Thomas Pynchon

my fav writer on writing thing is stevenson's essay on writing treasure island (My First Book) but I did like the intro to slow learner when I read it in a library

the robot duck subplot has a scene where the world's greatest chef is called in to deal with the robot duck, and when he modestly insists that he knows nothing about ducks, robespierre or whoever is like "but what of your canard du casserole? your canard au pamplemousse flambe?, and the chef blushes and says OH THOSE OLD CANARDS

book is weirdly like early woody allen

i like the slow learner intro a lot too. it's weirdly charming and unexpected that he calls 'on the road' one of the greatest american novels, or somesuch.

alfred:

Displacing my personal experience off into other environments ... part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyonek nows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was rpecisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.

ugh sorry about the typos

I thought those were part of his advice to young writers.

essay is enjoyably harsh:

The next story I wrote was "The Crying of Lot 49," which was marketed as a "novel," and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then.

i think the autobiographical thing is true though: you get snotty about Mere Autobiography and Lack Of Imagination, and repeat things nabokov says about the writer creating an imaginary hermetic universe for the mandarin reader to play in, and then one day you wake up and realize that every nabokov book is about a sad european emigre who thinks about pale nipples a lot

please note though that while i am talking about myself here i only realized this several years after reading the pynchon essay, from which, at the time, i only managed to take what i already knew.

i like pynchon's sense of humor! he is... "weird" on race. i dont know, im not an expert, ive only ready crying and gravity's rainbow.

it took me like six months but im pretty sure i loved it.

both Mason & Dixon and Against The Day have a really difficult first third to get through, it took me multiple attempts to get through those first 300 or so pages for both books. Once they get going though, both are amazing. My two favorite Pynchon novels.

mason & dixon is not worth it, i don't think. against the day, inherent vice, gravity's rainbow, v, all are worth it. haven't tried vineland on (bad) recs

thinking I should write a dissertation on pynchon and race

i don't remember any race stuff in 49...and he's always seemed kind of immature about matters like that. his sense of humor is kind of borderline MAD magazine in Rainbow, frankly.

still reading Against The Day and it is still so goddamn good I can't even really believe it, the best writing I've read in a decade maybe? I mean, there are just these constant tossed-off paragraphs of brilliance or random historical erudition every 5 or 6 pages.

p. 619 btw

Never thought about it like MAD Magazine. I was a regular reader as a kid (even Cracked on occasion), and I enjoy Pynchon's sense of humor. That's what got me hooked on reading him in the first place, weirdly enough.

to be honest I think I made that comparison becaues the few pictures of Pynchon he looks like Alfred E Newman.

But, he does have a pretty slapstick sense of humor. Like that story in V. about the kid with the screw in his bellybutton that he played with and his ass fell off.

Seriously found Against The Day to be more gripping/easier to read than several other Pynchon novels (esp V). I remember it as a real page turner, though I haven't read it since it came out. I think I struggled more with Mason and Dixon, actually (although it wasn't a struggle per se).

There's a quite good essay on MAD as the progenitor of McSweeney's in an early N+1: http://nplusonemag.com/regressive-avant-garde.

An urgent & key text on Pynchon and race is The Secret Integration, I woulda thunk - not particularly immature for an early short story.

Think I will have another crack at AtD when/if it ever becomes available for kindle in the UK. Just started Infinite Jest this way and I'm finding it so much easier to read without having to lug the cumbersome hardback around with me.

I think the earlier sections of Against The Day crack along quite nicely - the Chums of Chance, Merle & Dally (that section is so so lovely), the Western chapters. It helps that Pynchon is playing with children's genres, to an extent, there. The bit that drags is the lengthy section in the Balkans in the build-up to WW1, but it's worth slogging through that for the ending.

Mason & Dixon is wonderful, probably my favourite novel ever.

gravity's rainbow is still my favorite, but against the day is awesome, reaching sublime crescendos that gesture toward contemporary concerns, orange alerts and so forth ~

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

inherent vice is sitting on a shelf, waiting for me eventually, after the ask, and mao ii, and the age of innocence, and how bluegrass music destroyed my life and the beggar maid. . . . sort of putting it off, because then there's no more new pynchon to read

er, anybody know where i can buy n+1 magazine in london?

i'd love to subscribe but the postage alone is more than the cost of the magazine..

