new pynchon new pynchon new pynchon

Oh, I just got my hope up that a new was on the way :(

Another possible in-world overlap: Lew Basnight is described as The Fool in the Tarot conspiracy, and he seemingly has the ability to move between worlds. Tyrone Slothrop also becomes The Fool and vibrates his way out of this world.

man this thread makes me sad: I don't know whether I could imagine approaching that specific modality of enthusiasm ever again

xp

as i was reading i was often wondering if it was going to intersect more definitively with GR

(there's a throwaway bodine but i don't really count that)

thomp the film fired me up all over again :)

the film of IV i mean, there isn't an ATD film scheduled yet

was loving against the day last time i got halfway through it but then it disappeared; this was a couple years ago but just last week i ordered another copy actually.

honestly was relieved when this revive didn't mean a new one.

have the monk notes from which ATD's epigraph is taken on my wall.

i got halfway through it but then it disappeared

when the weird shift happens in ATD with the Balloon Boys section it is very disorienting, but it eventually gets back on (an alternate reality?) track. I am really looking forward to re-reading this.

Best Name Award goes to Bevis Moistleigh this time, speshly if Bevis is pronounced how I suspect

note. - the name bevis should be pronounced with a short e (the fact there is a richard jefferies ref in atd = awesomeness!)

i really do need to read this through again without the multi-year gap of my first go through.

yeah this book is like the greatest thing

I took dlh to mean his copy literally went missing, hence ordering a new one

this is probably my favourite Pynchon of the four I've read

it might be his best, which puts it somewhere at or near the literary pinnacle. maybe gr is still more mysterious and holistic or w/e but this is a thousand pages of dropped jaw

and no it shouldn't be filmed

gr = ten-hour anime
m&d = hbo series
atd = the point-and-click to end them all

I took dlh to mean his copy literally went missing, hence ordering a new one

yeah this. if it were GR i'd say it disintegrated; won't be sure until reread what the michelson-morley-metaphorical equivalent is.

displaced?

omg it happened again

Would totally play the shit out of a point-and-click Against The Day.

From the wiki:

According to Robert Bramkamp's docudrama about the V2 and Gravity's Rainbow, entitled Prüfstand VII, the BBC initiated a project to produce a film adaptation of Gravity's Rainbow between 1994 and 1997. Some unfinished footage is included in Bramkamp's film.[18] The Bramkamp movie includes other dramatized sequences from the novel as well, while the main focus is on Peenemünde and the V2.

Saw this, its ok, like lots of the footage, but its marred by a quirkyness that doesn't quite fit. However it was good to see an European take on GR

Someone should do a Pynchon inspired conspiracy/alt-history/anthology tv-show like Fargo called P.

I am in the middle of a second reading of GR (ten years since the last one) and one thought i keep having is that while it would be totally fun to see someone attempt to film it i just dont see how it wouldnt be a total disaster.

oh and the 10 year gap means that i am only slightly less lost than the first time, but i remember a unusually high number of set pieces and scenes, if in a disjointed fashion.

yeah kinda tantalizing xp cuz it lends itself to cinema better than yr average giant unfilmable novel -- frames of film as integral slices a key part of the image system; movie genre pastiches; musical sequences etc

laurie anderson says that she took his conditions for a GR musical adaptation (ukes only) as "a polite no" but why

I think a "free" -ish adaptation is the only way a film of GR might work.

Alex Ross Perry did do a very free version of it, though I haven't seen it. I haven't seen Inherent Vice either. And Pynchon is by far my favorite writer, I don't know what's wrong with me.

Inherent Vice is good but i feel like the distinctive qualities of Pynchon's voice only emerge intermittently.

gr = ten-hour anime

― imago, Sunday, August 14, 2016 3:48 AM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is exactly right: Studio Gainax or bust

ukes only = polite no
kazoos = yes do it

ows - the ten-hour anime of GR is one of the worst ideas ever and it pains me to see you subscribe to it, even if jokingly.

it's cute that someone's still hazing me in 2016

where would yous situate gravity's rainbow - in terms of difficulty - with reference to the rest of Pynchon's ooooeuvre? liked it but found it hard-going

have only read crying and the three epics but GR is comfortably the hardest

I think Gravity is by far the hardest. Pynchon is actually really careful to create red threads throughout his books, he almost never jumps into something completely new without warning you first, but some of the links in Gravity are very minor. Yes, it's stated that Slothrop will take part in some experiments with drugs, but it's still a shock when the book devolves into hallucinatory nonsense about the Kenosha Kid. The Pökler's are only introduced in a vision from a medium, before the book all of a sudden jumps back to early thirties Germany. GR really is more fragmented and 'harder', while Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are more straightforward. GR really rewards rereading as well.

