Do you realize that this is the first time I will be able to anticpate NEW PYNCHON

OH WELL

There would have to be ancestral Tchitcherines...

! Thread of threads right there, if you do all three.

"DAEREST SLOCUM"

Because one of the risks of adopting the picaresque is ending up with a string of vignettes but no plot, no underlying mystery to be solved (e.g. who or what is V, Tristero, what's up with Slothrop's cock), no antagonist to be defeated, no outcome we desire for the characters. Just a series of events. This happens, then this happens, and it's all very amusing but not particularly involving.

And a faux 18th century novel kind of needs to be Picaresque, I think, but I think there's plenty of underlying mystery and that whole Realist cohesive novel schtick needs putting to bed anyway.

But it's been put to bed so many times! I don't care about cohesion (coherence?) in The Novel, but Pynchon's demonstrably weaker in the absence of a reason to turn the page.

And while one of the pleasures of Pynchon is the way he toys with and challenges and exposes our expectations of nnarrative, he can only do so as a novelist who relies on those expectations quite heavily for many of his effects. It's not as though we're talking about Robbe-Grillet here...

So they're both The Odyssey...

But the parallels with M&D for me are more to do with the fact that all three are satirical books that have more going on than just satire, and that they share a high degree of preoccupation with the texture of prose, and that they're very funny shaggy dog stories.

Who saw the Simpsons episode with Thomas Pynchon voicing himself? Wearing a paper bag over his head, with a huge flashing THOMAS PYNCHON'S HOUSE marquee in his front yard?

Agreed on both counts, actually. I'm being perverse more than a bit reductive. But note that whether or not the crisis is resolved is most definitely not a requirement. cf. The Crying Of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow...

Surely the 'page-turner' in Mason & Dixon is why the hell they are out there drawing this line in the first place? Admittedly, this isn't as strong as Tristero/Slothrop's cock but by my third Pynchon novel I'd kind of stopped bothering about that side of things.

Matt, I answered this two posts before you raised it... Expectations can't be foiled and confounded if they're not cultivated in the fiirst place.

The one I didn't like is Vineland... When I read it (ca 1999) it seemed like a sloppy, pointless mess.

This is crazy talk. Seriously. Painfully accurate in its assessment of the Reagan/Bush years, the whys of them, and where it was all headed. But then, we've been here before...

Far from schtick gone wild, Vineland is an angry, mordant, and prescient assessment of the Love Generation's death drive. If often hilarious.

Mason and Dixon is a virtuoso piece, but also plotless and the last thing I would choose to change anyone's mind about Pynchon.

Should we revive a Pynchon thread for this side stuff and return to Lot 49?

-- rogermexico (tenthreaso...), October 28th, 2005 6:19 PM.

I'm assuming I'll have to get an American copy if I want it this year. Which I do.

elevator = lift

i really liked "mason & dixon". can't wait.

Nooooo! Giles Goat-Boy is brilliant.

Huh? With a few substitutions, that description could pretty well cover any Pynchon, Lot 49 included.

And, as is being reported today, the title of the book is Against the Day (it'll be reflected on our site in a day or so). But meanwhile, what do you think of the description? Is it classic Pynchon, or Pynchon parodying his "usual business"? It would be hard to find a time riper for his hijinks than the crazy turn of the last century. As a friend and fellow fan here said about one of the many events promised to appear, "Tunguska!!! Tunguska's the best, right there you know it's going to be good." December seems too far away, but maybe I'll spent the meantime finally breaking in my pristine copy of Mason & Dixon, as many of you have recommended. --Tom

John 12:7 (King James Version)

1Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.

2There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.

3Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

4Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him,

5Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?

6This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.

7Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.

8For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.

9Much people of the Jews therefore knew that he was there: and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead.

10But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death;

11Because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus.

1

This seems to be the book.

But other than that you liked it?

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader's, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses. It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man. Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads. Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder. Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.)

xpost

"a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank"

possible!

"For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work tended to be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human connection, soulfulness or redemption."

In addition to being WRONG (and better argued by Richard Locke in his Book Review treatment of GR), this perspective freaks me out. Without going all grad-student, she more or less in so many words sez "gimme them SOULFUL, UPLIFTING novels, where PEOPLE LIKE ME LEARN something important about FAMILY AND THEMSELVES."

