so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

I think it is very hard also. It took me c. 2 years to read. Wasted years? Maybe.

It is queer the number of people who talk about stopping at the bananas.

i've never read any postmodern lit (except lot 49 before this) because i hate it in theory, it's not my fave and i'm certain this won't be my fave either but it is fun as a lark, even an exteremely extended one. plus many wonderful discoveries await if you have patience, like the bit about the dodoes...

sorry im typing like this, i don't usually i don't think but...lots of caffiene.

where i stopped last [this] night [morning]: (slothrop has just bumbed into an old female companion in the street and is going up to her landlady's)

Mrs. Quoad's is up three dark flights, with the dome of faraway St. Paul's out its kitchen window visible in the smoke of certain afternoons, and the lady herself tiny in a rose plush chair in the sitting-room by the wireless, listening to Primo Scala's Accordion Band. She looks healthy enough. On the table, though, is her crumpled chiffon handkerchief: feathered blots of blood in and out the convolutions like a floral pattern.

and where i picked up this morning [afternoon]:

"You were here when I had that horrid quotidian ague," she recalls Slothrop, "the day we brewed the wormwood tea," sure enough, the very taste now, rising through his shoe-soles, taking him along. They're reassembling . . . it must be outside his memory . . . cool clean interior, girl and woman, independent of his shorthand of stars . . . so many fading-faced girls, windy canalsides, bed-sitters, bus-stop good-bys, how can he be expected to remember? but this room has gone on carifying: part of whoever he was inside has kindly remained, stored quiescent these months outside his head, distributed throygh all the grainy shadows, the grease-hazy jars of herbs, candies, spices; all the Compton Mackenzie novels on the shelf, glassy ambrotypes of her late husband Austin night-dusted inside gilded frams up on the mantel where last time Michaelmas daisies greeted and razzled from a little Sevres vase she and Austin found together one Saturday long ago in a Wardour Street shop. . . .

well that's fantastic, isn't it? and it isn't why isn't it???

that passage above is followed by a literally LOL scene where slothrop is gorged by each with the most unspeakably vile candies known to man. yeah this book is pretty genius and i am SO sorry about all the typos there...nevermind i guess but it is a typically great paragraph, trust me.

With almost any other writer there is, I can suppress this kind of idiotic neurotic questioning, but Tommy P gets me fired up every time.

i'm sorry i'm way too fucked up to discuss this right now but have you ever read any ts eliot? i promise to talk more later.

Post-modern lit in general yes is obnoxious but do not discount Donald Barthelme or early John Barth (through Chimera) if you are enjoying Gravity's Rainbow this much.

There's one other thing I just remembered about the style/plot split. The National Book Award selection committee chose Gravity's Rainbow under some kind of protest about its supposed unreadability. Pynchon sent a clown to accept the award.

That and the banana nausea thing early on were the two bits I enjoyed.

I think it may be slightly unhelpful to talk about GR as PoMo lit. I guess I would call it post-Beat, post-hippy, post-'permissive-age' / The 1960s / whatever US Romantic espionage fiction. But possibly for some that means PoMo.

The scene with Slothrop and the English girl I found offensive, or at least annoying. I have said often before, and seem to be saying again: the book is oversexed, sexually obsessed, crammed with promiscuity and rampant (male) infidelity, to an extent that to me was odious.

i haven't read this, at all, over the past three days. but tonight i will probably read some.

esotericness wasn't what got me, rather the bloated boringness. my eyes glazed over at the banana roll-call, and i skipped and skimmed around for several years running.

I don't know what 'hazmat' means.

(Haz - Hazardous Mat - Materials)

ugh. i hated catch 22. i think i have a problem with the late-modernist masculine canon.

Got much less bogged down the second time around - the first time there was definitely too much to take in all at once.

I've read Vineland twice too, and considering rereading M&D pretty soon - again, the sheer density means I probably missed a lot of the nuances first time around.

