Thomas Pynchon

Gonna second Mason & Dixon as being lot of fun. Though it may partly be the lowered expectation? Anyway, email from the publisher saying Bleeding Edge has been released and should be on the way.

m&d has, like, resolutions and shit. most of the balls that are up in the air are caught or left to actually drop in the viewer's sight. but it feels weird because structurally it's not really 'tighter' than g's r, even though the contract it has w/ the reader makes it feel like in some sense it ought to be.

the protagonists & frame narrative give it a greater sense of focus than GR, and it's less randomly allusive -- the jokey anachronisms aside everything is specific to its time & setting (eg the duino elegies i suppose are thematically relevant to GR, i haven't read them closely, but they've always seemed like a kinda undergrad-heavy thing to carry into a wwii story)

iago if you've made it through v. you will have no trouble whatsoever with m&d, it is way more fun

Thanks for the sage advice, everyone...yeah I loved V. and wanted to start GR all over again as soon as I finished it, so I guess it should be alright. Also, I use the online wikis for each book if there are a lot of references flying over my head and those are enormously helpful. Thanks again!

I recommend this one
― what's up ugly girls? (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, September 4, 2013 5:06 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
a lot of books written about him have some agenda and/or axe to grind (which is totally understandable - dude left a trail of destruction that was pretty sizeable), this is one that was both well-written, well researched, and pretty even-handed in its approach
― what's up ugly girls? (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, September 4, 2013 5:07 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never thanked you, Shakey...so thank you very much for the rec!

http://www.mclemee.com/id38.html

I believe it was finally confirmed that he did not write those Tinasky letters. They used to be available as a book though and it was often filed with Pynchon books, at least in the Bay Area

yea, this is p interesting nonetheless esp w/ the murder-suicide tie-in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hawkins_(writer)

weirder and more depressing than we thought :-(

“You one of those right wing nut outfits?” inquired the diplomatic Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. “They accuse us of being paranoids.”
“They?” inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
“Us?” asked Oedipa.

our beloved author's "big" novels as themed around conic sections:

http://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~michael.harris/Pynchon.pdf

V: V (duh)
GR: Parabola (duh)
M&D: Ellipse (the orbit of venus as it transits across our star)
AtD: Hyperbolic

convergence and divergence, characters in chaotic orbits and themes casting off to the infinite

that's great & serves especially to reconfirm Against The Day as arguably Pynchon's (second) greatest masterpiece

fonctions automorphiques

heh

Is the cone itself a conic section?

fonctions automorphiques

heh

― j., Thursday, April 9, 2015 11:49 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to the tune of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI9fS5WMRo0

http://i.imgur.com/k8dSF26.png

http://i.imgur.com/Muj7vDO.png

lollllllll

I'm reminded of the rumor, during the long silence between The Recognitions and JR, that Pynchon was a pseudonym for William Gaddis: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/01/24/mistaken-identity/

Can this article be turned into a film somehow please?

Pynchon must be tired of telling customer support people he doesn't want to be recorded whenever he calls CS?

I got Vineland for Christmas. Maybe I'll finally read it this year.

Good piece on Vineland and the protests.

https://bostonreview.net/arts-society/peter-coviello-pynchon-and-coming-police-state

good review: of course the best pynchon is always the one i just reread (i will never reread V.) but i have a special fondness for vineland and this piece is good on much of why, its sadness, its kindness (the portrait of zoyd-prairie's father-daughter badinage and affection is lovely, and convinces me that whatever else his set up mystery-man pynchon has a daughter, you read it here first)

but yes, most of all it's so so good at a particular undissolved loyalty to a particular (doomed but potent) political moment, as kissing cousin to (of all things) chris marker's le fond de l'air est rouge. i wasn't at all a red diaper baby (mum and dad were well meaning eco-liberals) but for a time i did have 68er maoist students for baybysitters and recall puzzling over the literature they had lying around, full of the UK version of this season of revolt, pictures and design more deeply affective than the words. somewhere i possibly even have their copy of barbara garson's macbird!, an absurd overwrought evocative fragment of this exact same time -- borrowed to make sense of it (i never made sense of it)

(first performance: STACY KEACH as macbird, amazing)

yes that gets at the deep love I also have for that book, the undying truth of the heart of what drives radical politics, also eloquently expressed in parts of AtD, imo.

also, it is so so so West Coast, I love that about it

It's only two or three years since I finally got round to reading Vineland - I remember the opening scenes being terrific and yes the father-daughter relationship being very affecting but the whole thing running out of steam very on.

I guess all his best ideas were going into Mason and Dixon which surely he was writing the whole time he was working on Vineland.

disagree, that is not my experience with it at all, the throughline for me is all about the enduring conflict between the FPS film crew and the Feds. plus, it's way funnier than M&D imo (which I also love, for lots of different reasons.

I've read three TP books and haven't understood any of them nor understood why anyone would like them. I guess that's commitment, of a sort.

Crying, Vineland and M&D, fwiw.

they're funny

Pynchon been on my mind so much recently as the sanest documentarian of how conspiracy theories work on people, and a sanity check marker for me to revisit now as interest in them has migrated from the left to the right. Vineland I read when it came out, and the characters in that book absolutely formed a template for me as I came across later agitprop like 'Underground' or films like Robert Kramer's 'Milestones' (and Mark S OTM about my favorite Marker film and I'd throw in Alain Tanner & John Berger's 'Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000' as well)

still have not read past Vineland, and the last year does not leave much room left for fiction but it does make me wish I'd already taken in Mason & Dixon

xpost I always send people to Crying first, if that one bounced then no fear. we could use a film version of that around now.

they're funny

midly and occasionally. they mostly make me feel stupid for not finding them more so.

obvsly I'm not saying I'm right and your wrong, I'm just perplexed by it. I saw the film of Inherent Vice and found the fact that a character was called Japonica to be very funny.

that’s another reason people enjoy his books: all the good names

imo Against The Day is the one to start with, yeah it's the longest one but it's completely charming and considerably less cryptic than GR

I really need to read Vineland. Will try to score a copy at some stage

My dumb take on Vineland is that it sits on the leading edge of the contemporary vogue for female action heroes.

I read Vineland 3 years ago and, despite it being a bit uneven, I liked it a lot. It's his most earnest of the ones that I've read (49, GR, Vineland, M&D, IV).

Mason & Dixon is still my favorite. It has such a huge heart.

Crying of Lot 49 was a total blast, I wanted to read it again as soon as I finished it.

Vineland has been staring at me from the top of a stack, think I’ll get to it sooner than later

I bought the Mason and Dixon hardcover new for like 5 bucks in high school cuz it was one of those clearance items in the front of Barnes & Noble. Kinda figured it wasn’t well regarded because of this?

but obviously I was mistaken re:M&D

Me and a friend read M&D at the same time, not sure I would have gotten through it without the outside motivation but very glad I did, his best imo

I read The Crying of Lot 49 a couple of months ago, really liked it. I thought this was an amazing passage coming in 1965 (quoted it on Facebook): "When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah, well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself."

pynchon reading meltzer in crawdaddy :)

A blueprint for Meltzer, anyway (checked, and he started at Crawdaddy in '67).

yes i know

but it does seem kinda meltzerish

maybe not mean enough

When I posted on FB, I compared it to Sheffield's Beatles book.

The band, the Paranoids, they were good too; reminded me of one of those fake bands you'd see at the time on The Flintstones or The Munsters.

Someone deceived me. Thomas Pynchon is alive and well. I apologize.

— Louise Glück (@PoetLouiseGluck) February 16, 2021