Something like Infinite Jest is much more willfully fragmented than anything Pynchon has ever done.

found infinite jest an easy read, tho of course it is extremely to miss important plot points in ij because of the fragmented nature of the narrative

I agree IJ is an easier read, I'm just saying that GR is actually more fragmented. When I wrote my thesis on GR I went through the first big chunks of both books and mapped out connections between sections. And GR always makes sure to introduce the following section, while IJ does not. It's just easy to overlook because there is SO MUCH going on in GR all the time, while IJ will spend pages on a businessman watching television.

ows - the ten-hour anime of GR is one of the worst ideas ever and it pains me to see you subscribe to it, even if jokingly.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, September 7, 2016 4:58 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like any adaptation of GR (one of my favorite novels) that attempts to be faithful to its source is going to be a debacle, so I'd want it at least to be a colorful one. Really, though, my dream adaptation would be a very long Rivette film with the kind of tenuous relationship to Pynchon that Out 1 had to Balzac.

"Reef was always the reckless one," he recalled, "what folks call 'wild,' and Frank was the reasonable one, may've gone crazy now and then for a minute and a half, but I was never around to see it."

"And what about you, Kit?"

"Oh, I was just the baby."

"I think you were the religious one." Hard to tell just then if she was teasing.

^^^ ballsy

Really, though, my dream adaptation would be a very long Rivette film with the kind of tenuous relationship to Pynchon that Out 1 had to Balzac.

Yeah, I think an adaptation that can capture certain moods of the book and faithfully render certain scenes. Good shout on Rivette.

I bet PTA winds up doing a film of GR...I read an interview with him during the filming of Inherent Vice where he claimed he had never read GR. That was so preposterous it made me suspicious

enjoying ATD even more on my second round, dude sends me to wikipedia more than any other author

hurrah!

even the weird, confusing part where the Chums end up incognito as students on a campus made more sense this time

Huh was just wondering today if Bleeding Edge will be his last book, revive got my hopes up!

sorry! no dedicated thread for ATD.

"dude sends me to wikipedia more than any other author"

yeah, was always pleasantly surprised to find out so many of the weird ass historical events referenced in his books were not just totally invented things.

TP would be on my COVID worry list if he hadn't been self-isolating for the past 50 years amirite

he wasnt on mine but now he is, i tht this was a (deprecated) RIP notice >:(

No dedicated thread for ATD. I'm about 180 pages in and really like it, even love it at moments. The Tom Swiftian opening is excellent and I never knew I wanted to know about labor unrest in 1890s Colorado.

One of my favorite parts of any Pynchon is when he outdoes Lovecraft in narrating the arctic expedition and what is brought back. Wiki says the destruction here is a reference to 9/11 NY. Also that the terrorism of the anarchists seems likewise drawing a sympathetic, or at least conflicted, viewpoint re: the 9/11 terrorists. Makes one wonder why he had to write an explicit 9/11 book later.

dude sends me to wikipedia more than any other author

He was quite a challenge in the days before the Internet.

suspect it's the beast from 20000 fathoms that he's thinking of / superimposing on 9/11 in that section (tho monster-as-cargo is more king kong, and the style is lovecraftian yr right). breathtaking yeah. remember thinking it a real trick that ATD is the most conventionally "human" of his doorstops-- about a family like it's the corrections, "optimistic" even (despite its final image being a castle in the air)-- while also being the one that's switching to a different pastiche every fifty pages. (even mason+dixon more or less sticks to just one.) reassembles the 19c novel out of postwar scraps.

(also his best title imo: a physical description of the 90-degree angle that is the book's "rainbow"; a phrase for millenarian preparation or insurance; the title of a polemic.)

I have already gotten some indications of acronyms of organizations popping up (like in GR) and perhaps the Chums of Chance org being conspiratorial. Is Pynchon going to link the origins of modern capitalism in M&D to the robber barons in AtD to the military industrial complex of GR? I sure hope so.

lol keep reading

you haven't even started the damn thing yet

love ATD so much