Thomas Pynchon

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.