When I said 'I don't really agree', that meant, largely: 'you like the book and I don't'. I don't think I had very specific points in mind. But I will look and think, about that.

http://www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html

The long Gerald Howard piece is pretty interesting.

I loved all of the little anecdotes sprinkled throughout, like the alliterative restaurant dishes (pubic parfait and whatnot), Benny the Bulb, the boat that magically missed the torpedos, Roger Mexico pissing all over the boardroom and then crawling out under the table, etc. I like how Pynchon maintains a jovial/fantastical feel through most of the book, I don't think it'd be near as great if he was writing a realistic narrative. And has there ever been a more musical book? There was a song every ten pages it seemed

I have to say though that the pedophilia, poop-eating, toilet-diving, etc. made me squirm while I read it and grew somewhat tiresome by the end. I'll probably pick up the commentary book at some point and re-read GR with it, but before I read any more Pynchon, I need a few years off. Phew!

j., though there are places that made me laugh i think of it as closer to, i dunno, reading comic books; most of the gags aim for amusement or wonder, instead of laffs.

the chase scene in the mountain, btw, is where pynchon totally excels at this in GR. by Vineland, it's increasingly how he's doing EVERYTHING.

i like it that pynchon sort of forces me into a sense-driven reading mode precisely b/c it cuts across how i (& probably lots of foax) learned to "appreciate" literature in school.

Wow that's embarassing. I think I've always spelled it like that too. *hangs head in shame*

(compare the moments of terror, fear, etc., in gr to just the set-pieces in v - which leads me to wonder what a comparable list of them might be for gr.)

as per leslie fiedler there is little difference, generically, between sex porn and horror-porn, which is why in particular i was moved to wonder where the horror-porn is in gr (it is clearly locatable in v).

i don't know if that would even satisfy me, though, as far as my question above goes, since that would make for an asymmetry between the horrific and the sex-porn in 'gr', given that the latter is easily localizable to particular encounters, some fantasies.

oboy

i'm halfway through and i'm pretty sure > halfway out of my depth. but it's doing a good job of expanding my imagination, empathy, understanding of how life exists on earth, etc. flattening of time and space, the quintuple zero, mapping of coordinates (in the context of categorized and apposite human destruction) are all combined like a very elaborate and troubled essay of what's going on at the center of human evolution since like the discovery of the printing press. and all those s/m scenes! i really have to ask -- do you people think it's an accurate rep. of berlin sex life? hottt and weirdddddddd. i think he's getting at something else under the surface of that, you know? beyond decadence...

Writing about Oakley Hall the band, I came across Pynchon's original review of the novelist Oakley Hall's Warlock (think he wrote more later), on this good Pynchon archive (which has lots more besides his essays, that's just where I came in)
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_gift.html

okay, I just finished this...it took me a solid year. I kept having to stop and take breathers, but it was mind-blowing. I feel I must read it again, as I'm sure I've missed a ton of subtext

I'm exactly at that point, too, Morley.

"the smoke of certain afternoons" is such an odd thing to find qualms with.

can one find qualms or just have them?

"October 25: Rocketmen and Wastelands, an essay by Marshall Shord - Shord is a recent graduate of Washington College, Maryland, who won the nation’s largest undergraduate literary prize, the Sophie Kerr Prize, in large part thanks to his 100-page critical thesis on the first three novels of Thomas Pynchon. Shord was awarded a check for almost $56,000 for his scholarly excellence and last we heard he’s been traveling the world. The Modern Word is proud to share the Pynchon paper worth a BMW, which could be characterized as one reader’s personal dialogue with Pynchon’s first three novels."

http://themodernword.com/pynchon/shord.pdf

^thanks for this...v. good reading on a slow day at work.

pers'n'ly i am for thinking it is awful

who would make the best film adaptation of gravity's rainbow? i think the coen bros would do the best at casting the array of characters.

i read this book 15 yrs ago in fits & starts over six months mostly "under the influence" so it passed by in a semi-comprehensible haze. what stuck was the names, i almost made "geli tripping" my first ILM tag.

ken's takes on the science/literary split feel absolutely OTM to me.