Grrrrrrrr.

*Last year, when reviewing Ben Kunkel's book Indecision , a coming of age novel set in New York, she reviewed the book in Holden Caulfield's voice--i.e. she wrote the review as Holden Caulfield. Not exactly the hting you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A44581

You can see how she might have accumulated some enemies. The Nation’s former literary editor, John Leonard, is on the record decrying Kakutani’s “tin ear” and “benighted” analysis. The Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley said that when he heard Kakutani had won a Pulitzer, he wanted to give back his own.

"The place was like a museum of mayonnaise. This being just at the height of the culte de la mayonnaise then sweeping Belgium, oversize exhibits of the ovoöleaginous emulsion were to be encountered at every hand. Heaps of Mayonnaise Grenache, surrounded by plates of smoked turkey and tongue, glowed redly as if from within, while with less, if any, reference to actual food it might have been there to modify, mountains of Chantilly mayonnaise, swept upward in gravity-impervious peaks insubstantial as cloud, along with towering masses of green mayonnaise, basins of boiled mayonnaise, mayonnaise baked into soufflés, not to mention a number of not entirely successful mayonnaises, under some obscure attainder, or on occasion passing as something else, dominated every corner.
“How much do you know of La Mayonnaise?” she inquired.
He shrugged. “Maybe up to the part that goes ‘Aux armes, citoyens’—” "

ketjap:preterite::mayonnaise:elite?

Any other potential referents for the title?

oh salon, waht make u so dumb?

Again with the "believable people," the demand for plucked heartstrings, the valorisation of subjectivity over structures and systems...

What can I say, except...

http://www.knitemare.org/cats/270917405_1c8cb1fb12.jpg

emo fux0rz

Also, I like Neal Stephenson but ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

WTF???

also omg in the book i just hit the section with the italicized words. ROFFLES!

(Alan and I were sitting in the pub yesterday evening with a copy of Against The Day on the table wondering if 'absquatulated' was actually a word.)

Just had to get that off my chest, because it feels like a terribly minority viewpoint these days. And, I suspect, its why most critics are having such a terrible time with it.

-- sterl clover (s.clove...), November 28th, 2006.

Answers
Fucking hell - I'm only to 170!
Time to log off and do some real reading, I guess!

-- austin#$@#@! (austin.swinbuF="mailto:swinburn@douchebaggm">swinburn@douchebaggmail.com), November 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lol @ cap'n-save-a-has-been
-- M I C H I K O K A K U T A N I ([email protected]), November 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i'm only 100 pages in! but i was on holiday and was only able to buy a copy on sunday, though. i've been carefully avoiding reviews and will prob avoid this thread until i'm done, i guess - and i'm not really sure that'll be before xmas.
anyway, really enjoying it so far, especially for the relative accessibility, which is allowing me to enjoy the details without worrying about getting totally lost.

-- toby ([email protected]), November 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm about 150 pages in now - there's a bit of maths talk in the Arctic section that lost me completely but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Toby, if you could enlighten me as to the relevance of it once you've got there it'd be greatly appreciated.
I don't understand the initial criticisms of the novel at all - if anything it feels more generous and 'human' than any of his other books (disclaimer, not read Vineland). Anyone who can read the Merle and Dally section and still feel Pynchon can't do 'proper characterisation' is mad.

Still - army of Arctic subterranean gnomes with laser crossbows = r0x0r.

-- Matt DC (runmd...), November 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also did anyone else notice the Russian rivals to the Chums of Chance dropping four-block pieces of masonary from their ship = THEY ARE PLAYING TETRIS!
-- Matt DC (runmd...), November 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the name of the captain is actually the name of the dude who invented tetris too!
i read up some on the maths and quaternions in particular to help me thru those sections, tho strictly speaking they're not necessary plotwise or even themewise but more for the sake of gags. there's some pretty absurd multilingual puns around too.

just finished the book -- the european politics/balkans section around p. 800 with british spies etc felt like it really dragged -- really the roughest spot in the book. but there's a great momentum towards the end following it, particularly when it hits california and all of a sudden there's a whole new pynchon register for his writing that just rushes out of nowhere and you've felt the whole world shift beneath yr. feet and the strange curls of postwar progress.

it seems to me at this point that the underlying theme is really arrivals and departures and a growing sort of mood more than anything else that's hard to capture in simple language, but just of coming to find one's place in a world that as one ages becomes increasingly both scary and sprawling but also with mercy and deliverance in the oddest moments. a secular wakeful dream of a life in grace.

