And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
I'm re-reading V, and am excessively glad I'm doing so; the first time through the first 2-300 pages was a slog, leavened by the end of the book, but this time it's 100% beauty. How did I ever sleepwalk through pages filled with this:
She knew instinctively: he will be as fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edge of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect, why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there ever should have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will lean how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45° angle to his line of sight, pointed her nose at his heart. Looked up at him through her eyelashes.
“How long have you been in New York?”
It really is monumental, and after this I am going to have to finally get down to it and crack Gravity's Rainbow.
She knew instinctively: he will be as fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edge of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect, why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there ever should have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will lean how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45° angle to his line of sight, pointed her nose at his heart. Looked up at him through her eyelashes.
“How long have you been in New York?”
It really is monumental, and after this I am going to have to finally get down to it and crack Gravity's Rainbow.
Pynchon went to Cornell, you know. (So why we have a building named after Ayn Rand and not him is beyond me.)
Posted by
K |
1:36 PM
Oh, I know. Some of the stories in Slow Learner were written at Cornell. And the building thing stupifies me.
Posted by
Ian |
11:42 AM