![The Jazz Butcher](https://v1.jazzbutcher.com/images/knife_logo_80.png)
Lot 49 and some others
Date: Mon 02 Mar 1998 - 05:29:23 PST
>>about Pat "still having some genius left," as if we doubted so! Sorry,
>>but it makes a good last line in a review destined for laymen.
>Well, I'd have to disagree. Your whole review is completely positive and
>you then end it with a sentence containing something of a reservation about
>the man. Huh?
I wouldn't have read so much into that line. The author as much as said he wrote it just to write it.
On the subject of Lot 49, the phrase appears before Pynchon. It's part of the closing line of a Langston Hughes poem, although the name escapes me. Can anyone shed some light on that? I will certainly look further into it.
I read some Pynchon when I was into "beat" writers and I had kind of lumped him into this category as a result of his similarity to Burroughs. The man has some really nice word play that is fun to read if you are someone who can occasionally enjoy language just for language's sake. But Zembower is right, he lacks substantive meaning and I had always taken "Looking for Lot 49" to be a song that existed purely to express that sentiment i.e. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Received on Wed Apr 22 17:58:46 1998