-- sterlclover (s.clove...), November 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also striking is how pornographic it is. The sex is tamer than, say, GR, and that's why it feels different -- not all the sex scenes (which really do start to accumulate faster in the later sections of the novel) are particularly set-pieces of symbolic fetishistic whatever -- they're more naturalistic and almost shockingly casually integrated into the narrative where they make sense -- not in any depth, but just with a bit less offstage than what we're used to, and sometimes even portions of sweet moments between loving couples. Which makes it somehow all the more jarring, not in the context of the novel, but in the context of how we expect novels to work.
-- sterlclover (s.clove...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Pynchon would you guys recommend to a Pynchon skeptic? I had to read Vineland for a class and I felt like it was mostly a lot of forced silliness and absurdity.
-- Hurting (hurtingchie...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vineland is NOT a good place to start.
-- grbchv! ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Crying of Lot 49 is good, and short. V is very good, not (quite) as mostrous or intimidating as GR or ATD or M&D, but pretty monstrous.
-- austin!@$# (austin.swinburEF="mailto:inburn@doucheb">inburn@douchebaggmail.com), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Start with V.
-- letmebackin! ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I reread Vineland after urging in the ILB Pynchon thread. I still don't really like it, too much cutesy and not in the charming creepy way of usual Pynchon cutesy. All that fucking ninja shit was way too William Gibson.
Picked up the new one but am saving it for Christmastime.

-- adam. ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i'll echo the V recommendation, my first and still my favorite. then i read GR which i also loved but it's a little too..... in places. After that i read Lot49 which is fine, and his most accessible, but it honestly didn't make much of an impact compared to the other 2. I HATE M&D, so much that I'm not currently thinking about the new one, but i'll come around eventually.
-- bliss ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FWIW, M&D improved by about 500% on my reread.
-- austin#$@#@! (austin.swinbu="mailto:.swinburn@douchebaggma">.swinburn@douchebaggmail.com), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm really enjoying M&D, actually. And I really loved 49
-- grbchv! ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gotta say that the one problem I had was keeping the rotating cast of roughly eight "main" characters in this one straight. Had to keep flipping back to doublecheck who had been paired with whom, which one was in Vienna at the moment and which in Mexico, etc. The book's long enough that they all get plenty of play, but there are also sometimes HUGE gaps between sections dealing with any one of them.
-- sterlclover (s.clove...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After that i read Lot49 which is fine, and his most accessible, but it honestly didn't make much of an impact compared to the other 2
Gotta disagree on both counts. Easiest to finish, yes, but deceptive. Like Lake Inverarity, there's a lot hidden underneath the surface.

V is in many ways the most straightforward, and offers a good primer in How To Read Pynchon. In addition to being great fun in its own right.

-- Name Not Found ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fools! Vineland is awesome!
-- Dan I. (w1nt3rmut...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

so, is this good? I asked for it on me christmas list
-- kingfish in absentia (jdsalmo...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

it's great, so far.
-- hstencil not logged in ([email protected]), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haha Sterling - one of the things I was enjoying about this one is that it seemed relatively straightforward to keep track of the characters. But then I only recently reread Gravity's Rainbow so maybe that's not the best reference point.
A friend of mine is using ATD as a 'way into' the bigger Pynchon novels. He read Lot 49 recently and is finding this easier going - I'm find it very accessible.

That said the last 800 or so pages could be complete crap for all I know ;)

-- Matt DC (runmd...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also did anyone else notice the Russian rivals to the Chums of Chance dropping four-block pieces of masonary from their ship = THEY ARE PLAYING TETRIS!
-- Matt DC (runmd...), November 28th, 2006.
You just blew my mind.

