CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[Mark Kohut]

Agreeing with David's remark about "just warming up" I will put a slightly
different slant on its meaning:
With his later longer and perforce richer novels, he could elaborate on
this deep lifelong theme.....all the way
thru* Bleeding Edge. *

This 'short story marketed as a novel" is, in retrospect, only the first
manifestation of the theme Morris defines well.
This work is not any kind of early attempt at what was a major later
book....one thing about Pynchon that is not true
of many, many good writers is that each book is so different
superficially....plots, setting, nature and quantity of coherent
themes.......

BUT it exists itself with other themes right here in 1965-1966---and for
all time--even if he had died at Farina's pub party rather that Dck before
he could write *Gravity's Rainbow *even.



On Sun, May 5, 2024 at 8:27 AM O G <octogonalyoyo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>