so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

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.

oh come on, everything has a theme

i think the parabolic arc structure is more apparent in the "ascending" and "descending" parts and not so much in the middle, but anyway how interesting is a parabolic arc (not very)

i did have a very beautiful looking book of essays on GR from the 70s which i never read and tossed, i think it had an essay on it

this one

well that's not true, i read the first article and then tossed it, but the first one was good, can't remember what it was about though ...

I think it would be a pretty narrow reading of GR to say it was "about" paranoia or a particular conspiracy or even the helplessness of in any meaningful sense. I guess you could say that there are a lot of "themes" running through pynchon's later books, but they're more like motifs in my mind, or really ideas and concerns, or moods. I don't think it's bad that you can't say precisely what they're "about", and i generally think the idea that novels have to be "about" something is sort of pernicious.

I'm really loving how visual/cinematic the book is, all the flights he goes on read like stage direction or something

the distinction between themes vs motifs is a little over my head tbh

I think it would be a pretty narrow reading of GR to say it was "about" paranoia or a particular conspiracy or even the helplessness of in any meaningful sense. I guess you could say that there are a lot of "themes" running through pynchon's later books, but they're more like motifs in my mind, or really ideas and concerns, or moods. I don't think it's bad that you can't say precisely what they're "about", and i generally think the idea that novels have to be "about" something is sort of pernicious.

― s.clover, Thursday, May 10, 2012 11:14 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the distinction between themes vs motifs is a little over my head tbh

― the late great, Friday, May 11, 2012 12:23 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This might be too obvious, but if you're reading Pynchon/GR as standard metafiction then the distinction is a little clearer. Typically, a book's motifs, or reoccurring symbols or structures, are what inform/elucidate the book's themes, and those themes are kind of the End Point / What the Book Is About. If you're coming from a metafictional angle, then those themes are no longer the End Point, but just another reoccurring motif that informs a larger metanarrative.

It might also be tough to wrap one's head around since GR just has so many interweaving elements and so many dark corners that it's tough to ever feel like you have a toehold. Shit is just dense, fun, complicated, and rewarding inasmuch as you feel like penetrating. Basically, if you're a reader whose reading pleasure rests in feeling like you've confidently figured out a book's themes, GR will either severely disappoint or change the way you read/think about texts.

ok sure i know my list of literary devices from 9th grade honors english and i know a motif is a way of talking about repeated use of devices (imagery for example) that can establish a theme

i don't really see the distinction in practical terms though or what clover's getting at when he says "oh that's just a motif but not a theme"

i wouldn't say my pleasure in reading gravitas rainbow rests in figuring out the themes either - personally i love the startling imagery and the way he uses voices and the pseudoscientific digressions he gets in to

and i realize the themes are more complex (and there are many more of them) than in, say, "the old man and the sea"

but i do think that it's possible to suss out a few of the things pynchon wants to say about the anxieties of living in the postwar military industrial complex driven world and how they are similar or different or emergent in the anxieties of the war and prewar and how different people deal with those anxieties

fuk u if u disagree

the late great do you hate being talked down to more than anything?

yes

i thought my response was pretty mellow though, this time

hee hee "gravitas rainbow"

but i do think that it's possible to suss out a few of the things pynchon wants to say about the anxieties of living in the postwar military industrial complex driven world and how they are similar or different or emergent in the anxieties of the war and prewar and how different people deal with those anxieties

See, this is where I disagree. I mean the setting of GR is one time period, and the concerns of GR, the society it "lives in" (and that pynchon lived in writing it) is of another time period, but first off for a deeply historically researched novel, with the exception of some of the interesting bits drawn from research (herero in particular) (and then of course it's difficult to tell the fiction from the nonfiction) I don't think it has anything to say about the WWII time period at all, or the people in it. And I don't think it has anything to say about living in a "postwar military industrial complex driven world," or for that matter, about anxieties of anyone! On the one hand, it's more concerned with characters making choices in a certain set of trying contexts, and how it feels to live with these choices. And on the other, it's a complex network of symbols and relationships (like, literally symbols -- logos, parabolas, mandalas, tarot cards, graffiti, visions, other gnostic elements) that shift in and out of focus and configuration to create the underlying movement of the novel, which i see basically as an emotional one. I mean, it's like if you ask me what a Bartok Concerto is "about". I can tell you what it *does*, maybe, sort of, and the context it exists in of other work, but I can't tell you what it *means*. Or I can't do so in a way that isn't nearly entirely just what it means to me.

btw my use of theme vs. motif isn't drawn from any particular notions of how they're used in a literary setting, but more how we might use them in talking about a symphony.

“Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”