go me! pt. deux
SO.
I got my Experimental Forms midterm back tonight. You might remember it from my 4/14 post - the prof. liked it and wanted to keep it for an extra week. I was extremely flattered and elated, of course, especially in light of how unhelpful other students have been regarding feedback.
He gave it back to me before class. I got an A+ and compared in all no-shit seriousness, to Thomas Pynchon. Holy shit.
Specifically, he said my project reminded him of passages from Gravity's Rainbow, which is one of those novels that gets called things like "the greatest postmodern novel of the 20th century" and so thoroughly pissed off the Pulitzer board that they overruled their own committee's unanimous recommendation of GR and didn't award a fiction prize that year (1974).
Now, I'm not a Pynchon fanboy - I hated The Crying of Lot 49 when I first read it (although I'm liking the second readthrough a little more) and have only recently gained an appreciation for his work (it tends to be almost self-consciously difficult to read), but I do know what Pynchon means to my professor, and that isn't a name he would throw around to cushion someone's ego. I also know my own insecurities about writing fiction that's too much plot/concept and not enough character, and that my work ultimately lacks depth and too often mimics or badly lampoons the conventions of genre fiction and blah blah blah. So you might imagine how awkward it was to have this professor sit and pick my brain about this piece for 15 minutes, as though I was a writer of actual import who'd done something cool and interesting.
I'm re-reading it now, to take in his notes, and I still want to tinker with and change things about it. I can still see all the warts and uneven edges. I'm not going to tinker with it, though. I'll save those lessons for the next thing I write.
Pynchon. Jesus fuck.
I got my Experimental Forms midterm back tonight. You might remember it from my 4/14 post - the prof. liked it and wanted to keep it for an extra week. I was extremely flattered and elated, of course, especially in light of how unhelpful other students have been regarding feedback.
He gave it back to me before class. I got an A+ and compared in all no-shit seriousness, to Thomas Pynchon. Holy shit.
Specifically, he said my project reminded him of passages from Gravity's Rainbow, which is one of those novels that gets called things like "the greatest postmodern novel of the 20th century" and so thoroughly pissed off the Pulitzer board that they overruled their own committee's unanimous recommendation of GR and didn't award a fiction prize that year (1974).
Now, I'm not a Pynchon fanboy - I hated The Crying of Lot 49 when I first read it (although I'm liking the second readthrough a little more) and have only recently gained an appreciation for his work (it tends to be almost self-consciously difficult to read), but I do know what Pynchon means to my professor, and that isn't a name he would throw around to cushion someone's ego. I also know my own insecurities about writing fiction that's too much plot/concept and not enough character, and that my work ultimately lacks depth and too often mimics or badly lampoons the conventions of genre fiction and blah blah blah. So you might imagine how awkward it was to have this professor sit and pick my brain about this piece for 15 minutes, as though I was a writer of actual import who'd done something cool and interesting.
I'm re-reading it now, to take in his notes, and I still want to tinker with and change things about it. I can still see all the warts and uneven edges. I'm not going to tinker with it, though. I'll save those lessons for the next thing I write.
Pynchon. Jesus fuck.