Thomas Pynchon

(this is like the ten gazillionth pynchon thread on BOTH boards but who cares: he is the ROYAL TENENBAUMS of am lit and that is enuff)

someday we oughta do a group read of GR or something else. the pynchon list is good for that except that it's full of cranky knowitalls who have been on the list for 10 years.

(stab at ile suppressed ha ha)

oh, umm, classic, anyway.

I don't think I've ever reread a book. Is there enough time? I'd worry too much about the stuff that I was missing out on.

Now---

Took me 2 and a half years to get through GR. Bits of it were brilliant, bits of it were impenetrable. I persevered, but haven't managed to finish another novel since. I think it killed fiction as an enjoyable pasttime for me.

The Pinefox, do you like any PoMo fiction? I know you are a big Joyce fan (haha though a pal of mine wrote his thesis on Blake and has found him unreadable since, so maybe I'm wrong), and I have known some fans of Modernism's peaks who really dislike anything that's very Postmodern.

In general I don't like talking about things as PoMo; if I loved anything I would probably not call it PoMo. Nonetheless, there are some things that might get called PoMo that I like. I have a lot of time for CL49, and a lot of respect for DeLillo. I like at least a bit of Barth, though I am yet to be fully convinced re. the vaunted Barthelme. But you may be meaning sth much more way-out than that.

Although the line between Modernism and Postmodernism is hard to draw (Beckett is a rewarding study here, I think), there is an important difference in the attitude towards meaning, in particular. I've found that some admirers of the former are annoyed and frustrated by what they see as frivolity and emptiness in much PoMo fiction, in its abandonment of the search for and belief in suitable new metanarratives - I'm wondering if that might be how you feel, because combining that with Pynchon's encyclopaedic ambition and scale (partucularly in GR) might exacerbate the annoyance that might cause.

I think there is a smugness to Pynchon's writing too, something I see in quite a few writers of (more or less) his generation, a former-hippy-youth's overconfidence in the rightness of their reading of the world, particularly in ideological terms - it's an impression that has turned me away from Tom Robbins, for instance, who I used to really like a lot. Barth has some of this, but his obvious idolising of great past storytellers, an almost fannish, childlike adoration of and reverence for paradigms such as Homer and Scheherezade, soften that hugely, for me. Anyway, I mention that about Pynchon because these things, particularly in combination, might easily cause a very serious-minded Modernist to feel exactly what you expressed in your "awkwardly pretentious and horribly obnoxious" comment upthread.

this is a long term deal and more to my benefit obv. ha

Martin S: one (main?) thing I don't like about GR = too much sex. As I have said before, GR = post-hippy James Bond [etc etc, as I have said before, etc etc].

I think Pynchon can Write but I don't think I feel the gain in his relative unclarity.

yeah, other people who get it on in gr: roger and jessica, pirate and scorpia mossmoon, katje and blicero and what's his name, katje and BRIGADIER PUDDING even jesus, enzian and blicero, a bunch of people on thanatz's yacht, er leni pokler a bit I think (but does FRANZ POKLER ever get any? hmm), and uh...

of course all along (many of those happen sort of episodically), slothrop keeps on having secret agent sex after the london part of the book is over: katje, geli tripping, the actress, the girl on thanatz's yacht, trudi and whatsername at saure's place, and I'm sure there are more. plus he has uh amorous encounters with more people, incl some girls at the hermann goering, the spa where marvy chases him, the red cross girl or whoever, the PIG briefly...

This paper kind of deals with these issues, in a rather-too academic fashion.

This masculinist gigantism can is by no means self-evidently pro-feminist. Gravity's Rainbow often reads like a male fantasy gone out of control: the phalli are a little too large, the female characters too eager to bed down with Slothrop, the victims of sadists far too eager about their own pain.7 And because the narrative doesn't offer final readings, it is never quite clear how much really is mockery or disruption and how much is the residue of real assumptions about gender. These exaggerations self-consciously invite a feminist critique, from an outsider's perspective. But the novel itself does not supply that critique; it can only inflate or dislocate the discourses of its own crimes, and so at once gesture to a newly written self and reduplicate an old and tiresome one.

I think it's a good thing that, although I have seen mention of, I have never read about pynchon here.

"well, no, i usually, uh-" this is embarrassing for perdoo, it's like being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping a grape into your mouth- "just, well, sort of, eat them... whole, you know"

I finished Gravity's Rainbow yesterday. I wondered exactly how to express my reaction, or opinion. The more I wondered, the more my reactions threatened, or promised, to alter.

I shouldn't exaggerate that last point, though.

Some day I would like to take, or make, some room to say, and possibly also discover, some of what I think of the book.

Depsite much pynchon-love coming from Joel and other people I think highly of, I just can't get into Pynchon.

Have read crying a couple of times and enjoyed it lots. I'm thinking its a cousin to PKD's 'Three stigmata of palmer eldritch' so that means its great.

I was shocked by how conventional they are. I didn't like 'Atrophy' that much despite its reputation and really dug that one about the guy who runs off with the garbage man.

My bad.

FWIW, Sam, I much prefer that other crazy literary recluse guy.

Where Slothrop gets horny, bombs drop. Now, a study of the Herero.

That may contain the germ of a defence, as well as the outline of a rejection.

The second is to look at all other sections as self-contained -- like an obliquely connected collection of short stories.

To understand how it all connects, let x represent the number of times you read it. Then let x approach infinity.

alt. as a set of symbol systems (zodiac tarot jungian etc.) mapped onto one another and an investigation into the moralism of ways of knowing and meaning.

Another problem I have is that I tend to read very quickly - sometimes skim-reading - and that's just not something you can do with GR, is it?!

I'm going back to it again this weekend, to start from the beginning again. Wish me luck!

Oh dear God

I am sitting here at my computer with a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 next to me, about to reread it for a fourth time. I type "ILX" in the address bar and press Down, but just as I'm pressing Enter, my hand bumps my mouse and moves the cursor so that it highlights one of the other autocomplete suggestions... which just so happens to be this thread.

It weirds me out a little.

esp since this thread hasn't been active in two years!

what is Down?

the inner layer of insulating feathers on waterfowl. Also, one of the four direction buttons just to the right of your enter key.

No-one's mentione 'Against the Day' yet.

am currently stuck in it's grasp.

what is Down?

― the pinefox, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 2:04 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

stfu

> No-one's mentione 'Against the Day' yet.

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

Nearly finished my first read of this, and I find it weirdly moving on a personal level - even having been born in 1977 - I'm reminded somehow of lots of people I knew earlier in life. (The DL/Frensi parts and Che/Prairie parts have a particular resonance with two friends whose lives have drifted/diverged from my own, and the friendships seem to mirror one another in a way.) Surprised at how, well, easily digestible this has been in comparison to Lot 49.

what do others think?

oops. didn't mean to post that, started a vineland thread.

lake traverse and deuce kincaid, wow

i meant kindred. and sloat fresno. and against the day going all annie proulx meets cormac mccarthy. fuck

must admit i'm not enjoying "inherent vice" all that much. in fact, haven't picked it up for about two weeks.

