Bill, Thanks for the interesting reviews of Pick-Up and Wild
Wives. I didn't read them, but in the more recent works by
Willeford, my favorite is still "The Shark Infested Custard"
this kind of crepuscular noir quartet, West Coast style. Not
that I found his Hoke's series an others uninteresting.
Back to 'Pick-Up', I liked your comparison with the
mathematical concept of uncertainty in the numbers theory. My
mathematics years are far behind me now, but one thing I
remember is that any system based on axioms leads always to
some paradox(es). The numbers theory is based on axioms
(IIRC) As the continuum hypothesis seems very paradoxical by
itself, could we say that any novel is axiomatic? I'm
practically sure we could… Anyway, the end, as the rest of
the story, are in the exclusive hands of the author… constant
logic is never a requisite… he's god! So, multiple ends are
always possible for a novel and maybe Willeford did it in a
low key in Pick-Up, not in an obvious way, because he wanted
to manipulate opposite endings?? It's a long shot, I
know…
E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384
At 23:34 14-07-03 -0400, Bill Denton wrote:
>PICK-UP (1955) was the first Charles Willeford novel
I ever read,
>(snip)
>We've talked about the famous last two lines of the
book. I won't quote
>them, but when you read the book for the first time,
they cast everything
>that happened in a new light. This time I looked for
clues along the way
>and found one or two, but mostly I was interested at
how Willeford
>described people such as Harry's bosses and Big Mike.
The last two lines
>seem to me a bit like the Continuum Hypothesis, if
you'll allow me a
>mathematical analogy [1]. The Continuum Hypothesis is
an important thing
>in set theory and basic math, but it can't be proven
true and it can't be
>proven false. Everything works if you assume it's
true, and everything
>works if you assume it's false. You could analyze
PICK-UP with and
>without the last two lines, and it'd work perfectly
both ways. Neither
>version is better than the other.
>
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Jul 2003 EDT