Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Tuesday's experiment ... is still happening.


2 comments:

walrus said...

A work in progress even . . .

Or "the contonuation through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross . . ."

I'm sorry for your travails with the Beerbohm thesis. I came to pretty much the same conclusion that academic life is dispiriting -- or reactive, as Deleuze might say (how on earth did he put up with it?).

And yes, looking back, I should have discovered the American alternative tradition earlier in life. Still, there we are.

"No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

I was looking over the reviews of Inherent Vice on Sunday and was shocked when I read this in the Sunday Times:

"Pynchon’s novel is also full of superb dialogue and lovely descriptive passages that show that, at 72, the outstanding gifts that led in the 1960s and 1970s to comparisons with Joyce and Melville have not deserted him."

72!

Tempus fugit.

Still, I might actually read Inherent Vice, as (a) it is shorter than the enormous, sprawling Against the Day (life's too short), and (b) it has been compared to the wonderful The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland, which I liked a lot, although it tends to be sneered at by hardcore Pynchon fans. Vineland also mentions the "Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze & Guattari" . . .

Walrus

PS According to James Berger in After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, “the reference to Deleuze and Guattari extends Vineland’s exploration of how to contend with the ‘Cosmic Fascist’ that has contaminated sex, politics, and representation”.


Hmmm

W.

belgianwaffle said...

Pynchon is 72 - my God! I feel suddenly decrepit.

You'll see how your post has triggered a warm wave of Waffle nostalgia.

Yes, for me it has to be The Crying of Lot 49. Blog trivia: one of the monikers I toyed with adopting was Dr. Hilarious. No doubt someone's had the same idea!

(My subsequent delvings into Zappa have confirmed that my first hunches were right - but uninformed. Early Pynchon seems to me to be tapping into the heady West Coast mix of magic-Gnosticism-poetry-Junk aesthetic that informs people such as George Herms, the Semina magazine, Jess & Robert Duncan and - surely - early Zappa (and his cover artist Cal Schenkel).

I asked Lisa J. if Duncan ever mentions Zappa - I could see certain aesthetic affinities between the two. Apparently not.

Hey! That's a new thesis topic. Yoo-hoo! I'm coming back!

Careful ...

Cheers

the C.

April Fool?