Dude. I think it only took me a couple of days all told, I loved it.

maybe i'll give it another shot tonight.

a black rush of hair streaming unruly as the smoke that marbles the flames of Perdition

liked INHERENT VICE, took finishing as an opportunity to pick up VINELAND finally, and i love it so far!

missed this bit of news late last year

http://www.filmjunk.com/2010/12/02/p-t-anderson-to-direct-inherent-vice-starring-robert-downey-jr/

maybe i'm nuts but what's up in wisco reminds me of against the day
http://www.slate.com/id/2286169/pagenum/all/#p2
or at least the simpsons, the koch bros scarsdale vibe's grandsons if not mr. burnses

I just bought Against the Day the other night, looking forward to digging in.

took me a while to get into. the deuce sloat lake fiasco hooked me

ATD is one of the greatest books i've ever read... and i've still got 300 pages to go

it picks up around then, believe it or not. cyprian turns out to be one of my favorite pynchon characters

i wish PT anderson was doing a six hour film of ATD instead

it's so fucking cinematic

ATD is one of the greatest books i've ever read...

i might go as far as saying it's my favorite tp by a long shot.

Robert Downey Jr. as lead in Inherent Vice is kind of perfect.

robert downey jr gains 40 pounds and plays slothrop, please

― cutty, Wednesday, September 17, 2008 11:29 AM (2 years ago)

Pynchon loves him some pigs:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef01538e4fe38c970b-600wi

"I was planning to skydive into the middle of these proceedings," joked Pynchon, who didn't even attend the National Book Awards when "Gravity's Rainbow" won in 1974. "Thank you for your teaching," he continued. "Good work and good vibes to everybody there."

Almost finished with V right now, and I'm enjoying it very much.

Did anyone else get this? I'm on the last 100 pages, and it seems like Pynchon is giving us the code to crack open the novel with. As in, now the past 400 pages are starting to make sense - Benny is like a fetish, an inanimate object, explains what SHROUD was saying, slaves, dance of death, all that good stuff. If that's the case, I wonder if it's reflected in Mondaugen's story where the German officer breaks Mondaugen's code and it reveals, from what I understand, a quote from Wittgenstein. I'm definitely interested in checking out what it means to see if/how it reflects on the novel's theme (if anyone else has done this, I'd love to hear about it).

Regardless, he's a great writer. Can't wait to read his other novels.

I am around 550 pages into Against The Day and it's my favorite one of his yet, just astonishing. V is the one I can't seem to get into so I'd say you have lots of great reading ahead of you.

just opened up lot 49 and its just really annoying

thrice is pretty good!
― city of gyros (http://i54.tinypic.com/11l4yvn.gif), Tuesday, May 9, 2006 12:51 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

an essay on Watts from the 60s

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html

lot 49 is not really annoying

yeah that's why I got it, because I thought I would be able to read a book by him that I wouldn't be bothered by. And I guess I don't really know how to say this well at this point, or maybe I am reading him wrong (ie. reading like 10 pages and throwing the book somewhere so it's not in my hands) but I really fuckin hate how he writes about race

it's weird, when it comes to books I'm not really that sensitive to how authors deal with race and I can overlook a lot, but for whatever reason, in pynchon's writing, I just get really disgusted by him almost immediately

i can understand that in regard to 'v,' which definitely has some problematic stuff in it. i don't remember any race stuff at all in 'lot 49,' tho.

my problem with pynchon is that i kind of hate his sense of humor, at least some of the time.

there's really no outward race stuff in lot 49 that warrants my rxn other than how he classifies his characters, I guess it's just something I notice much more in his writing than I do in that of other authors

Against the Day is fun -- the most diverting of his books since Lot 49.

whoops -- I meant Inherent Vice.

hahahaha

as reclusive writer dudes go he rates somewhere behind b. traven for me.

against the day diverts light

did anyone ever actually finish 'against the day'? i read the first 50 pages or so when it came out and even that was pushing it.

i read like three fucking hundred!

and still i failed

stansislaw lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is one of those books that had a profound effect on me, and it is completely paranoid through and though, but there's this resignation in it that I guess gets me through it. That, or I just click with its humor more. Something about how Pynchon deals with paranoia and conspiracy doesn't do much for me for whatever reason. Or rather what it does it just makes me agitated. I understand that these are pretty personal (albeit pretty consistently lodged by others) criticisms aimed at a much-loved author, so sorry for taking an author's thread and being all "it sucks"

i don't remember anything that happened in against the day but i've read more than one rapturous essay that makes me want to try it again. and yet. time's winged chariot.

At my friend difficult listening hour's recommendation I got as far as pg. 450 in Mason and Dixon.

Or rather what it does is just makes me agitated xp

At my friend difficult listening hour's recommendation I got as far as pg. 450 in Mason and Dixon.

i was touched by this but it was a case for st. jude

i'm sort of put off by the style of 'mason and dixon,' i mean i can't even stand to read editions of fielding or sterne without modernized capitalization, et al.

i was stunned by how readable and beautiful mason and dixon was just on a technical level. i may have overrated it because of that. i read a lot of it out loud, actually, to myself, which i hardly ever do; lots of it is lovely.

Try Mason & Dixon, The Pinefox - it's terrific fun. It has an excellent duck super-robot - I don't see how anyone could resist that! The funniest bit is where Mason is asking a dog about the location of another dog - "Bark if he is to the North" etc. He states after three tries that since the dog has not barked, the dog is clearly stating that the other dog is to the East. Dixon asks him if he is entirely comfortable with his logic.

this kind of makes me want to give it a try, haha.

i'm not really a pynchon fan though. i've read everything except vineland and the last two and the only thing i would unreservedly recommend to anyone is the introduction to slow learner, which is one of the best writer-on-writing things i've ever read.

mason & dixon also has a scene where they get stoned w/ george washington

which, i mean, that is a pretty obvious joke and also ripped off from dazed and confused, but it's still fun

what's the gist of the writers-on-writing essay?

