On the disgusting

Jo brings up a good point and its worth considering in light of the two books we've read and the third to come.

Why would I expect you to read such works in a nice Lutheran college like Dana?

We discussed the notion a bit with Lolita, but Lolita was also rather less graphic when compared to GR. In fact, there was a very clear moral position with Lolita, in that HH was a bad, bad man. The disturbing elements seemed to come from the rather lush and voyeuristic manner in which Nabokov positioned us as readers. It was hard not to feel complicit through HH's verbal manipulations.

Now we get Pynchon, and the graphic depicition of perversion is much more extreme than Lolita. Worse, that moral grounding seems more difficult to find. At this point, some of you may be much more sympathetic to that Pulitzer committee that refused to give Pynchon the prize.

A professor once told me, we live life to please us, we read literature to disgust us.