Posted by Joffre on 2/5/2009, 22:20:13, in reply to "Re: Franny and Zooey / Lost in the Funhouse"
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I didn't mean to suggest that Pynchon and Austen were mutually exclusive tastes.
I guess I feel that I should give Pynchon more effort considering his reputation. I wish he had written another short book. Gravity's Rainbow is just too long considering how I disliked it. I doubt I'll ever read The Crying of Lot 49 again if I don't find something more in it this time. This will be my third time with it. After the last time, which was around 01, I bought a Companion to TCoL49 which explains allusions and such, so I've always meant to read TCoL49 once more along with the companion.
I do feel some responsibility to keep trying to enjoy Shakespeare though. I made it through Macbeth a couple weeks ago, but I couldn't feel much interest in it. It is disturbing to me to find almost no interest in the writer all but universally acknowledged the greatest ever. I read one or two plays a year, and my only particular enjoyment comes from lines like, "Reason thus with life. If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep."
I feel as you do about art. I want to enjoy a story in some way. I find this difficult to talk about. I just don't seem to have the mots justes. I want to enjoy the language, the structure. I don't care about points. There seems to me no sense in reading today a protest against the Court of Chancery of Dickens day, more than a hundred years ago. But that is hardly the same thing as saying there is no sense in reading Dickens. I loved Bleak House. Do you know Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation? http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html I like it very much.