LRB bookshop? They've just started doing electronic editions in mobi format also...

or maybe foyles?

will try both, thanks!

i've been reading gravity's rainbow again lately -- it used to be my favourite thing ever written -- and, yeah, it's annoying me. i don't know. the feeling of 'i am bored with this damn overgrown stoner' is more prevalent. and the 'weirdness' about race (& sex) is bothering me more.

but then i can read a lot of people who are worse on such matters without being bothered about how bad they are: i think partly it's that pynchon thinks he has an Important Contribution to make on such things; partly it's that as a teenager i was so wowed by whatever ideas about sex and race were in play, here, that i feel bad for myself on rereading it.

that's how i feel about tom robbins

disgusting english candy drill = yoga flame for all time, etc., tho, still

ha all i know about tom robbins is that some people claim he is like pynchon only less so?

pynchon for dummies i guess? i don't know, i've barely read any pynchon.

last time i attempted vineland i remember it seeming like tom robbins :-/

any pynchon fans enjoy "the sot weed factor?" - i always got the impression that book kind of out pynchoned pynchon, ditto the author himself

i'm not convinced by that. i never did finish the sotweed factor, though.

when i was reading it i found myself thinking a lot about what david wallace took from barth -- an attitude towards the deployment of genre effects, maybe? i'm not sure i could unpack it without reading it again and paying it more attention.

i didn't realise it came out in 1960. blimey.

it gets less effect out of its 17th-century prose stylings than mason & dixon does. or it's less interested in amping them up and having fun with them than pynchon is. on a structural level it is playing within the rules of the genre it is aping a lot more than m&d does, too.

What do people think of V, though? Seems weirdly absent from all the conversation here.. I want to read it next because it should be a better appetizer for GR and Mason & Dixon, than just simply diving in having only read Crying of Lot 49.

barth is great (the chimera!) but the sotweed factor plays it straighter than pynchon, less zany, i'd say. now giles goat-boy on the other hand

Yeah I liked GR a lot at the time but only got about 20% of it, maybe less. All the scraps I've read about him make me think he's a bit, well, Zappa-esque.

Was admiring the physical thinness of Inherent Vice and thinking I should read this w/Vineland sometime. His best ones might be the normal sized ones, not the brick-like monsters.

I really liked lost in the funhouse but other than that and a couple of his "straightforward" early books, I've never really been able to get through anything he's done

inspired by this thread i picked up mason & dixon and it is *slaying me*, i am such a sucker for elaborate stoner humor. the talking dog! and bits are really affecting. i think i might describe it as a 'bromance'

there is this bit he does in that book about bread being the perfect combination of the four elements (either M or D's dad was a baker) that is a favorite passage of mine. I need to reread M&D but am still lost 2/3 of the way through Against The Day.

guess i'm gonna have to read mason & dixon then...

tbh i never read V. seemed too willfully obtuse.

i never FINISHED V, I guess. i did get maybe 50 pages in at one point in college.

I liked V. and found it rather absorbing... but I had also convinced myself that what turned out to be a one-off minor plot detail was gonna turn out to be way more important in the eventual 'resolution' of the story, and I kept reading and waiting to be proven right

What was it?

i love the bread passage.

i bet mark s says so somewhere here or in another thread but the robot duck is real (historically factual). i already knew that (because of pynchon), but i was surprised today to be reading KANT and find him mention the duck (actually the creator, vaucanson—you would have to remember his name without the footnote that sez 'ROBOT DUCK' to prompt you) in the critique of practical reason!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck

the robot duck is an important point in Hugh Kenner's The Counterfeiters that ppl who like pynchon would prob enjoy, I don't like pynchon really he's just seem like too much for me, but I mean I fell like I'm missing out in a way, in other ways though I feel like I'm dodging a bullet. Can dodging a bullet be missing out?

it's a bullet stuffed with jokes and funny names and ridiculous plot acrobatics, so maybe?