"Don't attempt long, difficult novels with Fielding-esque prose until your reputation as an eccentric recluse is firmly established."

my fav writer on writing thing is stevenson's essay on writing treasure island (My First Book) but I did like the intro to slow learner when I read it in a library

the robot duck subplot has a scene where the world's greatest chef is called in to deal with the robot duck, and when he modestly insists that he knows nothing about ducks, robespierre or whoever is like "but what of your canard du casserole? your canard au pamplemousse flambe?, and the chef blushes and says OH THOSE OLD CANARDS

book is weirdly like early woody allen

i like the slow learner intro a lot too. it's weirdly charming and unexpected that he calls 'on the road' one of the greatest american novels, or somesuch.

alfred:

Displacing my personal experience off into other environments ... part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyonek nows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was rpecisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.

ugh sorry about the typos

I thought those were part of his advice to young writers.

essay is enjoyably harsh:

The next story I wrote was "The Crying of Lot 49," which was marketed as a "novel," and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then.

i think the autobiographical thing is true though: you get snotty about Mere Autobiography and Lack Of Imagination, and repeat things nabokov says about the writer creating an imaginary hermetic universe for the mandarin reader to play in, and then one day you wake up and realize that every nabokov book is about a sad european emigre who thinks about pale nipples a lot

please note though that while i am talking about myself here i only realized this several years after reading the pynchon essay, from which, at the time, i only managed to take what i already knew.

i like pynchon's sense of humor! he is... "weird" on race. i dont know, im not an expert, ive only ready crying and gravity's rainbow.

it took me like six months but im pretty sure i loved it.

both Mason & Dixon and Against The Day have a really difficult first third to get through, it took me multiple attempts to get through those first 300 or so pages for both books. Once they get going though, both are amazing. My two favorite Pynchon novels.

mason & dixon is not worth it, i don't think. against the day, inherent vice, gravity's rainbow, v, all are worth it. haven't tried vineland on (bad) recs

thinking I should write a dissertation on pynchon and race

i don't remember any race stuff in 49...and he's always seemed kind of immature about matters like that. his sense of humor is kind of borderline MAD magazine in Rainbow, frankly.

still reading Against The Day and it is still so goddamn good I can't even really believe it, the best writing I've read in a decade maybe? I mean, there are just these constant tossed-off paragraphs of brilliance or random historical erudition every 5 or 6 pages.

p. 619 btw

Never thought about it like MAD Magazine. I was a regular reader as a kid (even Cracked on occasion), and I enjoy Pynchon's sense of humor. That's what got me hooked on reading him in the first place, weirdly enough.

to be honest I think I made that comparison becaues the few pictures of Pynchon he looks like Alfred E Newman.

But, he does have a pretty slapstick sense of humor. Like that story in V. about the kid with the screw in his bellybutton that he played with and his ass fell off.

Seriously found Against The Day to be more gripping/easier to read than several other Pynchon novels (esp V). I remember it as a real page turner, though I haven't read it since it came out. I think I struggled more with Mason and Dixon, actually (although it wasn't a struggle per se).

There's a quite good essay on MAD as the progenitor of McSweeney's in an early N+1: http://nplusonemag.com/regressive-avant-garde.

An urgent & key text on Pynchon and race is The Secret Integration, I woulda thunk - not particularly immature for an early short story.

Think I will have another crack at AtD when/if it ever becomes available for kindle in the UK. Just started Infinite Jest this way and I'm finding it so much easier to read without having to lug the cumbersome hardback around with me.

I think the earlier sections of Against The Day crack along quite nicely - the Chums of Chance, Merle & Dally (that section is so so lovely), the Western chapters. It helps that Pynchon is playing with children's genres, to an extent, there. The bit that drags is the lengthy section in the Balkans in the build-up to WW1, but it's worth slogging through that for the ending.

Mason & Dixon is wonderful, probably my favourite novel ever.

gravity's rainbow is still my favorite, but against the day is awesome, reaching sublime crescendos that gesture toward contemporary concerns, orange alerts and so forth ~

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

inherent vice is sitting on a shelf, waiting for me eventually, after the ask, and mao ii, and the age of innocence, and how bluegrass music destroyed my life and the beggar maid. . . . sort of putting it off, because then there's no more new pynchon to read

er, anybody know where i can buy n+1 magazine in london?

i'd love to subscribe but the postage alone is more than the cost of the magazine..

LRB bookshop? They've just started doing electronic editions in mobi format also...

or maybe foyles?

will try both, thanks!

i've been reading gravity's rainbow again lately -- it used to be my favourite thing ever written -- and, yeah, it's annoying me. i don't know. the feeling of 'i am bored with this damn overgrown stoner' is more prevalent. and the 'weirdness' about race (& sex) is bothering me more.

but then i can read a lot of people who are worse on such matters without being bothered about how bad they are: i think partly it's that pynchon thinks he has an Important Contribution to make on such things; partly it's that as a teenager i was so wowed by whatever ideas about sex and race were in play, here, that i feel bad for myself on rereading it.

that's how i feel about tom robbins

disgusting english candy drill = yoga flame for all time, etc., tho, still

ha all i know about tom robbins is that some people claim he is like pynchon only less so?

pynchon for dummies i guess? i don't know, i've barely read any pynchon.

last time i attempted vineland i remember it seeming like tom robbins :-/

any pynchon fans enjoy "the sot weed factor?" - i always got the impression that book kind of out pynchoned pynchon, ditto the author himself

i'm not convinced by that. i never did finish the sotweed factor, though.

when i was reading it i found myself thinking a lot about what david wallace took from barth -- an attitude towards the deployment of genre effects, maybe? i'm not sure i could unpack it without reading it again and paying it more attention.

i didn't realise it came out in 1960. blimey.

it gets less effect out of its 17th-century prose stylings than mason & dixon does. or it's less interested in amping them up and having fun with them than pynchon is. on a structural level it is playing within the rules of the genre it is aping a lot more than m&d does, too.

What do people think of V, though? Seems weirdly absent from all the conversation here.. I want to read it next because it should be a better appetizer for GR and Mason & Dixon, than just simply diving in having only read Crying of Lot 49.

barth is great (the chimera!) but the sotweed factor plays it straighter than pynchon, less zany, i'd say. now giles goat-boy on the other hand

Yeah I liked GR a lot at the time but only got about 20% of it, maybe less. All the scraps I've read about him make me think he's a bit, well, Zappa-esque.

Was admiring the physical thinness of Inherent Vice and thinking I should read this w/Vineland sometime. His best ones might be the normal sized ones, not the brick-like monsters.

I really liked lost in the funhouse but other than that and a couple of his "straightforward" early books, I've never really been able to get through anything he's done

inspired by this thread i picked up mason & dixon and it is *slaying me*, i am such a sucker for elaborate stoner humor. the talking dog! and bits are really affecting. i think i might describe it as a 'bromance'

there is this bit he does in that book about bread being the perfect combination of the four elements (either M or D's dad was a baker) that is a favorite passage of mine. I need to reread M&D but am still lost 2/3 of the way through Against The Day.

guess i'm gonna have to read mason & dixon then...

tbh i never read V. seemed too willfully obtuse.

i never FINISHED V, I guess. i did get maybe 50 pages in at one point in college.