-- Party With Me Punker (pelagi...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few other thoughts that hit me -- a central theme of the novel seems to be what P makes explicit as the bisexual threesome starts to come unglued -- how to distinguish the "freedom" brought on by incapacity in the face of impending catastrophe from a different, more genuine sort buoyed by the a sense of limitless possibility? Also, there seems to be a genuine autobiographical strand in capturing the realization that formulas of all sorts (vectoral, electromagnetic, kabbalistic and pythagorean) are as often or not splints and projections, deflections of aims and dawnings much less ambitious and more human.
-- sterlclover (s.clove...), November 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

say... he brought back Rabbi of Prague "long life and prosperity" gag...
-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 8th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

um, not much to add. but 200 pages in and loving this.
-- ryan ([email protected]), December 8th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the p-list ppl. have found crazy numerous little refs to the other books in this. which i sorta find cute and sorta irritating coz it feeds this fanboy tendency to read it for continuity like a comic book or something.
-- sterl clover (s.clove...), December 9th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there a Bodine that turns up at any point in the book?
I've kind of lost momentum on this due to a few other things going on so I'm only maybe 300 pages into it. Still nothing has outweirded the undergound gnomes with laser crossbows/fastforwarded Odyssey bit yet.

-- Matt DC (runmd...), December 9th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"That is that of which I speak."
LOL

-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 16th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

almost finished my reread of M&D -- everything feels so natural this time around -- sure it'll feel that way when i get back to ATD too. by which i mean, M&D's percolated in my head fr years and so now when i read it everthing rushes back and makes sense whereas like with p generally, the first few reads are rilly vertigo-inducing (for some reason, ATD was less so than any other except COL49 for me tho -- the plot was more conventional and substantial in most ways)
also the way that the captive tail in M&D parallels the CoC stuff in ATD started me thinking about the delicate and generous way p uses metafictional devices as compared to most. Also struck by how ATD *didn't* have the accel. of episodic movement and flights of fancy that most P novels have in their rush to the end (granted, M&D had a denouement following, but still...)

-- sterl clover (s.clove...), December 19th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Somewhere halfway through the second section, beginning to become overwhelmed. For a while I had a handle on the symbolic recurrence of mirrors, explosions, and bursts of light ... but no longer. I've been distracted by Occultancy, quaternions, bilocality, and exactly what the hell Merle and his ball of lightning have to do with anything.
[bbaa9197e741970193c784b29d00c890.png]

Pynchon Wiki is sort of helpful, but is there anybody wanting to offer spoiler-free chat about any of these confusions?

-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 20th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the codes don't add up -- if you try to fit them all together y'll fail -- thery're not supposed to add up either (they're other people's codes, or attempts at codes, or stabs at knowledge, or alternate foreclosed answers to a physics in becoming).
quaternions are easy tho -- wikipedia's section on them is pretty good. they're just a now superceded form of multidimensional vector calculation.

-- sterl clover (s.clove...), December 20th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

best bilocation joke I've read so far (just this morning):
"Kit was put to work sorting the catch....soon developing a sense of nuance among turbot and brill, cod and hake sole, plaice, and bream."

-- a bulldog fed a cookie shaped like a kitten ([email protected]), December 20th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But not entirely superseded, yes? The quaternion's continued value in descriptions of rotational space still has applications in e.g. signal processing (a Pynchonian trope or, at this point, tic par excellence that takes us all the way back to the Mondaugen's Story section of V, cf. Shambhala/Vheissu) and possible implications wrt the theme of double refraction.
xpost

-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 20th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ATD is lined up as my read for January, when I'm on maternity leave. However, given the less-than-focused state of my pregnant brain, I'm wondering if I shouldn't have gone for some Robert Harris or something instead...
-- Meg Busset (mogbaske...), December 20th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm on 725...just rolling with it. Some sections pull me in and I'm lost for an hour, others are a struggle just to see some relevence to an overall structure.
Fave characterization: 'mini' Cooper p.202
fave name: Mia Culpepper
fave passage that's too long to type out: p. 651, last para.

-- dave pacey (docpace...), December 20th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm about 450 pages in, and enjoying it a great deal.
I'm liking the way it oscilates between the relatively naturalistic bits, mostly but not entirely set in Colorado, and sheer lunacy mostly (entirely?) set outside the USA.

