so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

(I'm biased here, but there's a lot of experimental work these days in independent games by women and queers that is equally interesting but that tends not to be discussed in terms of solitary genius.)

braid was not an ungorgeous game, visually, mechanically, but blow's big-ideas thing is kinda tedious. this with its openly puzzle-like puzzles seems a lil more 7th guest than riven (riven is the peak of disguised, environmentally integrated puzzles in graphic adventure games imo, at least before the current revival i'm pretty ignorant of) though obv without all the camp.

feel sorta bad about that tedious thing. really it's just that he's tedious. i don't mean to sneer at the whole premise of trying to unify a game, thematically, in that real poe way, have it be thoroughly about something the way gr is thoroughly about parabolas. of course bomberman and mario 3 (and braid, even without its aspirational probably-about-the-atomic-bomb-wasn't-it? stuff) are as "about" anything as, like, unprogrammatic classical music is. i'm inclined to say that games should concentrate on that kind of meaning over the dense narrative kinds of meaning you find in postmodern literature -- but can imagine immediately being answered by someone arguing that games are in fact the perfect medium for that kind of meaning.

also: is my reflexive preference for riven-style integration and "immersion", puzzles that are of course designed to yield to you just so but which are also designed to mar as little as possible the impression of being in another place designed for another reason, over the abstraction and mechanical selfcommentary of the blow game, escapist and bourgeois

also also this of course is otm and an understatement

but there's a lot of experimental work these days in independent games by women and queers that is equally interesting but that tends not to be discussed in terms of solitary genius

as some of it seems to tend to get lynched.

also also also following from this

puzzles that are of course designed to yield to you just so but which are also designed to mar as little as possible the impression of being in another place designed for another reason

i think pynchon is the wrong pomo talisman to invoke: he's still kicking and doesn't seem to care much about video games, but if nabokov had been 20 years younger some weird stuff might have happened imo

first thought from that quote: "he has no idea what that book is actually like does he."

second thought: "you wanted to make videogames about strange sexual fetishism and nazis?"

idk i think he's probably read it

his actual claim is basically 'i want to make games that are difficult fun, in the way that pynchon is difficult fun'

if you i. don't think pynchon is difficult or fun ii. think that the 'difficult fun' model is kind of a lame one, then, yeah, this is not a good way to sell your game (it also ... yeah, okay, it's a shitty quote)

for a long while people have been saying 'it can't really be a game about little maze puzzles. there must be something more to it.' i like the idea that there is not almost as much as the idea that there might be.

anyway while i'm probably not going to buy it all of the talk about it did make me start playing the humble-bundle copy of braid i've had (digitally) lying around forever

well he must've read it. GR is a cult bk although Pynchon probably has a higher profile because of the film adap of Inherent Vice

GR isn't a cult book. Its the standard example of a "difficult, postmodern" text for people that have never read it and discovered that its about bananas and dick jokes and latex and physics and octopi and also the terror of war and preciousness of human connection in all forms (and dope).

like does this pretentious 3d soduku meets myst game where you wander around an empty island drawing lines have a subplot where the least weird thing that happens is a sentient lightbulb is inserted up a man's rectum for his sexual pleasure, i don't think so

he doesn't really say he wants to make games like gravity's rainbow, he says he wants to make games "for people who play gravity's rainbow", by which, yes, he emptily means "smart people"

*read lol

at least that's how he comes across. still tho "theme pervades mechanics" is something i can understand wanting to shoot for as a game designer and mo/pomo lit is your model there.

Cult bks aren't recognised by a kind of literary establishment. Like the difference between how Ulysses is perceived vs FW.

Pynchon isn't even in this list: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-best-novels-written-in-english-the-full-list

Boring I know.

which 'literary establishment' is finnegans wake not recognised by??

my impression is that pynchon's stock is dropping for a buncha reasons (keeps churning out late-career not-as-good books, even his best work occasionally reveals itself as directed at the White Het Male Reader in kinda a gross way, 70s high-pomo trickery at the second or third aphelion of its orbit) but i wouldn't want to make a call on canon vs cult rn

er my point was that FW isn't recognised, like GR. Therefore they are both cult books. But Joyce is seens as 'important' because of the work up to and inclusing Ulysses.

if you're citing "difficult fun" obviously your go-to ought to be the slits.

i agree that blow is invoking gravity's rainbow for its talismanic value. i have always found it to be a particularly thorny talisman.