I liked V. and found it rather absorbing... but I had also convinced myself that what turned out to be a one-off minor plot detail was gonna turn out to be way more important in the eventual 'resolution' of the story, and I kept reading and waiting to be proven right

What was it?

i love the bread passage.

i bet mark s says so somewhere here or in another thread but the robot duck is real (historically factual). i already knew that (because of pynchon), but i was surprised today to be reading KANT and find him mention the duck (actually the creator, vaucanson—you would have to remember his name without the footnote that sez 'ROBOT DUCK' to prompt you) in the critique of practical reason!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck

the robot duck is an important point in Hugh Kenner's The Counterfeiters that ppl who like pynchon would prob enjoy, I don't like pynchon really he's just seem like too much for me, but I mean I fell like I'm missing out in a way, in other ways though I feel like I'm dodging a bullet. Can dodging a bullet be missing out?

it's a bullet stuffed with jokes and funny names and ridiculous plot acrobatics, so maybe?

gr really is as gnarly, comprehension-wise, in certain places as its rep suggests, and there's always a period of acclimatizing* yrself to pynchon's style (esp. in mason and dixon, which is kind of the ur-pynchon novel in terms of high prose style take to a limit while still being readable), but as max says the last two doorstops (m&d and against the day) are at heart really long yarns stuffed with wtf incident and jokes that range from sublime and subtle to groaning/laughing despite yrself.

*add this to the -ize thread

so like they're "difficult" but theyre also goofy rube goldbergian gag reels/saturday serials.

I'm gonna be honest and say that the fuckin funny names shit is one of the bigger stumbling blocks for me

well, he's no nicholas sparks on the name front, i'll grant you that.

Marley is a better name than Mucho Ceviche or whatever shit he comes up w/

There was a kinetic art exhibition in London a year or two ago where an artist actually recreated the digesting duck but sadly I never got round to seeing it.

out of all of his books one of my favorite set-pieces is the tatzelwurm part in against the day. and kit in the mayonnaise factory.

the octopus in gravity's rainbow is up there too.

Fuck yeah Al Yankovic

Meantime:

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/after-long-resistance-pynchon-allows-novels-to-be-sold-as-e-books/

they gotta lotta spare advertising money over at viking/penguin, it seems.

http://pynchonwiki.com/

i've really tried with pynchon for the year now, but he can't put a sentence together. i like the ideas, the characters, but the grammar is appalling, it's like he runs it back& forth through google translate for maxiumum opacity. nova express or benjamin peret are easier than this creaky dyslexic prose! also for me it's too dependent on knowing characters in gilligan's island / US pop-culture refs. i don't mind such refs, & can guess my way through, but i see an overdependency on them. and the cut & pasted "research" parts people seem so happy to interpret as "erudition" paint pynchon as a crashing bore. so frustrating!

oh, IMO, of course ! just wondering if anyone else finds the "difficulty" in pynchon just parsing his arse-backwards sentences (I should state that I have overall enjoyed what i have read !)

iglu ferrignu from which country do you hail

iglu, you may have hit upon an 'emperor's new clothes' here I suspect. it's not that he "can't write a sentence' - obviously he can; but i do find it frustrating when authors write purposefully awkward sentences that you have to re-read over and over just to understand. especially when a simpler construction would have worked just as effectively. it's just making things difficult for no purpose at all and wouldn't be acceptable in any other sort of prose outside of the novel.

*scales fall from eyes*

haha, this all sounds incredibly naiive. I mean, Pynchon's also equally known for his incredible craft in sentence structuring, so y'know.

You know what would make James Joyce even better? If he wrote tunes the milkman can whistle.

dog latin meet henry james

okay okay, i get it.

i want examples of pynchon sentences which are difficult to parse, it will be a great game because as soon as anyone posts one i will say 'there is nothing difficult to parse about that' and imply they are stupid

you just gotta know how to speak american, how smart is that

i think a lot of his commas are pretty british

otoh a lot of the words in between the commas are american, possibly most of them

i'm, confused

you, never, did

an ex of mine starting reading GR in swedish. important swedish-translation-of-GR intelligence: in swedish, the kenosha kid bit just doesn't make any fucking sense.

"for the PAST year". anyhow...
joyce i can dig, it's musical & even if you don't get (or have time to research/ check footnotes) the refs it scans well. halfway through vineland right now - there's this bit where he coulda said "she left in a lovingly customised muscle car" but he digresses from the action to tell you just what (supposedly) kitschy designs she had sprayed on her particular model of pontiac by which spray shop in which district of town where OMG some crazy dudes get like totally wasted all day long y'dig, man ya ain't 80's cali unless ya lived it, brah. (although "the vomitones" seem totally unbelievable, even as a comic device)
it's like barry gifford extended threefold with a littering of showy & unnecessary (IMO) relative clauses. beckett is easier. i'm still enjoying it (i found mason & dixon easier somehow despite tiresome diatribes on indonesian sauces, unsexy/unkinky kinky sex, etc).
o i'm from teh UK but i do laodsa typos & live in the german territories.

gore vidal made a similar remark in reviewing 'gravity's rainbow' -- that it was like tone-deaf joyce, with no sense of rhythm or music.

No-one would say that Pogo had an inability to have read him up a couple books, in back of this old library which was opened in 1812 by Dr Theodore McInnery, the first Navajo chief to have converted to Christianity after what wasn't not a particular type of peculiar ritual wherein those willin' may well have ingested a couple peyote buttons and dreamed a dream of surfing a riptube in the fountain show at the Bellagio, exiting someplace triangulated Bermudaically, where Barry plays piano, the youth, the excitement, mano a mano. Dr McInnery, then known to most as plain old Runnin River, dreamt that Jesus Christ, our saviour would only afford the future Navajo reservation of 1984 a certain exemption from a compulsory purchase scheme mandated during a dry spell in the Whitehouse under the Ford administration, and favouring the construction company owned by Pogo's estranged great aunt Maude (who had indeed orchestrated that Whitehouse dry-spell by stabling her longhaired hemp steeds at the Hefner household for a couple weeks "R&R") ,if happenstance would indeed permit the planning and construction of a municipal library dedicated unto the good doctor, who subsequently got shot square between the eyes during some military skirmish in french indo-china. plum fell right off his skateboard into the pine box. Pogo mulled over the content of a 1983 spiderman some, and then hit the strip prowlin' for burrito's and sweet hibiscus print bikini clad tail...

i cd really go burrito prowlin right abt now, thanx

that's at least B+ parody material right there

i read one complaint about pynchon that likened his prose style to stand-up comedy, which i think isn't 100% wrong. also vidal's line about 'tone deaf joyce', also not necessarily a bad thing. i don't know. it's not a bug, it's a feature. try drinking a lot of coffee while reading, see if that makes it better or worse. if worse, try beer.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/18/a_nation_of_truthers/

man this sounds like it would be aces if it weren't written by that guy

an ex of mine starting reading GR in swedish. important swedish-translation-of-GR intelligence: in swedish, the kenosha kid bit just doesn't make any fucking sense.

― thomp, Friday, August 10, 2012 10:04 AM (1 year ago)

(1)

TDY Abreaktionsstation
Spital zur Hl. Veronika,
Bonechapel Gate, E 1
London, England
Winter 1944

An den
Kenosha Kid
Hauptpostlagernd,
Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

Geehrter Herr!
Habe ich Sie je im Leben, auch nur ein einziges Mal, belästigt?
Hochachtungsvoll,
Lt. Tyrone Slothrop
Postlagernd,
Kenosha, Wisc., U.S.A.

einige Tage später

Tyrone Slothrop, Esq.
TDY Abreaktionsstation,
Spital zur Hl. Veronika,
Bonechapel Gate, E 1
London, England

Geehrter Herr Slothrop!
Niemals.

