CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[O G]

I happen to agree with this.

As unsavory a phrase as "licking his chops" may be, especially with Pyn,
that's the feeling I get reading 49.  He was just warming up.

So why not do the one that was...not a drill?  The one where he actually
bites in.  Let's see how the author does with the second war, rather than
sad suburban housewives.

I don't recall much of GR, if anything, so I'll start.

Ten pages a week.  The thing with the summary of the ten pages at the start
of the week isn't necessary.  It's almost as fast to just read the ten
pages.  Summaries are a lot like summaries.

Questions are always, questions questions.

Questions don't have to be great or good, or remotely anything, just
questions.


On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 10:29 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 9:57 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote
>
> *“But making a leap from obscurity to metaphor seems unwarranted.”*
>
> Ah! You have fallen unintentionally upon the central metaphor of this
> novel!  It is almost a perfect restating of the metaphor of Oedepa’s
> journey:  Conspiracy is a key metaphor for the search for existential or
> spiritual or realistic or ANY kind of significance in one’s everyday
> experience.
>
> Trust me: Pynchon was only licking his chops with this one. He is quoted as
> aiming for GR to keep the scholars stroking their chins like they did for
> Ulysses.
>
>
> His gift to the readers of his pre-internet books, read in pre-internet
> times, was to give them a nodding acquaintance with the obscure and the
> hidden, and to point them ( as he did for Oedipa) towards unseen
> connections.
>
> I don't believe that he was trying to become his own obscure material;
>
>
> Yes, I know, he was a student (i. e. he sat in his
> lectures for one course) of Nabokov.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>