It's clear to me that Pynchon is consciously doing pastiches of different kinds of modern fantastic writing. I haven't tried to match everything up, but the ill-fated Arctic expedition is clearly H.P. Lovecraft, the sand fleas in the Go Desert is pure William Burroughs, the living Tarot is G.K.Chesterton/Charles Williams-style metaphysical fantasy, the peyote trip is Carlos Castoneda (presumably: I've never read him), there's all the Tom Sawyer/Boys Own Adventure stuff with the Chums of Chance of course, not to mention the explicit riffs on The Time Machine and Lost Horizon.

(I've been doing my best to avoid reading the reviews until after I finish, but I get the impression that the conventional wisdom is that the book is wildly inconsistent. I suspect that most reviewers are wishing he'd written a nice straightforward conventionally liberal historical narrative about the mine-workers unions in the early 1900's. To which I say, phooey! If that is in fact the case...)

-- PFS ([email protected]), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the best name (so far) is clearly the Uckenfay family.
-- PFS ([email protected]), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My impression was actually that Michiko Kakutani, at least, would have been happier if he's written The Curious Case of The Time Traveler's Wife in the Nighttime or something.
And he'll be hard-pressed ever to top Joaquin Stick or Geli Tripping.

-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yah looking back at M&D too it was clear to me how much p had taken to writing through a mess of other voices. with gr it seemed more like he was writing thru film, telegraph, etc. and other less literary genres, which was a v. difft feel (& of course vineland is all about the omnipresent toob)
-- sterl clover (s.clove...), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the best name (so far) is clearly the Uckenfay family.
-- PFS (s_f_peterse...), December 21st, 2006.

I so debated posting this, but I thought I'd look like I was too easily amused. I agree, tho.

-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'd never deny it.
(And it hardly seems like any kind of flaw when talking about a Pynchon novel. Ficht nicht mit der Rockettenmensch and all that...)

-- PFS ([email protected]), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spongiatosta, people.
-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 21st, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mouthorganman Apprentice Bing Spooninger, the Band Mascotte.
-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 25th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I got the new one for Christmas this morning -- can't wait.
-- Joe Isuzu's Petals (crump...), December 25th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, so what the hell is going on with Candlebrow U.?
Also, somebody wanna speculate about the weird cryptography talk directed Cyprian's way (IIRC) somewhere between 700 - 850, the discussion of errata and texts overlaid with texts? I had a Neal Stephenson moment, almost, and then I got suspicious that Tommy-P was screwin' around with me, trying to imply a secret novel of some sort. Plz to discuss!

-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Used Amazon gift cert to buy (also Mark Bittman's Best Recipes in the World on remy bean's rec), should be here Friday!
-- jaq (js...), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

man, i'm jealous. i wish i were restarting AtD. (the first 150 pages of confused me in a fantastic way, more even than most other Pynchon).
-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

also got the new one for Christmas(along with zombie books, hooray!). Will be starting as soon as I finish up another historical multi-threaded tome, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver.
-- kingfish in absentia (jdsalmo...), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bumper sticker seen this weekend: MY OTHER CAR IS A PYNCHON NOVEL
-- nabisco ([email protected]), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

gawd, I wish i owned that.
-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

for a while there 600-700, i was thinking the Y-R-C menage was analagous to the triple entente??? but the pieces never quite fit. somehow i keep thinking the main characters map to the countries involved in the great game and the great war, but then...
-- dave pacey (docpace...), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Gawd, I wish I owned that."
- Remy
What, the car or the novel? Anyway, sticker oughtta read: MY OTHER CAR IS THOMAS PYNCHON

-- adam beales ([email protected]), December 28th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

for a while there 600-700, i was thinking the Y-R-C menage was analagous to the triple entente??? but the pieces never quite fit. somehow i keep thinking the main characters map to the countries involved in the great game and the great war, but then...
...but then Pynchon is typically only interested in politics as an epiphenomenon of elite cruelty, cynicism, greed, lust, and self-preservation. It's the wake left behind the good ship Anubis.

In this, his worldview doesn't actually stray too far from Homer, only the gods ein sich aren't there to command, provoke, or, ultimately provide rationale. But he certainly wouldn't blink at the Greek/Ilian casus belli. He'd just make it less noble and more sad, and avoid anything more than a rueful sentence or two suggesting the elevation of tragedy.

So since he's generally more concerned with the consequences of world-historical events for the schlemiels stuck inside them without hope of escape (hope of escape serving as one of the key axes separating preterite from elite) than he is with The March Of History, the only way he'd draw that kind of analogy would be to make it SO OBVIOUS EVEN THE CHARACTERS COULD SEE IT. And thus cartoon it away.