Der Kenosha Kid

(2)

Der Kleine Klugscheißer: Mach halblang, Opa, ich kenn doch eure Dielenwärmer, mir ist der «Charleston» unter die Sohle gekommen u-und der «Big Apple» auch!
Der alte Veteranenschwofer: Aber, jede Wette, niemals der «Kenosha», Kid!

(2.1)

K.K.: Sooo'n Bart hat das für mich, der «Castle Walk» und selbst der «Lindy»!
A.V.: Aber, jede Wette, niemals der «Kenosha Kid».

(3)

Kleiner Angestellter: Ja, und seitdem schneidet er mich, und da hab ich mir gedacht, vielleicht ist es wegen der Slothrop-Sache, ich meine, falls er mich da irgendwie für verantwortlich -
Vorgesetzter (herablassend): Sie niemals, der Kenosha Kid hat wirklich andere Dinge im Kopf als…

(3.1)

Vorgesetzter (verblüfft): Sie!? Niemals der Kenosha kid! Hat wirklich andere Dinge im Kopf als…

(4)

Und als jener großmächtige Tag sich verneigte, da Er uns in Flammenschaft all die Worte in den Himmel geschrieben, deren wir uns jemals bedienen würden, die uns noch heute ergetzen und unsere Wörterbücher würden, die uns noch heute ergetzen und unsere Wörterbücher füllen, da ermannte sich der kleine Tyrone Slothrop, unsterblich in Brauchtum und Liedgut, und stellte dem Kid mit piepsiger Stimme diese einzige Frage: «Und warum niemals ‹der›, Kenosha Kid?»
Diese Variationen über die Worte «Niemals der Kenosha Kid» rotieren durch Slothrops Gehirn, als sich der Arzt aus weißer Helligkeit zu ihm herabbeugt, um in zu wecken und mit der Sitzung zu beginnen. Schmerzlos gleitet die Nadel in die Vene seiner Armbeuge: Natrium-Amytal, zehnprozentig, jeweils ein Kubik, wie indiziert.

(5)

Leim aus Lynn oder Kleister aus Cleveland oder Klebstoff aus Oklahoma. Jacke wie Hose. Aber niemals der Kenosha-Kitt!

(6)

(Tag des Aufstiegs, Tag der Opfergaben, das Volk hält ihn heilig. Fette sieden, Blut tropft ins Feuer und verbrennt zu salzigem Braun…) Sie haben das Charlottesville-Schwein erledigt, check, das Forest-Hills-Füllen, check, (leiser werdend) das Laredo-Lamm. Check. Oh-oh. Moment mal. Was haben wir denn hier, Slothrop? Noch niemals ein Kenosha-Witz? Dann aber los, Slothrop!

Steife Latte
Abklaviert,
Zurück in Reih
Und Glied marschiert -
Los geht's Slothrop,

Dafür, Bruder, keinen Schiß -
Ich will Entlassung vom Komiß!
Ab get's Slothrop!

…

Im Schatten, wo Schwarz und Weiß ein Pandamuster auf sein Gesicht malen, dessen Flecke aus wucherndem Narbengewebe zu bestehen scheinen, wartet der Verbindungsmann, den zu sehen er die ganze weite Reise unternommen hat. Das Gesicht ist so schlaff wie das eines Haushundes, und sein Besitzer zucky mächtig die Schultern.
Slothrop: Wo steckt er? Warum zeigt er sich nicht? Und wer sind überhaupt Sie?
Stimme: Den Kind hat man geschnappt. Und mich kennst du sehr wohl, Slothrop. Erinnerst du dich? Ich bin Niemals.
Slothrop (mustert ihn eingehend): An seiner Stelle? (Pause) So hat er also doch, Niemals? Der Kenosha Kid…

Sirs,

You never her.

The Kenosha Kid

Kurt Cobain was apparently inspired to write 'Smells like Teen Spirit' by one of the many ditties in Gravity's Rainbow: "Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious, I'll tell you it's just -out, -ray, -juss, / Spirit is so -con, -tay, -juss, / Nobody knows their a-ges..."

much like i used to compulsively watch ally mcbeal cos i found it so annoying, i read pynchon.
he writes like a ronnie corbett monologue

And it's goodnight from-

Dukkha – The Noble Candle of Suffering
Samudaya – The Noble Candle of the Cause of Suffering
Nirodha – The Noble Candle of the Cessation of Suffering
Magga – The Noble Candle of the Path leading to the Cessation of Suffering

He sparked one up and smirked insouciantly, as he prepared to recount the details of thematically related nob gag he picked up in indonesia, along with a case of distemper so bad he couldn't starts in the bladder and can move up to the base of the tongue, in effect causing it to push against the windpipe. At length, this infectious viral disease causes swelling of the tongue and can eventually lead to suffocation. The effects of blain distemper are thought to be enhanced from excessive rasping of the animal, and also if there is abnormal heat in the stomach.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html

long biographical piece in advance of the new book posted above

cool, enjoyed that, even if it was held together with stick-tape

*sticky-tape

“He’s somebody who just—you see him and he sees you. The thing I have in my head is Robert De Niro in Brazil. He knows the truth but he’s got to get out of here now: ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, I won’t be here long.’ ”

That's Bill Ferguson from Lotion in that quote...I know him slightly but now that I am turning into a Pynchon head I plan to find out more!

was bummed lotion played a reunion last year and i had no idea. if you hear from him about anything coming up, plz share with ilx!

that's my father-in-law's mustache in that aged pynchon mockup in the nymag piece. fyi.

was bummed lotion played a reunion last year and i had no idea. if you hear from him about anything coming up, plz share with ilx!
― "Dave Barlow" is the name Lou uses on sabermetrics baseball sites (s.clover), Thursday, August 29, 2013

will do!

So awful I thought for sure it had to be fake, but the verified Penguin Press twitter account is hyping it, so: http://vimeo.com/73716114

Pynchon must be doing this kid's parents a favor or something.

oh it was cute

I thought the trailer was terrific...you realize that guy in it is supposed to be a douche, right?

Yeah but the plot of the book was so awkwardly wedged in!

Yeah but the plot of the book was so awkwardly wedged in!

― Dan I., Wednesday, September 4, 2013 2:19 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

ha! that's true...

Pynchon must be doing this kid's parents a favor or something.

what if it's his son?