the musical equivalent is clearly "trout mask replica", which i discovered at approximately the same time as "gravity's rainbow" and which was just as inscrutable to me. (i'd class "eraserhead" as the film equivalent, though in this medium the talisman is much less universal.)

actually, in some respects trout mask replica was far more forbidding than gravity's rainbow, because i had no idea whatsoever what was supposed to be happening in it. "a screaming comes across the sky" is far more coherent than whatever the hell it is that happens in the first five seconds of "frownland". over the next couple years i listened to the trout mask replica maybe a few dozen times, and gradually came to understand what was happening on it, that it was, in fact, music.

i still haven't finished reading gravity's rainbow. i've come to the conclusion that i'm just not smart enough to follow it. every few years i give it another try, and somewhere around page 100 i realize that i have no idea whatsoever what happened on the last three pages. the mechanical functions of reading have continued but at some point my faculties of comprehension gave up. what parts of it i can understand are brilliant, but i suspect i will never be able to judge it as a whole.

GR is the second most researched book of 20th century, after Ulysses. I don't think Pynchon's stock has been dropping, his late career is less embarrassing than a lot of others, and he had a film made recently.

I remember Blow in that documentary about indie games, bemoaning that gamers were enjoying his work "for the wrong reasons". Ah, if we were all smart enough to really appreciate your genius, Jonathan.

frederik that's a great stat, where on earth is it from

i still haven't finished reading gravity's rainbow. i've come to the conclusion that i'm just not smart enough to follow it. every few years i give it another try, and somewhere around page 100 i realize that i have no idea whatsoever what happened on the last three pages.

You should read the first few passages around In the Zone. If you like the prose running with some of it is worth some of your time.

If your rep is going down the toilet in lit circles make a film

sorry I misread yr point thomp - er idk FW is really hated on isn't it? Its only in the convo at all because the same guy also happened to write Ulysses

I remember lolling at John Carey talking, being all nice about Ulysses and then when the convo switched to FW its like there was a power cut or something.

FW feels far less susceptible to mainstream academic criticism i think and hence the broader distaste for its "novelty" or whatever the complaints are

john carey had opinions about how ulysses was bad to further his career at some point: i guess he no longer finds them necessary

fw: idk, i mean, joyceans like it. it has held appeals for various avant-gardes, additionally. i think the number of people conversant with ulysses and against the wake is pretty small.

generally speaking, i think pynchon holds up better than a lot of his contemporaries.

re: pynchon's reputation. i think he falls into the category of white male writers like darger, joyce, or proust- destined to be talked about more than read. i'd argue this categorization is not even necessarily a modern one, but comes out of the lineage of writers like cervantes and fielding. if he is comparatively suffering these days- and i don't know that he is- it's that any expansion of his audience is going to have to come through the youth, because there's only a very limited subset of the population that can read his relatively impenetrable work. and the youth, to their credit, seem to be starting to come to the realization that there might be writers other than white males whose work is worth reading on its merits.

not sure why you'd put Cervantes or Fielding in there at all - writers of hugely popular novels in their day with respect to size of reading audience

arguments about penetrability in literary fiction feel irrelevant today tbh

the reading audience was a lot different back in their day.

conversation's moved on I realise, but cross-media comparisons are always really difficult, and I don't really trust them. I don't think braid-guy is being quite as facile as meaning just 'smart people' by referring to GR, but clearly referring to GR in bookland is going to be suggesting a more focused set of distinctions or a different sort of status to that of referring to it wrt games: people who are happy with non-linear, interrupted progress, and whose definition of 'fun' includes being challenged is probably the broad set of ideas at play here.

but yeah - dlh's 'theme pervades mechanics' point v s clover's nazis/sex: comparisons usually seem based on looks like (this thing has a lot of the same content as the thing to which it's being compared, nazis and sex, and maths and London presumably), feels like - (experience of playing is like the experience of reading or watching or whatever), and behaves like ('authorial' attempts to match a layer of innovation in the originating work with a meainingful level of innovation in the target work)

all of this feels a bit of a faff though, other than as a recommendation to let the experience of reading or watching something interesting, which does novel things with form or content or whatever, being an encouragement to do the same in your area. plus I'm not convinced these things map meaningfully from books to tv/films, let alone games.