But of course, the US isn't even in the casino of the Great Game yet, let alone at the table. It's the Vibe robber baron capital formation that will end up serving as the ante. And the diminished fortunes of a shell-shocked Continent.

-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

now in progress: pynchonwiki. Soon to include GR and M&D as well.
-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Campanile.jpg]
hehe

-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), December 29th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

to answa matt dc way up there, yes seaman bodine turns up around the half way point in the ship that divides into two
-- BounceBounceBounceBounceBounceBounceBounce ([email protected]), December 30th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

done, and ... hmmm... I feel like I could write a 600 page refutation of Kakutani's crapass review. The ending is beautiful, irreducible, strange, and seems to resist tattooing easy dramatic closure over individual plot-bodies, all while bringing them, collectively to a handsome point of departure. This strikes me as right: for a book obsessed with process and progress and tunneled-perspective, to tidily suture shut the individual souls' paths would be a travesty. Pynchon seems to, hah, imply an individual vector for each protagonist, not necessarily the one we'd like to choose, but the right one (cf. Corporatized Chums of Chance), and one that doesn't flatten the character's perspective journey into a line with digressions but (as said during one of Kit's dreams) that zigzagging around through four-dimensional space-time might be expressed as a vector in five dimensions. Whatever the number of n dimensions it inhabited, an observer would need one extra, n + 1, to see it and connect the end points to make a single result". Anti-teleological.
Uhgh, I got more to type, but I've got to go to the bank.

-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 30th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I finished yesterday. Long and ultimately very rewarding. I agree with Remy that the ending was satisfying, in fact, I found the last hundred and fifty or so pages to be some of the most enjoyable of the entire work. Gilligan's Island!! and Merle's 3D photo viewer (so cool an entire book could have been born of it).
In a book about Time, I found it interesting that the characters seem 'in' the time but not 'of' the time (probable that this was a theme), and save for the various narrative pastiches, the same could be said of the storylines.
I wonder if much will be made of the fact that most of the interpersonal relationships had three 'dimensions' (Lake-Deuce-Sloat, Y-R-C, Stray-Frank-Ewball, Frank-Wren-Dr, etc.)?
Just some random thoughts.
-- dave pacey (docpace...), December 30th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also Cyprian became my favorite character by the end of his presence. I was hoping he'd come back for a curtain call, but ... sadly ...
-- remy bean ([email protected]), December 30th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Guys, ssh with the sorta-not-really-but-kinda spoilers for a bit? I'm trying to make the last couple hundred pages last...
-- Name Not Found (tenthreaso...), January 2nd, 2007.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

edrants.com is having an Against The Day Roundtable, and Part Two, which is up today, is hysterical and worth a look
http://www.edrants.com/?p=5231

-- Mr. Que (pelagi...), January 3rd, 2007.

There's a similar, and even better, gag on pg 603 or therabouts, in the Gottingen section.

Man, I was feeling cracks way early in the going, back when Merle was raising Dally in the absence of Erlys and Kit was trying to explain his decision to go to Yale.

They're the vital flight into imagination, among so many other things. Stevens' necessary angel Little Nemo'd out of gravity.

OH HELL YA!

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/is_thomas_pynchon_investigating_raymond_chandler__96443.asp?c=rss

the most encouraging thing in that post is more the '400 pages' bit

Remember the rumor was Vineland would be about Godzilla.

Vineland was about Godzilla, kinda.

I wasn't expecting a new book ever, so I'm extremely excited about this.

Vineland was about Godzilla, kinda.

One vignette does not a subject make, unless there's a really awesome monograph coming in which case let 'er rip!

I know, I exaggerate. But I'm really not too bothered what it's about so long as it gets released. That intital description makes me wonder if he's going to revisit any Lot 49 territory.

And it turns out it's a sequel!

link?

Bump because I still haven't been able to find anything out about this and was wondering if anyone else had.

I still haven't finished Against the Day yet...

Um.

The last couple of Lew Basnight scenes in Against The Day are very Chandler, if I remember correctly. Just saying like.