*mind essplode*

http://forums.hipinion.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17726&start=120

scroll down to the boxed discussion of Jackson Pynchon's band at Vassar, complete with band photograph!

he doesn't seem to be in the photo though.

he doesn't seem to be in the photo though.
― wk, Wednesday, September 4, 2013

oh yeah, looks like he ducked out of the picture like his dad! (maybe)

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

kinda less excited for this if it requires a trailer

trying to imagine what the trailer for any of his weightier novels would be like

nah that's silly, course i'm excited. but the excitement is tempered knowing that it's already being framed in simpler terms, reduced, prepared for easy consumption

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef014e88434d23970d-600wi

Pynchon making a "V" sign in the doorway of his Manhattan Beach, CA apartment, complete with (Porky?) Pig pinata

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f40rk4ai4po

Jackbruce01
Jackbruce01 2 years ago
Good band with great bass player. Sorry he's barely visible in video.

pause that at the 1:00 mark. pynchon's son is jandek!

oh wait no, that's the guitar player

xxp to my own post...anyone have any idea when the victory hand gesture was appropriated by anti-war people to become the peace sign? or are the two unrelated?

he's just advertising his debut novel

or misaligned bunny ears

yeah was going to mention the IV trailer.

or are the two unrelated?

I don't think it ever signified "victory" in the US, isn't that a britishes thing?

lol Crowley:

In 1942, Aleister Crowley, a British occultist, claimed to have invented the usage of a V-sign in February 1941 as a magical foil to the Nazis' use of the Swastika. He maintained that he passed this to friends at the BBC, and to the British Naval Intelligence Division through his connections in MI5, eventually gaining the approval of Winston Churchill. Crowley noted that his 1913 publication Magick featured a V-sign and a swastika on the same plate.

I'd love to read a good bio of Crowley...what a nut!

I recommend this one

a lot of books written about him have some agenda and/or axe to grind (which is totally understandable - dude left a trail of destruction that was pretty sizeable), this is one that was both well-written, well researched, and pretty even-handed in its approach

lol Andrew WK recommends!

“Aleister Crowley–what a man. I've read several Crowley biographies, and this one takes the prize for most enjoyable and intimate. Mr. Kaczynski has the personal understanding and experience necessary to paint an accurate portrait of Crowley, with all the exciting context in place. Mr. Kaczynski's passion for his subject makes for an informative and potentially life-changing read. Why wade on the shores of such a vast man, when you can dive in? I think Crowley himself would have welcomed such a loving penetration."
–Andrew W.K., musician

sorry for thread derail...

loving penetration, eh?

he was into that kind of thing

Hmm, Kaczynski? wonder if there's any relation to the guy who was framed for pynchon's bomb making.

Far Right: https://a2-images.myspacecdn.com/images03/31/ee964c367771422d897e6cb11b924aa5/600x600.jpg

sorry for thread derail...

not possible to derail a Pynchon thread tbf.

The Crying of Lot 77

this pynchon jr stalker stuff is a tad creepy, unless it can be shown beyond doubt that it's his very self in the trailer

it wasn't not his uncreepiness that irked his very self so much as the lack of his hypothetical uncreepiness not actively demonstrated to have been beyond the recognition of stalking a junior "self".
"Your shot, Crowley", he smirked.
Carom billiard cues have specialized refinements making them different from the typical pool cue with which many people are more familiar. Such cues tend to be shorter and lighter overall, with a shorter ferrule, a thicker butt and joint, a wooden joint pin (in high-end examples) and collarless wood-to-wood joint (for a one-piece cue "feel"), a fast, conical taper, and a smaller tip diameter as compared with pool cues. Typical cues are 140–140 cm (54–56 in) in length and 470–520 g (16.5–18.5 oz) in weight—lighter for straight rail, heavier for three-cushion—with a tip 11–12 mm (0.43–0.47 in) in diameter.[9] The specialization makes the cue significantly stiffer, which aids in handling the larger and heavier billiard balls as compared with pool cues. It also acts to reduce deflection (sometimes called "squirt"), which may be defined as displacement of the cue ball's path away from the parallel line formed by the cue stick's direction of travel. It is a factor that occurs every time english (side) is employed, and its effects are magnified by speed. In some carom games, deflection plays a large role because many shots require extremes of English, coupled with great speed; this is a combination typically minimized as much as possible, by contrast, in pool.[10]:79, 240–1 The wood used in carom cues can vary widely, and most quality carom cues are handmade

Ah, so we're zinging DFW now?

zing zong
tokin' on da bong
wearin' out ma flip flop
listen to the hip hop
sich vorstellen neue Lieder
rhymin' & stealin' w/ a bhagavad gita
me and my horsey & a paul mosquito

you're fucking atrocious at this

i find the hagiography around DFW creepier than any Pynchon stalking....

Wait, linking a picture publicly posted by a band on their MySpace page is creepy stalking...?

apparently

it's meant to be atrocious - it's pynchon

imago ✓

massaman gai ✓

http://themodernword.com/pynchon/The_Kenosha_Kid_text.pdf

reading all the books in order, up to Mason & Dixon...someone tell me not to be scared of it

Mason & Dixon is really fun! I think it's his most approachable bighuge book

i couldn't get through it and I've read gravity's rainbow twice.

there's a robot duck, what's not to love

i'm rereading it now & i think it's his best. it's definitely the funniest

Gonna second Mason & Dixon as being lot of fun. Though it may partly be the lowered expectation? Anyway, email from the publisher saying Bleeding Edge has been released and should be on the way.

m&d has, like, resolutions and shit. most of the balls that are up in the air are caught or left to actually drop in the viewer's sight. but it feels weird because structurally it's not really 'tighter' than g's r, even though the contract it has w/ the reader makes it feel like in some sense it ought to be.

the protagonists & frame narrative give it a greater sense of focus than GR, and it's less randomly allusive -- the jokey anachronisms aside everything is specific to its time & setting (eg the duino elegies i suppose are thematically relevant to GR, i haven't read them closely, but they've always seemed like a kinda undergrad-heavy thing to carry into a wwii story)

iago if you've made it through v. you will have no trouble whatsoever with m&d, it is way more fun

Thanks for the sage advice, everyone...yeah I loved V. and wanted to start GR all over again as soon as I finished it, so I guess it should be alright. Also, I use the online wikis for each book if there are a lot of references flying over my head and those are enormously helpful. Thanks again!

I recommend this one
― what's up ugly girls? (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, September 4, 2013 5:06 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
a lot of books written about him have some agenda and/or axe to grind (which is totally understandable - dude left a trail of destruction that was pretty sizeable), this is one that was both well-written, well researched, and pretty even-handed in its approach
― what's up ugly girls? (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, September 4, 2013 5:07 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never thanked you, Shakey...so thank you very much for the rec!

http://www.mclemee.com/id38.html

I believe it was finally confirmed that he did not write those Tinasky letters. They used to be available as a book though and it was often filed with Pynchon books, at least in the Bay Area

yea, this is p interesting nonetheless esp w/ the murder-suicide tie-in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hawkins_(writer)

weirder and more depressing than we thought :-(

“You one of those right wing nut outfits?” inquired the diplomatic Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. “They accuse us of being paranoids.”
“They?” inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
“Us?” asked Oedipa.

our beloved author's "big" novels as themed around conic sections:

http://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~michael.harris/Pynchon.pdf

V: V (duh)
GR: Parabola (duh)
M&D: Ellipse (the orbit of venus as it transits across our star)
AtD: Hyperbolic

convergence and divergence, characters in chaotic orbits and themes casting off to the infinite

that's great & serves especially to reconfirm Against The Day as arguably Pynchon's (second) greatest masterpiece

fonctions automorphiques

heh

Is the cone itself a conic section?

fonctions automorphiques

heh

― j., Thursday, April 9, 2015 11:49 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to the tune of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI9fS5WMRo0

http://i.imgur.com/k8dSF26.png

http://i.imgur.com/Muj7vDO.png

lollllllll

I'm reminded of the rumor, during the long silence between The Recognitions and JR, that Pynchon was a pseudonym for William Gaddis: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/01/24/mistaken-identity/

Can this article be turned into a film somehow please?

