new pynchon new pynchon new pynchon

man FUCK amazon, i ordered new headphones on the weekend and they already showed up in my mailbox today!

Any other potential referents for the title?

AGAIN with the talking dog?

faulkner: "We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say: 'Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?'"

book of peter: "But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men."

tyndale (a 16th cent translator of the bible): "I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me."

Like you can have too many? Wait til you get to the runcible spoon fight in chapt... oh, but I've said too much already...

Ezra Tessler gives a summary:

the most striking example of Koch’s literary inventiveness is ‘The Red Robins’ (1975), the longest piece in the collection and perhaps the most well known of Koch’s relatively unacknowledged fiction. This dizzying 56 chapter, 150 page novel-like epic explodes into free-form prose, poetry, drama, and countless other incarnations of literary expression. Resiliently difficult to summarize, Koch’s hyperkinetic tale loosely follows the adventures of a group of pilots led by a morally ambiguous figure named Santa Claus as they swoop in and around Asia. The Red Robins inhabit—as if at random—jungles, cities, beaches, and clouds, while the story’s fantastical whims burst in and out of narrative, dialogue, list, rhyme, unconnected to specific time or event. There are no ‘characters’ in the traditional sense of robust personage. Instead, the reader meets a barrage of people, things, and places, some of which appear multiple times, most of which only momentarily. Together they get heaped in a spontaneous whirlwind so schizophrenic and bawdy as to rival the likes of Rabelais, Sterne, and Burroughs.

(click on 'tuesday' and fast fwd to 35 mins and available for a week)

"squints from needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light, women in headscarves, crocheted fascinators, extravagantly flowered hats, no hats at all, women just looking to put their feet up after too many hours of lifting, fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day..."

I also enjoyed Frankie Ferdinand saying " 'st los Hund?".

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nXknRDZBs0E/SUaMDxbkY2I/AAAAAAAAChI/X-U3-R60Pz0/s400/pynchon.jpg

So... Vineland Redux?

Publisher Penguin's catalog reveals details about the upcoming book by Thomas Pynchon. As previously reported, it will be a detective novel hitting shelves next summer; the news is the title, "Inherent Vice." And details about the plot:

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

man, i haven't even reread against the day yet

honestly that description is not too promising.

yeah it sounds terrible to me. and definitely reminiscent of vineland which i still am not keen on (maybe i need to re-read it?)

Yep, Vineland much better the second time. I thoroughly enjoyed it the 2nd time, and didn't really like it at all the first time.

vineland is grebt but the first chunk of it (before the explication of the DL & Takeshi plot, mebbe) is total autopynchon zappaishness, maybe kind of sours most first reads

The most striking thing about is that if you had handed me the first 30 pages, I would have staked my life I was reading the opening of the new Elmore Leonard.

apparently, according to amazon uk, people who pre-order inherent vice are likely to at the same time buy the kindly ones by jonathan littell

So the Kindley ones are buying The Kindly Ones?

Never had a clue this was coming out till BBC discussed it tonight. I see now the few posts here, but it has not generated any noise in my hearing till now.

They said 'unaccustomed territory for him'. Um, drug-addled paranoid psychedelic CA eccentrics with daft names in the late 1960s?

Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

I swear, that is practically the least unaccustomed sentence about Pynchon I can imagine.

Haven't read Against The Day, or any Pynchon novel, but Dale Peck's review of AtD might lead me to:

http://dalepeck.com/exclusives/heresy-of-truth.html

it makes me want to unread it tbh