I seriously expected him to die before releasing another book so this is very exciting.

i have been ploughing through mason & dixon for so long now. i'm really enjoying it when i actually do pick it up but if i leave it for more than a few days, picking the thread up again is a bit of a slog.

weirdly i thought lot 49 was v easy to read, sped through it on one sunny afternoon.

M&D is kinda unique among Pynchon novels in that you can read it episode by episode and following the overall thread becomes less important I think. Think it took me at least twice as long as Against The Day did, which is surprising.

I also recommend sitting and reading it in pubs with a nautical theme.

^^^true, and I saw this as a good thing. I think I actually slowed down my reading of it because I was enjoying it so much.

M & D that is.

I think I've lost my half-completed Mason and Dixon. It's my dad's favourite Pynchon. He's always on about it.

EXCERPT!

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/paperback_fever_excerpt_from_thomas_pynchons_upcoming_private_detective_novel_101775.asp?c=rss

Also title: Inherent Vice.

Beats the hell out of Solacious Quanti or Crystalline Skull Kingdoms, if'n ya ask me.

ha! this should be a hoot.

"Shasta"? SERIOUSLY? YES.

is this the shortest span he's ever had between two books?

Oilyrags I thank U

No prob. My even more obsessive than me pal Levide put me up on it.

Inherent Vice! stoked.

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/original/pynchonvice_thumb.png

steve shasta, wakeboarding detective

I keep forgetting this comes out next month. Anyway, this comes out next month.

http://giavasan.diludovico.it/archivi/public_html/giavasan/archivi/images4/inherent-vice_cover-final.jpg

I like the Pulp Pynchon cover for some reason. So is this supposed to feature the same surfer dudes that appeared in Crying of Lot 49?

The car is totally Ghostbusters.

review from the observer - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/26/pynchon-churchwell-inherent-vice

Very excited indeed after reading that.

a friend of mine is v much hoping mcclintic sphere is in it

am worried this will be too much like vineland (my least fav pynchon)

thomp, did u read against the day

BTW today's Sally Forth begins "A screaming comes across the sky."

v much...

ha

am worried this will be too much like vineland (my least fav pynchon)

boo fuckin' hoo, because yeah it would be a terrible thing if the american-speaking world got another book as sharp as vineland

i dont know i just found it too tom robbins-y

Love the cover.

Is the title a DFW reference? Infinite Jest / Inherent Vice. Same number of letters, syllables, and sound.

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." Churchill

^^ plus also "infinite jest" isn't exactly DFW coinage

i dont know i just found it too tom robbins-y

this makes me think maybe I should be giving Tom Robbins another try...

LA Times review up.

weird, an ex-prof of mine just released a totally unrelated, nonfiction book with the same title!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U

is that the voice of jeff bridges?

it's thomas pynchon

might be some more new pynchon

http://www.vice.com/read/thomas-pynchon-might-have-published-a-new-novel-about-community-colleges-under-a-pseudonym-vgtrn-059

it's not. but someone has a clever publicist.

What makes you so sure?

maybe he's Thomas Pynchon

Iago Ruggles Galdston.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Tinasky#Thomas_Pynchon

How far I've fallen, btw: I haven't read Bleeding Edge yet. :( (Did I miss out on anything?)

What makes you so sure?
--Acting Crazy (Instrumental) (jed_)

Friend at Penguin

Ok but unless your friend definitely knew who Pearson is, which they may, it doesn't necessarily follow that who they think he is is not P.

I don't have much investment in this tbh but P. has successfully hidden from public life for 50 years so could easily do this.

Different q and tangent - does Pynchon have an editor who performs a role similar to other author's editors?

She won't say. They can't talk about him--drives me nuts. But she would say that the Cow Country thing isn't him. He had a sort of editor in the 60s, can't remember her name. I think she helped type too.

Did you read those quotes from the book? Yikes, that ain't Pynchon. That list of names was a very poor approximation.

Also, what a dumb hoax for him to do--give him a little credit

Faith Sale was his editor. His best friend Kirkpatrick Sale's wife. Sale is quite a character.

How far I've fallen, btw: I haven't read Bleeding Edge yet. :( (Did I miss out on anything?)

― :wq (Leee), Thursday, 10 September 2015 22:11 (Yesterday) Permalink

Nah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/books/pynchon-intrigue-abounds-over-cow-country.html?_r=0