I read the first ten pages the other day! If I could only quit it with the Internet for a week or two I'd be able to get through the rest. Already I can sense it's gonna be pretty sick.

if you read gravity's rainbow in two weeks i doubt you are really reading it

i like the coen brothers doing this, but, dumb question, wouldn't it have to be a miniseries, not a movie?

if you think about the timeline and actual narrative in gravity's rainbow, i think it would fit into a 2 hour (or maybe a little more) film

Have you heard Saunders' Issac Babel reading on the New Yorker podcast?

no wai cutty -- slothrup would barely be parachuting within the first two hours, and that's omitting the musical numbers.

i do not think coens are a great match, because of their tendency to flatten the whole range of humor into one dry sadistically funny band, and i would submit alex cox as a better director.

i don't think you could do it justice in 2 hours! you'd have to leave too much out and all of the plot digressions are what make the book what it is.

also i think the coen brothers would make it too hokey. i don't really think gr could be made into a worthwhile film, actually.

i would say maybe terry gilliam over the coen bros tho

howz about coens for the dance numbers, someone else for the rest.

Have you heard Saunders' Issac Babel reading on the New Yorker podcast?

wrong thread?

Ha, yes. That was for "Book Remakes".

just found a link to it, i will check it out!

and that's omitting the musical numbers.

the musical number in the white visitation room with all the lab workers in a maze, damn that would be so awesome.

I think this would have to be an animated film to work properly.

Also Louis, I would recommend reading it as quickly as possible and not trying to follow it too closely, just enjoy the language and humour, and then re-reading it extensively at your leisure.

the coens could totally do JR by Gaddis--a bunch of people talking over each other for 2+ hours

resurrect altman

lol singing and dancing octopus

question is who plays rocketman?

bill pullman in a surprise cameo

Well already I'm very pleased with the nonchalant approach to the absurd evident in Pynchon's writing-style. I've heard it scales astonishing heights of intense and comic intricacy. Sounds fab. Will get on the case as soon as I get home tomorrow.

I think Roberto Rodriguez would do a fab job, maybe with particularly surreal sections either by Pixar or rotoscope-style (or both!)

pynchon really needs an action director for the most part, and a straight-up genre director in general.

Is this book anything like 'O Lucky Man'?

I have to say the X-Treme enthusiasm for this over the entire history of ILX has made me not want to read it, ever.

Not being funny, but y'know O Lucky Man is a re-working of Candide, right? GR does have elements of them in it, come to think of it. I understand what you mean about being off-put, but I think it's beautiful and like most big beautiful books best approached as a quilty wonderland to get lost in rather than as a code to break or a mountain to climb.

richard kelly

sorry, coen brothers suck. who could be this funny and amazing? no one. leave it as a fucking book for once.

Noodle Vague OTM re "quilty wonderland"

yes! why some things should never be film adapted unless they are something completely different

Could work as an ongoing prime time soap opera style serial though, 30 mins a week in perpetuity. And I still think an animated version might work.

totally, anything serial or genre. animated would be amazing but crazy. graphic novel?

There is some German film based on (bits of) GR. It also features Robert Forster out of the Go Betweens! Trailer is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ046SJpl8E

"as per leslie fiedler there is little difference, generically, between sex porn and horror-porn"

huh well even for leslie fiedler that's cracky

-

i haven't reread this book in like almost two years! this makes me sad.

malcolm mcdowell would be the best of all possible slothrups

leave it as a fucking book for once.

generally, i agree with this sentiment. but i think the narrative of GR is one of the most brilliant and beautifully crafted things i have ever read. i would love to see it in visual form. preferably while pynchon is still alive and is willing to work on it. most likely that will never happen.

there's always the opera, which he technically agreed to

coogan?

x post

He only agreed for the opera if it was entirely scored for kazoo

Banjo, I think.

