so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

"I don't see much similarity at all between Powers and Pynchon"

both total braniacs that science majors love who write dense "difficult" books and the occasional 250 page "entertainment".

plus, i can never finish books by either one of them.

"Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable"

you should try operation wandering soul. not any of these things. not that i finished it...

first pages of operation wandering soul here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Operation-Wandering-Soul/Richard-Powers/e/9780060976118#EXC

That review by James Wood stopped me cold.

that's your loss. powers is pretty good, sometimes great.

what do you recc i start with for powers?

That James Wood takedown of Powers is pretty good, but in fairness somebody should link to the recent takedown of Wood.

i think most powers fans would say read galatea 2.2 or the gold bug variations. and i WILL finish operation wandering soul someday. i didn't stop reading it cuz i didn't like it. i forget what happened there...

gain kinda reminded me of steven millhauser a little bit.

"Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable"

you should try operation wandering soul. not any of these things. not that i finished it...

The only Powers I've read is The Echo-Maker, so maybe I'm generalizing too much based on that. I can see how that excerpt of "Operation Wandering Soul" might put one in mind of Pynchon. There's still something subtly different about it, but it's hard to put one's finger on it though. Powers marshals all his literary tricks, scientific knowledge, and dense allusions to give the reader what boils down to a rather literal description of the prosaic act of driving in traffic. At bottom, he's still trying to faithfully describe realistic everyday experience. Whereas I think Pynchon would be more likely to marshal his literary firepower to describe a scene that's patently (and perhaps sophomorically) unrealistic.

ok so this is on my table at home.

Just read the first 20 pages of this in Toronto's Distillery District this weekend. I have six weeks until law school and might try to finish it before classes start.

(My initial goal of Ulysses or Infinite Jest fell by the wayside)

get through the first 200 pages and you're bound to finish it.

Strange to say, I bought a used paperback copy of GR for $1 a few months back, and last night I cracked it open and started it. It was just a taste, after I finished the DFW-interview book by David Lipsky and had a few moments to scrounge around for my next book. Seems ok enough to keep going on it tonight.

am reading this right now (3rd attempt + it seems like this time i'm gonna make it)

i think the threshold is the octopus. once you get there you need to finish.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

this book...

i dunno. the incesty stuff in the middle knocked me out of the book on my first two readthroughs

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow

re: the incest

that was never his daughter btw

Started it yesterday. wish me luck!

I also bought the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I need a good long holiday by the pool.

Weirdly, I also managed to get my hands on The Black Dossier (LOXG) by Alan Moore for light relief, and I'm finding this more difficult than Pynchon so far, then again I'm only a few pages in. Some dudes are gonna get bombed.

The only other long book I've read is Lanark and it's nowhere near as big as this. It took a matter of months - I'm a very slow reader on the whole as I like to re-read sentences and paragraphs and am overtly fussy about skipping words let alone sentences.

I also bought the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I need a good long holiday by the pool.

Surprisingly easy reading for such a big, political book. I really enjoyed it.

http://thomaspynchonfakebook.org/

!

something like my sixth crack at this and, lo this decade gone by, I'm at page 117 and have actually made sense of everything that's happened. I think what stumped me in the past was failing to appreciate that, despite the high blown style, GR is one long fart joke.

I got to ~650 before it pooped out. I just couldn't follow any more, and I got tired of making (increasingly) cobwebbed relational charts to keep track of characters.

keeping track of the characters is really besides the point.

ha i hate the bawdy american college student reptile brain that slithers beneath the sublime geometries

i like mason and dixon a lot, and crying is near perfect as it goes

whoa. dudes, dudes, I just realized.... what if.. we're the punchline?

this is no longer on my table at home, it sits a foot above my head as i sleep, brooding and judging me for failing to tackle it.

I need to take a reading holiday.

rereading Mason & Dixon right now, even more fun the 2nd time through.

Gravity's Rainbow is overrated imo, whereas Crying... and Against The Day are perfection incarnate. Vineland is fun too. I dunno why GR is the canon book when it is a real slog at times.

Never understood those with love for col49. I mean if you're just reading for the texture of the prose, sure. GR has so many amazing parts to it that sort of come and go and wash over you in ways that you can only really get from a large work. I mean I ended up sort of living with it and around for a period more that "reading" it, I think. Which isn't to say I didn't read it (more than once). But just that I stopped expecting it to hang together as a novel pretty quickly, and accepted it more as a structure, like a sculpture or whatever, that you can approach from different directions and see in different configurations.

I like ATD a bunch, but can't imagine calling it "perfection incarnate." Some of the long sections in europe in the latter third of the book lost me way more than GR ever did, and maybe its just because I read it at a different age, but the characters didn't stick with me in the same way, and there are images I remember, but mainly none as haunting as the best from GR or M&D. The one exception being the school essay near the end.

But yeah, GR leaves me reeling more than any other pynchon novel. page-by-page, vineland and inherent vice are maybe as inventive in places, but neither is as thematically ambitious as a whole.