Pynchon must be tired of telling customer support people he doesn't want to be recorded whenever he calls CS?

I got Vineland for Christmas. Maybe I'll finally read it this year.

Good piece on Vineland and the protests.

https://bostonreview.net/arts-society/peter-coviello-pynchon-and-coming-police-state

good review: of course the best pynchon is always the one i just reread (i will never reread V.) but i have a special fondness for vineland and this piece is good on much of why, its sadness, its kindness (the portrait of zoyd-prairie's father-daughter badinage and affection is lovely, and convinces me that whatever else his set up mystery-man pynchon has a daughter, you read it here first)

but yes, most of all it's so so good at a particular undissolved loyalty to a particular (doomed but potent) political moment, as kissing cousin to (of all things) chris marker's le fond de l'air est rouge. i wasn't at all a red diaper baby (mum and dad were well meaning eco-liberals) but for a time i did have 68er maoist students for baybysitters and recall puzzling over the literature they had lying around, full of the UK version of this season of revolt, pictures and design more deeply affective than the words. somewhere i possibly even have their copy of barbara garson's macbird!, an absurd overwrought evocative fragment of this exact same time -- borrowed to make sense of it (i never made sense of it)

(first performance: STACY KEACH as macbird, amazing)

yes that gets at the deep love I also have for that book, the undying truth of the heart of what drives radical politics, also eloquently expressed in parts of AtD, imo.

also, it is so so so West Coast, I love that about it

It's only two or three years since I finally got round to reading Vineland - I remember the opening scenes being terrific and yes the father-daughter relationship being very affecting but the whole thing running out of steam very on.

I guess all his best ideas were going into Mason and Dixon which surely he was writing the whole time he was working on Vineland.

disagree, that is not my experience with it at all, the throughline for me is all about the enduring conflict between the FPS film crew and the Feds. plus, it's way funnier than M&D imo (which I also love, for lots of different reasons.

I've read three TP books and haven't understood any of them nor understood why anyone would like them. I guess that's commitment, of a sort.

Crying, Vineland and M&D, fwiw.

they're funny

Pynchon been on my mind so much recently as the sanest documentarian of how conspiracy theories work on people, and a sanity check marker for me to revisit now as interest in them has migrated from the left to the right. Vineland I read when it came out, and the characters in that book absolutely formed a template for me as I came across later agitprop like 'Underground' or films like Robert Kramer's 'Milestones' (and Mark S OTM about my favorite Marker film and I'd throw in Alain Tanner & John Berger's 'Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000' as well)

still have not read past Vineland, and the last year does not leave much room left for fiction but it does make me wish I'd already taken in Mason & Dixon

xpost I always send people to Crying first, if that one bounced then no fear. we could use a film version of that around now.

they're funny

midly and occasionally. they mostly make me feel stupid for not finding them more so.

obvsly I'm not saying I'm right and your wrong, I'm just perplexed by it. I saw the film of Inherent Vice and found the fact that a character was called Japonica to be very funny.

that’s another reason people enjoy his books: all the good names

imo Against The Day is the one to start with, yeah it's the longest one but it's completely charming and considerably less cryptic than GR

I really need to read Vineland. Will try to score a copy at some stage

My dumb take on Vineland is that it sits on the leading edge of the contemporary vogue for female action heroes.

I read Vineland 3 years ago and, despite it being a bit uneven, I liked it a lot. It's his most earnest of the ones that I've read (49, GR, Vineland, M&D, IV).

Mason & Dixon is still my favorite. It has such a huge heart.

Crying of Lot 49 was a total blast, I wanted to read it again as soon as I finished it.

Vineland has been staring at me from the top of a stack, think I’ll get to it sooner than later

I bought the Mason and Dixon hardcover new for like 5 bucks in high school cuz it was one of those clearance items in the front of Barnes & Noble. Kinda figured it wasn’t well regarded because of this?

but obviously I was mistaken re:M&D

Me and a friend read M&D at the same time, not sure I would have gotten through it without the outside motivation but very glad I did, his best imo

I read The Crying of Lot 49 a couple of months ago, really liked it. I thought this was an amazing passage coming in 1965 (quoted it on Facebook): "When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah, well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself."

pynchon reading meltzer in crawdaddy :)

A blueprint for Meltzer, anyway (checked, and he started at Crawdaddy in '67).

yes i know

but it does seem kinda meltzerish

maybe not mean enough

When I posted on FB, I compared it to Sheffield's Beatles book.

The band, the Paranoids, they were good too; reminded me of one of those fake bands you'd see at the time on The Flintstones or The Munsters.

Someone deceived me. Thomas Pynchon is alive and well. I apologize.

— Louise Glück (@PoetLouiseGluck) February 16, 2021

^^^this better still be so

meanwhile checking in on my reread-it-all ratings:

i actually spoiled GR for myself by doing too mch back-reading (maybe also by rereading it too often): it's probably now slipped right down to my list

least favourite still always V. (which is just too beat generation for me)

i'd need to reread the last three for this to be definitive (AtD took me ten years -- with several interruptions and restarts) but i think my current order is

M&R
AtD
VL
BE
IV --- need to reread this as the actual sequel to VL
GR
CL49
V

― mark s, Saturday, 19 November 2016 00:19 (five years ago) bookmarkflagline

AtD: currently my favourite, tho this always kinda just means the one i read most recently
M&D: i think his best and deepest -- i love that it's abt america just before the revolution (he must have just shouted w/glee when he discovered in pre-novel research that one of M&D stayed in the UK and one emigrated) (tracer tells me THE SOTWEED FACTOR is also abt america just before the revolution, so i guess i shd read that
VL: very fond of this, it's the one where he learnt to do affection between characters and i prefer him like that -- tho it leaves brock vond a weak reed (like he forgot how to do villains)
BE: getting a raw deal here -- his "novels of times as they are now" (this, VL and CoL49) are always full of alert observation, and i think there's tons here that's (a) accurate and (b) not in any other novels -- need to reread, maybe disenchantment will kick in (ie my allergy to cyberpunk -- as i was reading it i was thinking "i much prefer this to gibson")
IV: re the film (which i liked) even quite smart ppl seem to go with "who needs another big lebowski?" -- well i hate big lebowski, who needs even one, IV isn't a bit like it… book is lowish mainly bcz i'm a tiny bit allergic to marlowism
GR: putting it here looks challopsy -- and i think you can find me raving abt it on early ilx (s.clover will remember) -- but i honestly read this once too many times (8 or 9) and just have no will to, again; this surprised me too (it has great set-pieces of course)
CoL49: superb as a second novel by a young writer, several great set-pieces and startling ideas*, like VL and BE a "novel of times as they are now" (fun to read alongside didion) but his inexperience sentence-making shows now and then, several of the characters don't really work (for example the paranoids), and i always felt tripped up and let down by its brevity
V.: a handful of scenes i still remember from reading it first and only time c.1981, but i also have an allergy (much larger this time) to beatnikery and this i remember as rancid with it >:( never tried to reread it, i know i probably should
SL: bleh, there's really nothing much here (his intro essay is quite funny)