It is now almost exactly 5 years since I finished this book. I hope it has improved a bit in that time.

Or maybe you have?

I thought it was ukulele; I wonder if the whole story is actually apocryphal.

I am quite impressed that the pinefox finished this book, considering his distaste for it.

more & more I think certain aspects of its reputation are unearned, but also unaimed for � aspects which help it maintain a kind of cachet without helping readers or potential readers read it better, or read anything else

I tend to change my mind twice about whether any novel of P.'s is any good at least twice during the course of a reading. I have decided to reread Against The Day next, but only if I see the American edition somewhere.

Though uke and kazoo are both plausible, according to LA herself it was banjo:

http://www.transmitmedia.com/svr/vault/anderson/ander_transcript.html

Well already I'm very pleased with the nonchalant approach to the absurd evident in Pynchon's writing-style. I've heard it scales astonishing heights of intense and comic intricacy. Sounds fab. Will get on the case as soon as I get home tomorrow.

-- Just got offed, Wednesday, 13 August 2008 17:33 (2 weeks ago) Link

robert downey jr gains 40 pounds and plays slothrop, please

took me like five months but i finally finished it

sounds like it was a chore for you

shit i need to do this

it would probably be in my top 10 favorite books.

congrats max, i couldn't even get all the way through the crying of lot 49 ;_;

lol xp

i read the first 10 pages last summer and they were great...but then i just stopped...i've not been in the habit of reading novels since graduating, and now i actually don't have the time to even if the urge struck

but this in every way sounds like the kind of thing i'd go nuts for

crying of lot 49 is nowhere near as good as GR or M&D or IV imho

I have as yet to finish M&D. I'm not sure why it felt like such a struggle - maybe it was the historical period and subjects it tackled.

no, it wasnt a chore, but the last 150 pages were kind of tough going for me

i was proud of myself for being able to follow what was happening, more or less

<3 V & GR, sorta underwhelmed by crying of lot 49, loathed M&D to the point of never wanting to read any new pynchon ever

erm, even if the urge *strikes*, that should be. anyway after i finish my MA i swear to every mod on ilx that i will read this mfing novel next summer

we will have a parade in your honor, complete with animated penguin gifs

octopus master of ceremonies

anyway max dude you read the best authors, plz be my pending lit guru, i want you to check on my pynchon and nabokov intake come this time next year with all the assiduity of a coroner, que and velko and sarahel can play too

tbh all i really read is "postmodern fiction" and scandinavian crime novels

and hp lovecraft

i'm trying to remember the last novel i read - i think it was The Financier by Theodore Dreisser. It wasn't all that great, but I did learn about puts, calls, short selling, and various other stock market products, that apparently existed in some form even back then.

crying of lot 49 is nowhere near as good as GR or M&D or IV imho

Interesting. I've read L49 and I am observing IV cautiously from afar. Just read an ambiguous review of it (Bookforum) that had to defend its unsatisfactory aspects as really intentional and the whole point.

is richard powers the kinder gentler pynchon? is he a better writer than pynchon?

did you read james wood's review of richard powers?? i think he would disagree w/ you. it was pretty brutal

still haven't read richard powers. and i've had a copy of 'time of our singing' hanging around since, like, 2003.

He's kindler and gentler, but that's about it.

I don't see much similarity at all between Powers and Pynchon other than perhaps that both write long, ambitious novels. Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable - Pynchon is much the opposite with his wild and woolly prose, love of bad puns, shaggy-dog tangents, and general apathy towards the constraints of realism.

what was tough going about the last 150 pages for you? it's tough going for slothrop too, i guess :/

"I don't see much similarity at all between Powers and Pynchon"

both total braniacs that science majors love who write dense "difficult" books and the occasional 250 page "entertainment".

plus, i can never finish books by either one of them.

"Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable"

you should try operation wandering soul. not any of these things. not that i finished it...

first pages of operation wandering soul here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Operation-Wandering-Soul/Richard-Powers/e/9780060976118#EXC

That review by James Wood stopped me cold.

that's your loss. powers is pretty good, sometimes great.

what do you recc i start with for powers?

