Comments on: Also

By: Big Worm

Big Worm — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 16:49:50 +0000

maybe you high-toned recent college graduates should stick with your graphic novel comic books and teevee and leave books more challenging than â€œThe DaVinci Codeâ€? for others with an i.q. over 75.

If you want a string of cliches to have any chance of working as an insult, you at least have to form a coherent sentence. Please try harder.

By: Lamb Cannon

Lamb Cannon — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 21:46:11 +0000

I couldn’t read any more comparisons of Pynchon’s salient and hilarous book to “Infinite Jest” without commenting–maybe you high-toned recent college graduates should stick with your graphic novel comic books and teevee and leave books more challenging than “The DaVinci Code” for others with an i.q. over 75. Just sayin.

By: Mo's Bike Shop

Mo's Bike Shop — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 04:39:04 +0000

Oh, and…

Malt does do more than Milton can

To justify God’s ways to man.

I mean, I’ve heard the chimes at midnight…

Shit, I’ve left my necktie–God knows where?

By: Mo's Bike Shop

Mo's Bike Shop — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 04:18:37 +0000

Nancy, et al.

I did my master’s thesis on the “intertextuality” of Stephen Daedalus and Prince Hal. The teachez loved it.

In fact, to give a spoiler, if you want to see an eighty-year-old critique of a born-to-the-colonization/slavery-mindset wingnut, try seeing chummy old Buck Mulligan with a more jaundiced eye.

And Joyce is trying to evoke an Homeric/Bardic/Drum Circle effect. The text is composed to be read again. So you’ll do well to reread new and difficult sections. Or sing them out loud.

Or you could listen to the books-on-tape, WIRQG, version while you’re reading it.

I got nothing on Pynchon, there are only so many hours in a decade.

By: makifat

makifat — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 16:30:23 +0000

GR is an excellent, if dense, read. Lots of military-industrial paranoia to ingest, along with copraphagic excess that would make mozart blush. Weird as it seems, I approached it like a miniseries, a pynchonian version of an ABC-TV “special event” from the 1970′s. Well, it worked for me. It has never taken me sooooo loooonnngg to read a book. I remember reading it primarily on train/metro when I worked in DC.

And I disagree about “Mason and Dixon”, although it is perhaps a book for older persons, with a touch of the wistfullness that comes with age. It is a comic masterpiece, complete with an insane mechanical duck. Notice the sweet little reference to GR in the first line. Just read and enjoy.

By: Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 14:31:45 +0000

Intellectual onanism. It was fun for Pynchon. YMMV

By: Dennis P

Dennis P — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 14:26:21 +0000

I still read “Gravity’s Rainbow.” For me, the first read was like Joyce’s “Ulysses;” once I stopped trying to make sense of the book and just started reading it it was, and is, a continuing delight.

By: pablo

pablo — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 08:04:44 +0000

Am i the only one who thought Infinite Jest seemed gimmicky?

By: Dan Someone

Dan Someone — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 06:10:16 +0000

Goddammit, somebody stole one of my apostrophes! It was there just a second ago, really!

By: Dan Someone

Dan Someone — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 06:09:31 +0000

Um, Siffl, mikey: isn’t this how the Pasty/Thers fiasco got its start? Whether it’s the authors intent or the reader’s that makes a work… uh… work?

I’m just sayin’.

Anyway, I never managed to make it through Gravity’s Rainbow, but I did just finish my occasional reread of The Crying of Lot 49. Loved it, as usual.

By: Siffl

Siffl — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 03:44:56 +0000

one more thing:

yes, a good question: what is poetry for ?
but perhaps a better question:
what is it against?

By: Siffl

Siffl — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 03:44:06 +0000

Your ‘moment,’ with all due respect (as they say) has precious little to do
with the author’s ‘moment.’ Your point is your point. The author’s point
is his/hers.

And, fortunately, or not so fortunately, we read poems, we do not ‘feel’ them.

The way poetry ‘works’ and what poetry ‘is for’ …. well, that’s two very
different subjects.

Anyway, I would never begrudge anyone his pet poems or poets,

Even I could be forced to confess to one or two ‘guilty pleasures.’

By: mikey

mikey — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 03:13:54 +0000

Well, my friend, that is certainly possible. But see, I didn’t go to college. I went to war. So just don’t see it this way. I say that if you can separate the moment from the poem, you have failed. You have missed the point. You cannot feel a poem without context. C’mon, pal, the poet KNOWS this. As does his contemporary, the Songwriter. The words are meant to work with the context. The cannot CARRY context.

Please. I beg you. Please don’t tell me I don’t understand the way poetry works. Know why? ‘Cause I think YOU don’t get what poetry is for…

mikey

By: Siffl

Siffl — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:48:52 +0000

gosh, I don’t feel like “a hopeless dork” ….

Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff — I remember it well.
Unfortunate title in ways Housman may have missed.

I suspect you are conflating the drama of the moment
with the ‘poem’ itself. And it’s not unusual for people to transfer
the intensity of a ‘life moment’ to the song, television show,
or, in this case, poem that was ‘playing’ when we experienced
that moment.

By: mikey

mikey — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:29:25 +0000

Nope. Not buyin. You’re a dork. Big honkin dork. I taught “Terence” to a kid from Tennessee who didn’t finish junior high school under a starry sky under mortar fire in the sticky clay of a Firebase in Southeast Asia, and all I can say is you have GOT to be a hopeless dork…

mikey

By: Siffl

Siffl — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:21:30 +0000

Housman was the preeminent classics scholar of his time.
(Oddly enough, a lousy translator of the classics.) He published
only two books of poetry in his life, widely separated in time.

“A Shropshire Lad” was quite a popular success (– sort of
the Stanyan Street of its day.) Nevertheless, it was the last
gasp of the Edwardians before the modernists (Pound, Eliot,
et.al.) swept all that 19th century crap away.

Shorter Siffl: Housman sucks.

By: mikey

mikey — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:04:23 +0000

No, I’m sorry, excuse me Tim, I’m NOT finished. Dood, if you can’t find pleasure in reading Houseman, either you’re just not trying or your standards are so high you’re missing all manner of enjoyable. Let yourself go, mi amigo…

mikey

By: mikey

mikey — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:00:13 +0000

Oh, I know, such a Blundering Buffoon am I…

mike

By: Siffl

Siffl — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 01:46:40 +0000

Middle English probably sounded like Dutch. So,
maybe you’d want to get stoned and try Chaucer with
an accent more ‘ la Pays-bas’.

And I can think of nothing to redeem either Kipling or Housman
other than lighter fluid and a match. Book-burning, I tell you,
is soon to make a come-back.

By: mikey

mikey — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 01:16:55 +0000

Re Confederacy of Dunces (mikey @ 18:57), it wasnâ€™t necessarily a bad book but you can only take so much of that diaper-clad whiner before you want to throw the book into the fire, which I might have done if Iâ€™d had a fireplace.

Yeah, actually I know whatcher saying. But you couldn’t stay true to that character and NOT do that. And hey, no one would wanna throw Gravitys Rainbow” in the fire, ever…

As to reading Finneganâ€™s Wake aloud in an Irish brogue (Siffl @ 18:40), that worked for me with The Canterbury Tales in the Middle English. Read it like a Brit might and you hear what theyâ€™re actually saying.

Yep. Also works with “A Shropsire Lad” and any Kipling at all…

mikey