Saturday, February 10, 2007

...I don't know if I ever mentioned or linked to Dear Mr. Pynchon, a daily (for often irregular definitions of "daily") page-by-page response to Gravity's Rainbow. The blog was launched in January 2006, and has recently crossed the 200 "letter" mark. The entries are short, elliptical, and you might say impressionistic. There is also a remarkably consistent voice to the letters, as well as an above-Internet-average concern with style and voice. They do well to capture, if not the mood (as if one such mood can be said to exist), then certainly a mood of reading the book.

The obvious point of comparison is the Zak Smith illustration project. For my money, I have enjoyed and felt engaged with the Dear Mr. Pynchon letters more than I have Smith's illustrations. If nothing else, reading the letters demonstrates (or at least, reiterates) the fact that Smith's drawings are just one act of interpretation, and that interpreting and reinterpreting Gravity's Rainbow (if not all literature, if not all art) is an ongoing, highly creative exercise, one that is performed by individual people who need swear no allegiance to the "common understanding" or the "inherited knowledge" about what a given work "is." That there is, in other words, more to getting a work of art, than merely "getting it." (Which may be an obvious point, made in over-inflated scare-quoted language. But it still seems to me like one that is worth being reminded about, now and then.)