That James Wood takedown of Powers is pretty good, but in fairness somebody should link to the recent takedown of Wood.

i think most powers fans would say read galatea 2.2 or the gold bug variations. and i WILL finish operation wandering soul someday. i didn't stop reading it cuz i didn't like it. i forget what happened there...

gain kinda reminded me of steven millhauser a little bit.

"Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable"

you should try operation wandering soul. not any of these things. not that i finished it...

The only Powers I've read is The Echo-Maker, so maybe I'm generalizing too much based on that. I can see how that excerpt of "Operation Wandering Soul" might put one in mind of Pynchon. There's still something subtly different about it, but it's hard to put one's finger on it though. Powers marshals all his literary tricks, scientific knowledge, and dense allusions to give the reader what boils down to a rather literal description of the prosaic act of driving in traffic. At bottom, he's still trying to faithfully describe realistic everyday experience. Whereas I think Pynchon would be more likely to marshal his literary firepower to describe a scene that's patently (and perhaps sophomorically) unrealistic.

ok so this is on my table at home.

Just read the first 20 pages of this in Toronto's Distillery District this weekend. I have six weeks until law school and might try to finish it before classes start.

(My initial goal of Ulysses or Infinite Jest fell by the wayside)

get through the first 200 pages and you're bound to finish it.

Strange to say, I bought a used paperback copy of GR for $1 a few months back, and last night I cracked it open and started it. It was just a taste, after I finished the DFW-interview book by David Lipsky and had a few moments to scrounge around for my next book. Seems ok enough to keep going on it tonight.

am reading this right now (3rd attempt + it seems like this time i'm gonna make it)

i think the threshold is the octopus. once you get there you need to finish.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

this book...

i dunno. the incesty stuff in the middle knocked me out of the book on my first two readthroughs

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow

re: the incest

that was never his daughter btw

Started it yesterday. wish me luck!

I also bought the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I need a good long holiday by the pool.

Weirdly, I also managed to get my hands on The Black Dossier (LOXG) by Alan Moore for light relief, and I'm finding this more difficult than Pynchon so far, then again I'm only a few pages in. Some dudes are gonna get bombed.

The only other long book I've read is Lanark and it's nowhere near as big as this. It took a matter of months - I'm a very slow reader on the whole as I like to re-read sentences and paragraphs and am overtly fussy about skipping words let alone sentences.

I also bought the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I need a good long holiday by the pool.

Surprisingly easy reading for such a big, political book. I really enjoyed it.

http://thomaspynchonfakebook.org/

!

something like my sixth crack at this and, lo this decade gone by, I'm at page 117 and have actually made sense of everything that's happened. I think what stumped me in the past was failing to appreciate that, despite the high blown style, GR is one long fart joke.

I got to ~650 before it pooped out. I just couldn't follow any more, and I got tired of making (increasingly) cobwebbed relational charts to keep track of characters.

keeping track of the characters is really besides the point.

ha i hate the bawdy american college student reptile brain that slithers beneath the sublime geometries

i like mason and dixon a lot, and crying is near perfect as it goes

whoa. dudes, dudes, I just realized.... what if.. we're the punchline?

this is no longer on my table at home, it sits a foot above my head as i sleep, brooding and judging me for failing to tackle it.

I need to take a reading holiday.

rereading Mason & Dixon right now, even more fun the 2nd time through.

Gravity's Rainbow is overrated imo, whereas Crying... and Against The Day are perfection incarnate. Vineland is fun too. I dunno why GR is the canon book when it is a real slog at times.

Never understood those with love for col49. I mean if you're just reading for the texture of the prose, sure. GR has so many amazing parts to it that sort of come and go and wash over you in ways that you can only really get from a large work. I mean I ended up sort of living with it and around for a period more that "reading" it, I think. Which isn't to say I didn't read it (more than once). But just that I stopped expecting it to hang together as a novel pretty quickly, and accepted it more as a structure, like a sculpture or whatever, that you can approach from different directions and see in different configurations.

