version's Thomas Pynchon masterclass

william_kent

Well-known member
Which you definitely haven't bookmarked or anything.

lol, I got into an argument the first day I joined this forum when I said he was a dirty old man ( with little to no evidence that would stand up in court, same reasons I'm worried about my early posts concerning a screechy voiced singer and her alleged cocaine habit abetted by a prog rock superstar when she was underage _, I heard there is some law called libel, allegedly
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
lol, I got into an argument the first day I joined this forum when I said he was a dirty old man ( with little to no evidence that would stand up in court, same reasons I'm worried about my early posts concerning a screechy voiced singer and her alleged cocaine habit abetted by a prog rock superstar when she was underage _, I heard there is some law called libel, allegedly
I think this might be something to worry about if anyone who didn't already use Dissensus knew about Dissensus.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
And someone slips on a banana skin, lol.
More slapstick humour now, Pointsman chasing a stray dog with his foot stuck in a toilet bowl.

Reminds me of one of those daft comic interludes you get in Shakespeare plays. Not particularly funny but the writing quality is so high he just about manages to get away with it.
 

version

Well-known member
He says he just wishes there was a Fitzcarraldo edition so he could have a copy with one of their covers.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
he was saying to me that he wished graham norton would do an audiobook of prynn's poems and that he'd absolutey love it if graham could do a short commentary about each poem as well
 

version

Well-known member
More slapstick humour now, Pointsman chasing a stray dog with his foot stuck in a toilet bowl.

Reminds me of one of those daft comic interludes you get in Shakespeare plays. Not particularly funny but the writing quality is so high he just about manages to get away with it.

Pointsman's fucking horrible. I can't remember whether he's actually described, but I picture him like Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein. I stumbled on some guy who people think the character might be based on, but can't remember his name now. A shady scientist or psychiatrist or something in England during the war.

pretorius5.jpg
 

version

Well-known member
More slapstick humour now, Pointsman chasing a stray dog with his foot stuck in a toilet bowl.

Reminds me of one of those daft comic interludes you get in Shakespeare plays. Not particularly funny but the writing quality is so high he just about manages to get away with it.

I think he's funny, but he's at his best when he's serious. The long, descriptive passages are where he really shines, when he goes all Rilke and Melville and starts talking about war + technology or geopolitics or angels.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think he's funny, but he's at his best when he's serious. The long, descriptive passages are where he really shines, when he goes all Rilke and Melville and starts talking about war + technology or geopolitics or angels.
I agree, the poetic-philosophical digressions are great.

My least favourite bits are the spontaneous yet highly orchestrated orgies where everyone breaks into song, like some x-rated version of a Disney film, and when he starts doing all that extremely affected, folksy "aww shucks, gee whizz!" stuff.

In fact the songs and poems are, for the most part, extremely annoying and IMO don't really add anything.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Don't get me wrong, I think he's pretty funny as well, just not so sure about the slapstick bits. The songs don't really bother me, so far. Didn't really know what to make of the giant adenoid.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
More slapstick humour now, Pointsman chasing a stray dog with his foot stuck in a toilet bowl.

Reminds me of one of those daft comic interludes you get in Shakespeare plays. Not particularly funny but the writing quality is so high he just about manages to get away with it.
I love all the little details like when he describes the ether soaked sponge as "a round pale collection of holes". He's great at describing things in accurate but surprising ways.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
"They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God’s actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year."
 

sus

Moderator
"What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos; he merely has the facility for hooking on"
Gerry Fialka asserts that Marshall McLuhan asserts that the antenna metaphor originates with Pound. Which sounds familiar from my time reading Kenner.
 
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