no matter the interesting mechanics my experience of braid was, once I'd applied myself to achieve a certain degree of progress through it, one of inutile frustration and boredom (ie I was crap at it bcos stupid). in this respect the best comparison was that Calder edition of The Childermass I've got, which inadvertently replicates 30-odd pages of dense and clamorous theological-political polemic, which I read without realising it had been inadvertently repeated, and even when I began to suspect, I thought might be some beckettian literary game of hate with the reader and therefore I should experience it to get the full flavour. it wasn't. it was a printing error.

or 'material bug' or whatever.

my point wasn't just "looks like" but particularly "feels like" -- GR is weird and surprising and funny and outlandish and often cartoonish. blow's stuff is delicate and precocious. and that's also behaves like. GR is really not a _formally_ innovative book in any sense except for the zaniness of its plotting and cross-cutting (and perhaps the degree to which multiple themes are interwoven). Like if you want actual po-mo experimental literature there are much better exemplars. He has none of the concern with texts, the reader, textuality, that pervade the other stuff. None of those anxieties. There's fourth-wall breaking, sure, but in a casual offhand way that just sort of recognizes it as one of the grand tricks of the trade.

frederik that's a great stat, where on earth is it from

― carly rae jetson (thomp), 31. januar 2016 11:49 (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

From one of the monographs I used for my thesis, don't have it here to backtrack. Also, old factoid, might not be true still.

that Calder edition of The Childermass I've got, which inadvertently replicates 30-odd pages of dense and clamorous theological-political polemic, which I read without realising it had been inadvertently repeated, and even when I began to suspect, I thought might be some beckettian literary game of hate with the reader and therefore I should experience it to get the full flavour. it wasn't. it was a printing error.

please tell me it's not the old calder jupiter books edition from the sixties :-/
(though should probably give it a reread before attempting the two later parts)

it is. I'll dig it out and find chapter and verse. frankly it's not that much worth re-reading apart from the wonderful first few pages. monstre gai is excellent.

lol i actually started gravitys rainbow yesterday. loving it so far.

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.

― the late great, Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:01 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Clover is right that GR isn't really about WWII per se either. I always imagine it as a veiled Vietnam book, concerning P's sense of guilt over "working on" the Minuteman ICBM (used heavily in Vietnam) while working at Boeing (I think he edited the in-house newsletter or something). His girlfriend from the time said all the main characters were based on people in their circle (apologies for the excessively biographical reading!) and it does end in the present, after all. That same girlfriend said P often like to wear disguises and playact that he was a spy or something in postwar Germany.

If anyone's interested, there is a podcast called Pynchon in Public and they are about to begin discussing GR. I wish it was a little more academic, but it's vaguely interesting.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/searching-for-nazi-gold

GR isn't really about WWII per se either. I always imagine it as a veiled Vietnam book

it's a book about the imaginative & organizational proclivities practiced by europeans for centuries that could, at their zenith (so to speak), bring about something like wwii, and their persistence into the vietnam era, imo.

also lots of digging and burying things underground, some of which can now be found

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/germany-moves-to-atone-for-forgotten-genocide-in-namibia

Rukoro, the Herero chief, rejected what he called Germany’s “chequebook diplomacy” and bilateral dealings with the Namibian government. “Guess what: the Hereros and the Namas of Namibia will never … declare ceasefire with generations of German governments to come. Our war will continue,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/science/giant-squid-eyes-brain-lobes.html

As for why giant squids even need such big eyes, previous research has suggested that their eyesight is uniquely adapted to spotting faint clouds of bioluminescence that indicate a sperm whale — their main known predator — is approaching from a distance.

This new study supports that conclusion, Dr. Chiao said, by showing that the part of the giant squid’s optic lobe that processes visual information is indeed rich with neurons. It also shows that giant squids probably don’t use that information to perform the complex and dramatic appearance changes other cephalopods are famous for.

After all, when you live in near-total darkness, what you’re wearing likely doesn’t matter, Dr. Chiao said.

hey i've only got 100 pages left of this goddamn thing

imo they should really retitle it This Goddamn Thing

spoiler: on the final page it says "you've been punked!"

my favorite section in the book i think is franz pökler's vacations with maybe-ilse

spoiler: on the final page it says "you've been punked!"

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, May 1, 2018 1:44 PM (eleven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this would be a completely fair way for it to end so i kinda experienced a dual-lol there

I have fond memories of reading GR for the first (and only, but plan on revisiting) time like 5 summers ago.

Coincidentally I'm currently a few hundred pages into Mason & Dixon. It's fun!