I like ATD a bunch, but can't imagine calling it "perfection incarnate." Some of the long sections in europe in the latter third of the book lost me way more than GR ever did, and maybe its just because I read it at a different age, but the characters didn't stick with me in the same way, and there are images I remember, but mainly none as haunting as the best from GR or M&D. The one exception being the school essay near the end.

But yeah, GR leaves me reeling more than any other pynchon novel. page-by-page, vineland and inherent vice are maybe as inventive in places, but neither is as thematically ambitious as a whole.

GR also very deliberately teases you, sometimes explicitly ("You will want cause and effect. All right.") with the prospect of pulling together meaning from what's going on, but to a large degree you end up knowing as much (or as little) as the characters themselves, who can only sort of limn a very few contours of whatever complex of conspiracies is operating to send them pinballing around the zone. So it's confusing, but also immersive and revelatory -- cinematic. Vineland maybe has a similar effect at times, but his other works are are maybe less ambitious in this regard.

Which isn't to say the other books are less good, or inferior by some standard. It's just to say that GR is amazing in a very unique way, and I don't know if I'd even want more books doing that exact thing again.

the last time i tried to read 'GR' (for like the sixth time in my life, jesus) i did actually find it funny! it does help to read slowly and try to visualize every single thing happening.

'lot 49' does have a v. different tone and style than anything else by pynchon, IMO -- part of why i like it so much is that oedipa maas is such a believable person. stranded in a universe of terrifying caricatured nightmare-humans. she reminds me a bit of carroll's alice.

GR and V have been my favorites of his--for some reason I have yet to get through M&D. I've tried several times to return to it, and each time I get stuck somewhere and put it down.

got 'inherent vice' out from the library so im going to read that soon. is it any good? 'COL49' had some great writing but overall i liked it but didnt love it. 1st half of 'mason & dixon' is great fun and the writing is superb but by the time they get to america it started to bore me. both books are due another bash though.

I never finished Vineland or V, but I'd rank

AtD; GR; M&D > IV, Vineland, V? > CoL49, everything else

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tXmfhKeHM5k/T6iBb5McNnI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/mwQZeC0Q1fQ/s1600/pete+campbell+CoL49.png

Against The Day really drags in the Balkan section, but then again it's a bit of a problem with all the long Pynchon novels, which tend to have a load of awesome stuff in the first half and then an amazing close but feel a bit draggy when you're 2/3rds of the way through. I really didn't need to read more about Major Marvy or Captain Zhang and his Jesuits by that point.

oh i loved the jesuits thing in m&d!

i don't even remember a jesuits thing in m&d and i'm pretty sure i read it twice

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.

i don't even remember a jesuits thing in m&d and i'm pretty sure i read it twice

― thomp, Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

! the sino-jesuit conspiracy and the 'ghastly fop' story-w/in-a-story/subplot

it's not the themes that i'm contrasting -- it's the way the books are structured both on a macro-scale and from scene to scene. GR was basically the book that taught me how to read books as something other than a linear narrative with some ornamental pleasures (descriptions, gags, set pieces) dangling off. CoL49 is a book that doesn't need to be read in other than that way.

i remember the ghastly fop & pynchon cheating at the end of it, but still ... hm. i guess i have to read it again

i think lot 49 does a really good job at doing a bunch of pynchon things in short and organised form, but that means missing out the other half of the things that you'd file under pynchon. but if you don't like encyclopedic novels / 'anatomies' / shaggydog sprawl it'd make sense to like that more than the others.

that col49 gets into but in my mind it's kind of portrait of the artist / ulysses type of thing.

funny that 'lot 49' doesn't appeal as much to hardcore pynchonites -- i feel like i've heard similar disdain toward 'portrait' and even 'dubliners' from ppl who really really love 'ulysses.'

ok clover i get what you're saying, and i hope you get that's what i'm getting at w my analogy

ulysses obv structured in a different way although it does have a similar thing going on in terms of how it uses space (thinking about how the characters wandering in ulysses take on particular shapes vs how the narrative forms a parabolic arc in gravitys rainbow)

i think lot 49 does a really good job at doing a bunch of pynchon things in short and organised form

This is key to what I like about it, such a succinct & distilled version of his sprawling paranoia.

