LRB bookshop? They've just started doing electronic editions in mobi format also...
― Stevie T, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 10:54 (twelve years ago) link
or maybe foyles?
― just sayin, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 10:57 (twelve years ago) link
will try both, thanks!
― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:05 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― thomp, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:49 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― thomp, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:50 (twelve years ago) link
that's how i feel about tom robbins
― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:52 (twelve years ago) link
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?
― thomp, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:58 (twelve years ago) link
pynchon for dummies i guess? i don't know, i've barely read any pynchon.
― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:59 (twelve years ago) link
last time i attempted vineland i remember it seeming like tom robbins :-/
― just sayin, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 11:59 (twelve years ago) link
any pynchon fans enjoy "the sot weed factor?" - i always got the impression that book kind of out pynchoned pynchon, ditto the author himself
― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 12:00 (twelve years ago) link
i'm not convinced by that. i never did finish the sotweed factor, though.
― thomp, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 12:19 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― thomp, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 12:23 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Davek (davek_00), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 12:36 (twelve years ago) link
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
― reggie (qualmsley), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 13:01 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 7 June 2011 19:48 (twelve years ago) link
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
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Tuesday, 7 June 2011 19:51 (twelve years ago) link
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'
― ☂ (max), Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:17 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― sleeve, Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:19 (twelve years ago) link
guess i'm gonna have to read mason & dixon then...
― one dis leads to another (ian), Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:28 (twelve years ago) link
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
― bernard snowy, Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:32 (twelve years ago) link
What was it?
― muus lääv? :D muus dut :( (Telephone thing), Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:48 (twelve years ago) link
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
― j., Thursday, 30 June 2011 02:08 (twelve years ago) link
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?
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 30 June 2011 04:37 (twelve years ago) link
it's a bullet stuffed with jokes and funny names and ridiculous plot acrobatics, so maybe?
― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, 30 June 2011 04:52 (twelve years ago) link
gr really is as gnarly, comprehension-wise, in certain places as its rep suggests, and there's always a period of acclimatizing* yrself to pynchon's style (esp. in mason and dixon, which is kind of the ur-pynchon novel in terms of high prose style take to a limit while still being readable), but as max says the last two doorstops (m&d and against the day) are at heart really long yarns stuffed with wtf incident and jokes that range from sublime and subtle to groaning/laughing despite yrself.
― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, 30 June 2011 04:57 (twelve years ago) link
*add this to the -ize thread
― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, 30 June 2011 04:58 (twelve years ago) link
so like they're "difficult" but theyre also goofy rube goldbergian gag reels/saturday serials.
― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, 30 June 2011 05:00 (twelve years ago) link
I'm gonna be honest and say that the fuckin funny names shit is one of the bigger stumbling blocks for me
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 30 June 2011 05:07 (twelve years ago) link
well, he's no nicholas sparks on the name front, i'll grant you that.
― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, 30 June 2011 05:10 (twelve years ago) link
Marley is a better name than Mucho Ceviche or whatever shit he comes up w/
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 30 June 2011 05:14 (twelve years ago) link
There was a kinetic art exhibition in London a year or two ago where an artist actually recreated the digesting duck but sadly I never got round to seeing it.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 30 June 2011 08:50 (twelve years ago) link
out of all of his books one of my favorite set-pieces is the tatzelwurm part in against the day. and kit in the mayonnaise factory.
the octopus in gravity's rainbow is up there too.
― cutty, Friday, 1 July 2011 18:45 (twelve years ago) link
Fuck yeah Al Yankovic
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 19 January 2012 16:51 (twelve years ago) link
Meantime:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/after-long-resistance-pynchon-allows-novels-to-be-sold-as-e-books/
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 12 June 2012 22:56 (eleven years ago) link
they gotta lotta spare advertising money over at viking/penguin, it seems.
― j., Wednesday, 13 June 2012 03:20 (eleven years ago) link
http://pynchonwiki.com/
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 9 August 2012 12:17 (eleven years ago) link
i've really tried with pynchon for the year now, but he can't put a sentence together. i like the ideas, the characters, but the grammar is appalling, it's like he runs it back& forth through google translate for maxiumum opacity. nova express or benjamin peret are easier than this creaky dyslexic prose! also for me it's too dependent on knowing characters in gilligan's island / US pop-culture refs. i don't mind such refs, & can guess my way through, but i see an overdependency on them. and the cut & pasted "research" parts people seem so happy to interpret as "erudition" paint pynchon as a crashing bore. so frustrating!
― iglu ferrignu, Friday, 10 August 2012 07:58 (eleven years ago) link
oh, IMO, of course ! just wondering if anyone else finds the "difficulty" in pynchon just parsing his arse-backwards sentences (I should state that I have overall enjoyed what i have read !)
― iglu ferrignu, Friday, 10 August 2012 08:09 (eleven years ago) link
iglu ferrignu from which country do you hail
― thomp, Friday, 10 August 2012 11:26 (eleven years ago) link
iglu, you may have hit upon an 'emperor's new clothes' here I suspect. it's not that he "can't write a sentence' - obviously he can; but i do find it frustrating when authors write purposefully awkward sentences that you have to re-read over and over just to understand. especially when a simpler construction would have worked just as effectively. it's just making things difficult for no purpose at all and wouldn't be acceptable in any other sort of prose outside of the novel.
― sorry for asshole (dog latin), Friday, 10 August 2012 11:27 (eleven years ago) link
*scales fall from eyes*
― max, Friday, 10 August 2012 11:33 (eleven years ago) link
haha, this all sounds incredibly naiive. I mean, Pynchon's also equally known for his incredible craft in sentence structuring, so y'know.
― sorry for asshole (dog latin), Friday, 10 August 2012 11:37 (eleven years ago) link
You know what would make James Joyce even better? If he wrote tunes the milkman can whistle.
― Matt DC, Friday, 10 August 2012 11:39 (eleven years ago) link
dog latin meet henry james
― Ward Fowler, Friday, 10 August 2012 11:40 (eleven years ago) link
okay okay, i get it.
― sorry for asshole (dog latin), Friday, 10 August 2012 11:42 (eleven years ago) link
i want examples of pynchon sentences which are difficult to parse, it will be a great game because as soon as anyone posts one i will say 'there is nothing difficult to parse about that' and imply they are stupid
― thomp, Friday, 10 August 2012 12:51 (eleven years ago) link
you just gotta know how to speak american, how smart is that
― j., Friday, 10 August 2012 14:36 (eleven years ago) link
i think a lot of his commas are pretty british
― thomp, Friday, 10 August 2012 14:45 (eleven years ago) link