gravitys rainbow: the trout mask replica of books?

Funnily enough, I was going to post a 'classic or dud: Thomas Ruggles Pynchon' myself today. For ten years now, GR has been my favourite book. Recently, after many years of prompting, I have persuaded the noted Joycean, Dr Pinefox, to give it a go, and started flicking through it again myself, wondering what he would make of it. To my horror, I'm not sure what *I* now make of it. A lot of it I found insufferably wacky. I had a similar problem with Mason & Dixon ('haha! George Washington is smoking pot! haha! there is a mechanical duck!'). This worries me greatly, since I was hoping reading GR every year would be the nearest I got to some kind of religious observance in my decrepitude.

I currently think V holds up better than all the subsequent books, but I may just be going through some crisis of faith.

Mason & Dixon = about the impossibility — futility vs pitiless necessity — of sustained friendship. How wacky is that?

The silliness protects and strengthens the sadness, and vice versa.

GR: leave it for a year or five. My copy now physically beginning to mimic TRP's narrative structure: ie last 30-odd pages have fallen off back and are flaking into smaller and smaller, more brittle bits.

Not "a mechanical duck" but "THE mechanical duck"!!

[*Plus* JW = even worse prose stylist than M.Amis...]

I agree Vineland is a bit Dharma-and-Greg, but actually I'm fond of it also.

i thought v. was fucking dull for the first 60 pages or so, but i kept with it and from there on out, it was fantastic; the bit about the priest's interactions with the holy rats in the sewers is probably the funniest thing pynchon's ever written.

i read the cyring of lot 49 in a day, and it was great fun and very inventive and likely his most musical book what with the garage band and the electronic music "club," but it feels increasingly slight and just a wee bit sexist.

the short stories are insightful and informative and worth it alone for pynchon's introduction, which reads just like his fiction. "the secret integration" is the most touching thing i've ever read by him and, indeed, he's still amazed that he wrote it.

i've never vineland or mason & dixon and i don't know if i want to, frankly. i'll defer to the opinion of others on these two.

Fred is quite right about The Secret Integration. I prefer it as a "gateway" work for those new to Pynchon above anything else he's written, especially (ick) The Crying of Lot 49.

And Steve T's list of musical works that fit Pynchon is a cop-out, coz he mentions or praises most of 'em.

A question related to this - finding music that fit somehow with GR - came up on the Pynchon mailing list like more than a year ago. There were some attempts at answers but I think the best I heard was that there's not really any piece of music comparable to it - it's just too damn big and complicated.

'Cop-out'???

ha! is Pynchon the anthony braxton of am lit then?

(I got a copy of GR for 3 quid)

Pleased to meet you.

Pleased to meet you.

-- A Woman Who Likes "TMR"

Likewise I'm sure!!

in no way analagous is wrong but I've become increasingly convinced that critics' assumptions that there is something called *Art* that can generally be discussed in a similar way, as opposed to more-or-less completely different things like literature and music and painting that need to be discussed in completely different ways is a bad thing.