And I love the Balkan part at the end of AtD! Great descriptions of weather and topography as the bedraggled love triangle blunders toward escape from Babylon.

there's a classic reading of GR that argues it's pretty much structured in response to ulysses, in terms of a very rigid underlying structure w/r/t time, thematic balances, etc. in this reading, the narrative doesn't form an arc so much as the rocket mandala. in fact, i get how the novel is bracketed by the arc of a rocket in some sense, but i've never seen the actual structure as an arc.

I should also say that reading pynchon for themes misses the point, I think, and his increasing maturity as a writer has been marked in part by his gradual abandonment of the idea that a novel needs to be "about" something, or some things. in that sense yes, CoL49 is the most explicitly "thematic" of his books, but that's what I think it's weakness is. To the extent that GR mines similar material, it's hard to say that it's a theme so much as a setting, or an ambiance.

oh come on, everything has a theme

i think the parabolic arc structure is more apparent in the "ascending" and "descending" parts and not so much in the middle, but anyway how interesting is a parabolic arc (not very)

i did have a very beautiful looking book of essays on GR from the 70s which i never read and tossed, i think it had an essay on it

this one

well that's not true, i read the first article and then tossed it, but the first one was good, can't remember what it was about though ...

I think it would be a pretty narrow reading of GR to say it was "about" paranoia or a particular conspiracy or even the helplessness of in any meaningful sense. I guess you could say that there are a lot of "themes" running through pynchon's later books, but they're more like motifs in my mind, or really ideas and concerns, or moods. I don't think it's bad that you can't say precisely what they're "about", and i generally think the idea that novels have to be "about" something is sort of pernicious.

I'm really loving how visual/cinematic the book is, all the flights he goes on read like stage direction or something

the distinction between themes vs motifs is a little over my head tbh

I think it would be a pretty narrow reading of GR to say it was "about" paranoia or a particular conspiracy or even the helplessness of in any meaningful sense. I guess you could say that there are a lot of "themes" running through pynchon's later books, but they're more like motifs in my mind, or really ideas and concerns, or moods. I don't think it's bad that you can't say precisely what they're "about", and i generally think the idea that novels have to be "about" something is sort of pernicious.

― s.clover, Thursday, May 10, 2012 11:14 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the distinction between themes vs motifs is a little over my head tbh

― the late great, Friday, May 11, 2012 12:23 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This might be too obvious, but if you're reading Pynchon/GR as standard metafiction then the distinction is a little clearer. Typically, a book's motifs, or reoccurring symbols or structures, are what inform/elucidate the book's themes, and those themes are kind of the End Point / What the Book Is About. If you're coming from a metafictional angle, then those themes are no longer the End Point, but just another reoccurring motif that informs a larger metanarrative.

It might also be tough to wrap one's head around since GR just has so many interweaving elements and so many dark corners that it's tough to ever feel like you have a toehold. Shit is just dense, fun, complicated, and rewarding inasmuch as you feel like penetrating. Basically, if you're a reader whose reading pleasure rests in feeling like you've confidently figured out a book's themes, GR will either severely disappoint or change the way you read/think about texts.

ok sure i know my list of literary devices from 9th grade honors english and i know a motif is a way of talking about repeated use of devices (imagery for example) that can establish a theme

i don't really see the distinction in practical terms though or what clover's getting at when he says "oh that's just a motif but not a theme"

i wouldn't say my pleasure in reading gravitas rainbow rests in figuring out the themes either - personally i love the startling imagery and the way he uses voices and the pseudoscientific digressions he gets in to

and i realize the themes are more complex (and there are many more of them) than in, say, "the old man and the sea"

but i do think that it's possible to suss out a few of the things pynchon wants to say about the anxieties of living in the postwar military industrial complex driven world and how they are similar or different or emergent in the anxieties of the war and prewar and how different people deal with those anxieties

fuk u if u disagree

the late great do you hate being talked down to more than anything?

