so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

i haven't read this, at all, over the past three days. but tonight i will probably read some.

esotericness wasn't what got me, rather the bloated boringness. my eyes glazed over at the banana roll-call, and i skipped and skimmed around for several years running.

I don't know what 'hazmat' means.

(Haz - Hazardous Mat - Materials)

ugh. i hated catch 22. i think i have a problem with the late-modernist masculine canon.

Got much less bogged down the second time around - the first time there was definitely too much to take in all at once.

I've read Vineland twice too, and considering rereading M&D pretty soon - again, the sheer density means I probably missed a lot of the nuances first time around.

When I said 'I don't really agree', that meant, largely: 'you like the book and I don't'. I don't think I had very specific points in mind. But I will look and think, about that.

http://www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html

The long Gerald Howard piece is pretty interesting.

I loved all of the little anecdotes sprinkled throughout, like the alliterative restaurant dishes (pubic parfait and whatnot), Benny the Bulb, the boat that magically missed the torpedos, Roger Mexico pissing all over the boardroom and then crawling out under the table, etc. I like how Pynchon maintains a jovial/fantastical feel through most of the book, I don't think it'd be near as great if he was writing a realistic narrative. And has there ever been a more musical book? There was a song every ten pages it seemed

I have to say though that the pedophilia, poop-eating, toilet-diving, etc. made me squirm while I read it and grew somewhat tiresome by the end. I'll probably pick up the commentary book at some point and re-read GR with it, but before I read any more Pynchon, I need a few years off. Phew!

j., though there are places that made me laugh i think of it as closer to, i dunno, reading comic books; most of the gags aim for amusement or wonder, instead of laffs.

the chase scene in the mountain, btw, is where pynchon totally excels at this in GR. by Vineland, it's increasingly how he's doing EVERYTHING.

i like it that pynchon sort of forces me into a sense-driven reading mode precisely b/c it cuts across how i (& probably lots of foax) learned to "appreciate" literature in school.

Wow that's embarassing. I think I've always spelled it like that too. *hangs head in shame*

(compare the moments of terror, fear, etc., in gr to just the set-pieces in v - which leads me to wonder what a comparable list of them might be for gr.)

as per leslie fiedler there is little difference, generically, between sex porn and horror-porn, which is why in particular i was moved to wonder where the horror-porn is in gr (it is clearly locatable in v).

i don't know if that would even satisfy me, though, as far as my question above goes, since that would make for an asymmetry between the horrific and the sex-porn in 'gr', given that the latter is easily localizable to particular encounters, some fantasies.

oboy

i'm halfway through and i'm pretty sure > halfway out of my depth. but it's doing a good job of expanding my imagination, empathy, understanding of how life exists on earth, etc. flattening of time and space, the quintuple zero, mapping of coordinates (in the context of categorized and apposite human destruction) are all combined like a very elaborate and troubled essay of what's going on at the center of human evolution since like the discovery of the printing press. and all those s/m scenes! i really have to ask -- do you people think it's an accurate rep. of berlin sex life? hottt and weirdddddddd. i think he's getting at something else under the surface of that, you know? beyond decadence...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wSTVMRkIk

(6'53" if you don't want to sit through the whole thing)

Hmm...

"These masterpieces have come to Deep Vellum and to Lawton thanks to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Andrei, a Russian-speaking book blogger from Eastern Europe, launched The Untranslated in 2013. He has described the idea for the blog as having come from reading Gravity’s Rainbow as an undergrad and wondering if there were similar works in other languages."

https://t.e2ma.net/webview/3ss14i/5ba151f32c3c2e783aa4db148566b1e7

First of all, its incredible for a blog to have that much of an impact. That the niche idea it promotes has been taken up is something.

I feel this is all a bit of a dead end. We'll see...while this stuff is still niche there will be a lot more focus on it. I have struggled with The Untranslated's writing on these books.

much as i love gigantic excessive (post)modernism there's something about seeing them all bunched together as a genre that leaves me a little eye-rolly maybe?

the thing that leaves me eye-rolly is that solenoid, while not without interest, was also very much not without boredom - tho i feel equivocal, as some aspects of it have stayed with me. it should be much much shorter tho.

i feel totally unequivocal tho about garden of seven twilights being just utter crap.

so, something’s off. big books doing lumpy or tangled things isn’t enough to justify reading or publication really imo, though fair play to the original blog for surfacing writing, it’s just they’ve all been amplified above their intrinsic power (someone will surely tell me that’s a bad metaphor - that not really being what amplification is but hopefully ykwim)

kinda breaks the veneer of sui generisity right

Feels like Biographical Entries for a Catalogue of Vast Untranslated and Unreadable Postmodern Novels is already its own fully realised metafictional exercise.