GR also very deliberately teases you, sometimes explicitly ("You will want cause and effect. All right.") with the prospect of pulling together meaning from what's going on, but to a large degree you end up knowing as much (or as little) as the characters themselves, who can only sort of limn a very few contours of whatever complex of conspiracies is operating to send them pinballing around the zone. So it's confusing, but also immersive and revelatory -- cinematic. Vineland maybe has a similar effect at times, but his other works are are maybe less ambitious in this regard.

Which isn't to say the other books are less good, or inferior by some standard. It's just to say that GR is amazing in a very unique way, and I don't know if I'd even want more books doing that exact thing again.

the last time i tried to read 'GR' (for like the sixth time in my life, jesus) i did actually find it funny! it does help to read slowly and try to visualize every single thing happening.

'lot 49' does have a v. different tone and style than anything else by pynchon, IMO -- part of why i like it so much is that oedipa maas is such a believable person. stranded in a universe of terrifying caricatured nightmare-humans. she reminds me a bit of carroll's alice.

GR and V have been my favorites of his--for some reason I have yet to get through M&D. I've tried several times to return to it, and each time I get stuck somewhere and put it down.

got 'inherent vice' out from the library so im going to read that soon. is it any good? 'COL49' had some great writing but overall i liked it but didnt love it. 1st half of 'mason & dixon' is great fun and the writing is superb but by the time they get to america it started to bore me. both books are due another bash though.

I never finished Vineland or V, but I'd rank

AtD; GR; M&D > IV, Vineland, V? > CoL49, everything else

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tXmfhKeHM5k/T6iBb5McNnI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/mwQZeC0Q1fQ/s1600/pete+campbell+CoL49.png

Against The Day really drags in the Balkan section, but then again it's a bit of a problem with all the long Pynchon novels, which tend to have a load of awesome stuff in the first half and then an amazing close but feel a bit draggy when you're 2/3rds of the way through. I really didn't need to read more about Major Marvy or Captain Zhang and his Jesuits by that point.

oh i loved the jesuits thing in m&d!

i don't even remember a jesuits thing in m&d and i'm pretty sure i read it twice

s.clover's post kinda confuses me, i always felt like gravity's rainbow and crying of lot 49 were very similar, they both have that "everything is connected, but nothing makes sense" theme and also the big critique of the modern military-industrial complex. gravity's rainbow has the added nuclear anxiety thread to it and just generally gets deeper and deeper into everything that col49 gets into but in my mind it's kind of portrait of the artist / ulysses type of thing.

i don't even remember a jesuits thing in m&d and i'm pretty sure i read it twice

― thomp, Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

! the sino-jesuit conspiracy and the 'ghastly fop' story-w/in-a-story/subplot

it's not the themes that i'm contrasting -- it's the way the books are structured both on a macro-scale and from scene to scene. GR was basically the book that taught me how to read books as something other than a linear narrative with some ornamental pleasures (descriptions, gags, set pieces) dangling off. CoL49 is a book that doesn't need to be read in other than that way.

i remember the ghastly fop & pynchon cheating at the end of it, but still ... hm. i guess i have to read it again

i think lot 49 does a really good job at doing a bunch of pynchon things in short and organised form, but that means missing out the other half of the things that you'd file under pynchon. but if you don't like encyclopedic novels / 'anatomies' / shaggydog sprawl it'd make sense to like that more than the others.

that col49 gets into but in my mind it's kind of portrait of the artist / ulysses type of thing.

funny that 'lot 49' doesn't appeal as much to hardcore pynchonites -- i feel like i've heard similar disdain toward 'portrait' and even 'dubliners' from ppl who really really love 'ulysses.'

ok clover i get what you're saying, and i hope you get that's what i'm getting at w my analogy

ulysses obv structured in a different way although it does have a similar thing going on in terms of how it uses space (thinking about how the characters wandering in ulysses take on particular shapes vs how the narrative forms a parabolic arc in gravitys rainbow)

i think lot 49 does a really good job at doing a bunch of pynchon things in short and organised form

This is key to what I like about it, such a succinct & distilled version of his sprawling paranoia.

And I love the Balkan part at the end of AtD! Great descriptions of weather and topography as the bedraggled love triangle blunders toward escape from Babylon.

there's a classic reading of GR that argues it's pretty much structured in response to ulysses, in terms of a very rigid underlying structure w/r/t time, thematic balances, etc. in this reading, the narrative doesn't form an arc so much as the rocket mandala. in fact, i get how the novel is bracketed by the arc of a rocket in some sense, but i've never seen the actual structure as an arc.

I should also say that reading pynchon for themes misses the point, I think, and his increasing maturity as a writer has been marked in part by his gradual abandonment of the idea that a novel needs to be "about" something, or some things. in that sense yes, CoL49 is the most explicitly "thematic" of his books, but that's what I think it's weakness is. To the extent that GR mines similar material, it's hard to say that it's a theme so much as a setting, or an ambiance.