YVVx6LIxIvLb7FGWCoPKfMhia49HUBroPzD0z7VYrTU
>> > --
>> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Arthur
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>