so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

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...

Writing about Oakley Hall the band, I came across Pynchon's original review of the novelist Oakley Hall's Warlock (think he wrote more later), on this good Pynchon archive (which has lots more besides his essays, that's just where I came in)
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_gift.html

okay, I just finished this...it took me a solid year. I kept having to stop and take breathers, but it was mind-blowing. I feel I must read it again, as I'm sure I've missed a ton of subtext

I'm exactly at that point, too, Morley.

"the smoke of certain afternoons" is such an odd thing to find qualms with.

can one find qualms or just have them?

"October 25: Rocketmen and Wastelands, an essay by Marshall Shord - Shord is a recent graduate of Washington College, Maryland, who won the nation’s largest undergraduate literary prize, the Sophie Kerr Prize, in large part thanks to his 100-page critical thesis on the first three novels of Thomas Pynchon. Shord was awarded a check for almost $56,000 for his scholarly excellence and last we heard he’s been traveling the world. The Modern Word is proud to share the Pynchon paper worth a BMW, which could be characterized as one reader’s personal dialogue with Pynchon’s first three novels."

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

^thanks for this...v. good reading on a slow day at work.

pers'n'ly i am for thinking it is awful

who would make the best film adaptation of gravity's rainbow? i think the coen bros would do the best at casting the array of characters.

i read this book 15 yrs ago in fits & starts over six months mostly "under the influence" so it passed by in a semi-comprehensible haze. what stuck was the names, i almost made "geli tripping" my first ILM tag.

ken's takes on the science/literary split feel absolutely OTM to me.

I read the first ten pages the other day! If I could only quit it with the Internet for a week or two I'd be able to get through the rest. Already I can sense it's gonna be pretty sick.

if you read gravity's rainbow in two weeks i doubt you are really reading it

i like the coen brothers doing this, but, dumb question, wouldn't it have to be a miniseries, not a movie?

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.