*the man's face on the stamp transfixed with fright and horror

― mark s, Wednesday, 12 April 2017 22:49 (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

not much to add: i did actually start a (tenth?) GR reread a couple years back and this time beached but i think that was mainly pandemic depression: i hardly managed to read anything in 2020 or 2021 -- my impression (i was trying a superclose read for once where i actually decode everyt sentence instead of just skipping it) is that i'm not as smart as i was when i first read it or else just less inclined to believe my own bullshit lol. i think -- since ppl were discussing it on the novels-unfinished thread -- that despite being short CL49 is one of the tougher TPs, partly bcz his attitude to the characters is at best enigmatic (if he loves em he's not showing it). maybe BB is overranked here? -- but i was unpersuaded by much of the critical disappointment (dudes he always gets that). anyway i shd reread; and AtD also of course

Glad to see some Bleeding Edge appreciation on here.

I have less than 50 pages to go in AtD. Love some parts (beginning, Colorado sections) and feel blessed to have 1100 pages of Pynchon, but it is overstuffed. M&D remains #1 for me.

not! long! enough!

(it took me ten years to finish)

did we know that his full name is "Thomas Ruggles Pynchon"

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.

👍

Surprised to see the low rating for Slow Learner - I think The Secret Integration is one of the loveliest things he ever wrote.

Shamefully as a dedicated TRP fanboi I am still not even halfway through Against the Day ;_;

I had seen his full name before because I have read his wikipedia page many times, but I don't think I ever followed the link to his ancestor William Pynchon, and saw the Pynchon coat of arms
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/COA_William_Pynchon.svg/800px-COA_William_Pynchon.svg.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoGaSWzWMAYFCK0.jpg

This would be a fun Nobel Prize surprise.

also, it is so so so West Coast, I love that about it

― sleeve

Maximalism’s Big Daddy. His novels, in which entropy reigns supreme, are dense and complex and uncover the murky and incongruous mechanics of life, but without providing a single answer. Authors like him only come once in a lifetime. Award the 2022 Nobel Prize to Thomas Pynchon. pic.twitter.com/2BVzmoNJTA

— Luis Panini (@TheLuisPanini) October 3, 2022

Hey take it over to the Great Real Names thread, M. Panini!

A game on this site was trying to find an author who was as wild as Pynchon. I really liked this piece of Laiseca, the novel hasn't been translated but it does sound wild.

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/manuel-antonio-castro-cordoba-on-laiseca/

I read Mason & Dixon this year and it was lovely

Yah!

xyzzzz, thanks for that link. The description of Laiseca sounds so much like Pynchon! Very interesting and now I want to read it but don't speak or read spanish :(

Quite a few ambitious works are being translated btw. This is out Match next year.

https://dalkeyarchive.store/products/the-garden-of-seven-twilights

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2022-12-14/the-huntington-library-acquires-papers-of-thomas-pynchon

Huntington Library is an awesome place and perfect for Pynchon. Really interesting that the archive will include his research materials - could be illuminating.

love this. huntington really is the right place.

A few have talked about Solenoid as the highly ambitious work on a Pynchonesque scale. Eng translation has been issued. I will have a go at it.

Mircea Cărtărescu’s “brilliant, clear and disquieting prose….fills you quite immediately with a desire to explore a world that seems to be collapsing”

Read @SaraheKornfeld’s full review of “Solenoid” (tr. Sean Cotter) here:https://t.co/crAUuYGybV@DeepVellum #LARreviews pic.twitter.com/Bg47GMSW7L

— Los Angeles Review (@LAReview) December 14, 2022

Lovely news to see indeed -- Pynchon and Butler, what a combo alone!

The best novel ever written by an ex-CIA operative (unless Pynchon is ex-CIA, which he might be).

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) September 22, 2023

If he was, it surely only served to sharpen his criticism of historical and contemporary US foreign policy

DeLillo has more big spook energy.

Libra presumably an expose rather than a speculation

whenever this thread is revived I worry that he's dead. how old is he by now anyway?

86 I think

there's a signed edition of Mason and Dixon on Ebay for $24k.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/274765041981?hash=item3ff945d13d:g:B7oAAOSwQWBdfQkd&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAA4NQNcS8Q0SfQmzO0180rdkEA3JX4lSWkw5TA7yzzANIQk8pUsHcXQs8FzKvlDWMLPHJePYglAPUC093VvGVN68JYxmebKgweiZ8Nbcw5r5XNmSffetYZxis45gH8G%2FfrPxRsxto3SCtzlSp1kA%2FFtpyf5Q0241JFXIjigK74en2DIdcCmj2hJ0zoRKRw6G%2Fvc7pfVR3LWO0QInO5m7tckigFGMBRoe2cUdDELt0miJWdXDFcNtpPjIsrD5S4PqlPUjKYygYfT%2B1sHP0efqct3wR4Yr3Y5amrbKlkoeg3pOqf%7Ctkp%3ABlBMUOq9tu3XYg

I’ve seen signed Salinger and Pynchon titles go for between $10k and $30k. You can see some more on Abebooks

He's actually been dead since 1974. The books written by "Thomas Pynchon" after that point have actually been written by Irwin Corey.

i've held on to a signed Infinite Jest first edition in the hope that it would hit those heights but alas they seem to go for around 4k; he's dead but he wasn't exactly a recluse. If I don't get a job at some point I'll probably have to let it go.

i found a hilarious reddit thread from a european investigator who followed old men all over new york wondering if they were pynchon. he may or may not have snapped a picture of the back of him going into the building they confirmed as a residence of pynchon's wife. I just like to imagine old guys in NY getting accosted by a swede asking "are you thomas pynchon?" and their bewildered eyes

that's amazing

I vaguely know Elvis Buñuelo and I read *Mating* at his behest. Amazing novel.

xxxpost best novel by an ex-CIA agent: might be those by pen names ov Paul Linebarger, though I haven't yet read any (though omg the shorter fiction)

re: Linebarger, the short fiction is amazing and stands up today. if anything only more prescient on e.g. animal liberation. nonfictionwise, Psychological Warfare is sitting on my desk but I haven't cracked it yet.

best by ex-CIA probably deserves its own thread. Frank Herbert seems obvious but afaict he genuinely was not affiliated.

Don't forget Harry Mathews