This is also, more than anything, another twitter-related production. All of the translators and Andrei are on there constantly tweeting about these things, so something was definitely brewing.

On twitter there was a big bust-up (its niche but you know) with some other people over the translation of this book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutunamayanlar

Which I think was translated into English by his then partner. Could see them all trashing it one night. These boys are passionate! Which makes me pause, yes.

Atay's short stories are getting a translation. Which I am v much looking forward to.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/waiting-for-the-fear

The discourse has blown up a bit on twitter, via this piece.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/

"Most concerning, for me, is that brodernist criticism interprets foreignness itself as “difficult.” The brodernist measures of “challenging” literature are a constrained series of attributes: winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists, brick-length tomes, cringey and misogynistic sex scenes, the stench of once having read Nietzsche, the words “psychedelic” and “oneiric,” half-hearted genre-play. Kafka, poor guy, gets thrown around a lot. The problem, to be clear, is not these traits—honest-to-God masterpieces compose much of the brodernist corpus—but their reduction into a series of attributes to be repeated as kitsch. Not the literature of exhaustion but an exhausting, at times exhausted, literature. A zombie avant-garde."

Would say there is much to be said for this. But after all is said and done we are not talking about big sellers that will have much impact.

Nevertheless, questions must be asked of it.

This is the next big brick:

https://store.deepvellum.org/products/schattenfroh

call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau

He knew it was awful and he did it anyway!

That's right

Funny, I read but did not finish Krasznahorkai‘s first book Satantango or whatever and was deeply unimpresssed

I do agree with that paragraph above from the review, Pynchon has a lot of shit to answer for

I liked 'Seiobo There Below' quite a bit and wanted to read 'Melancholy of Resistance' (I love the title)

Satantango (the film) is all time for me.

re: GR. Obviously not Pynchon's fault he had copyists but its worth saying his own fiction went through some evolution from GR onwards.

On ILX I remember we had some discussion on many American made bricks that were comparable to GR, but not as good either (or that was some of the judgment, I haven't read Underworld).

The piece is being seen as minimising women who write, read and like this stuff. Many are citing Marguerite Young but Macintosh is (from what I read of it) working at a different angle to GR. That para I pulled out attacks a particular niche and it feels like a sub tweet of that blog.

Yeah I would say Macintosh is nothing like Pynchon, maybe they are even opposites.

I only recently found out that John Holmes (no not...), the artist who painted the cover for the first UK paperback of Gravity's Rainbow, also painted the cover for the UK paperback of Jaws:

https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/61QAAOSwkwxnhjMC/s-l1200.jpg

https://i0.wp.com/m.bookcoverreview.co.uk/JawsFrontCover.png?w=2000

This bump reminding me I have The Luminaries and Ducks, Newburyport lying unread on my shelves. Yes yes I'll get to them...someday...

haha wow re: Jaws and GR

I finally traded in my unread Infinite Jest this week, after a good twenty years' aging on the shelf. I figure I can easily get another copy if I ever do decide to read it.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/maximally-perverse-obscurantism-grimstad

Here is a review, basically coming to similar conclusions to the brodernism piece, but its getting a much easier time because its not so online.

It can be considered in a lineage of similarly demanding tomes that push playful modernist experiment into a region that might be called “impossible”: i.e., the excruciatingly self-involved later Joyce of Finnegans Wake and strange lesser-known works of maximally perverse obscurantism like Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream. Some authors of quasi-impossible books like Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor), Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) and Wallace (Infinite Jest) nevertheless manage to write unfailingly entertaining sentences that never lose a certain vernacular crackle, and that are often funny.

Hated this conlusion though.

Because Lentz is himself a free jazz musician he deserves a good free jazz analogy. So, Schattenfroh it is like a Cecil Taylor solo which lasts a month. No matter how into Unit Structures you are, it would be hard to stay interested in such a solo, though I am fully willing to admit that this is just a failure of imagination on my part. Taking in such a piece of music would no doubt be remarkable, perhaps impressive, perhaps tormenting, depending on your taste and temperament, but undoubtedly one in which some inner sotto voce voice would seem to repeat: He did this. He did this.

Hated this conclusion though. Cecil chose not to do this. Big difference.