yes

i thought my response was pretty mellow though, this time

hee hee "gravitas rainbow"

but i do think that it's possible to suss out a few of the things pynchon wants to say about the anxieties of living in the postwar military industrial complex driven world and how they are similar or different or emergent in the anxieties of the war and prewar and how different people deal with those anxieties

See, this is where I disagree. I mean the setting of GR is one time period, and the concerns of GR, the society it "lives in" (and that pynchon lived in writing it) is of another time period, but first off for a deeply historically researched novel, with the exception of some of the interesting bits drawn from research (herero in particular) (and then of course it's difficult to tell the fiction from the nonfiction) I don't think it has anything to say about the WWII time period at all, or the people in it. And I don't think it has anything to say about living in a "postwar military industrial complex driven world," or for that matter, about anxieties of anyone! On the one hand, it's more concerned with characters making choices in a certain set of trying contexts, and how it feels to live with these choices. And on the other, it's a complex network of symbols and relationships (like, literally symbols -- logos, parabolas, mandalas, tarot cards, graffiti, visions, other gnostic elements) that shift in and out of focus and configuration to create the underlying movement of the novel, which i see basically as an emotional one. I mean, it's like if you ask me what a Bartok Concerto is "about". I can tell you what it *does*, maybe, sort of, and the context it exists in of other work, but I can't tell you what it *means*. Or I can't do so in a way that isn't nearly entirely just what it means to me.

btw my use of theme vs. motif isn't drawn from any particular notions of how they're used in a literary setting, but more how we might use them in talking about a symphony.

“Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”

let's agree to disagree then - still not following your argument entirely, or maybe i get but dont agree. i get yr point about hermeneutics but it seems like a very hard-line stance. surely you would say the ring cycle is about something?

we both agree GR is one for the ages, that's the important part

xposts, totally didn't mean to sound like I was talking down to you, was all meant in good faith, etc., sry :/

GR just hits me on an epistemological level, and maybe that's why clover's themes-as-motifs instantly makes a lot of sense to me-- normally motifs serve the themes, and in GR's case, it seems like the themes are themselves motifs serving something larger and more to the heart of wtf narrative/storytelling does at its basic level. Just seems like the book isn't built the way it's built in order to say something about post-war anxiety is all. So I guess fuck me I disagree :(

heh i was just defending my right to dissent

Its not that I feel vehemently "you are wrong" so much as i just love getting to talk and think about pynchon. also i've put so much into and gotten so much out of GR that there's no reading of it (including my own) that I'm not going to find reasons to say "no, that's missing the point".

anyway after i finish my MA i swear to every mod on ilx that i will read this mfing novel next summer

― kell surprise (country matters), Sunday, 4 October 2009 20:42 (3 years ago)

So it happened last night then, and how's this for a little bit o' Country Matters Hyperbole - this is the greatest artistic achievement of the twentieth century, as it stands, course there's Vlad and Jimmy J lurking in the sideroom...

wtf. Once a week and it's not about barca being stymied.

took you a little while to finish that MA did it

The degree of Master of Arts is awarded to BAs and BFAs seven years after matriculation, without further examination, upon the payment of a nominal fee.

bwahaha

i am so over thomas pynchon. i feel quite sad when i remember how much more of a thing thomas pynchon used to be for me. i won't lie, this is when my friends who still take drugs start talking about how much of a thing thomas pynchon is and must always be for everyone in perpetuity.

I never really got over him. I reread about half of Mason & Dixon earlier this year and was rapt. Rapt. For all his faults (which have become more obvious as I've grown up), there's no living novelist I'd rather read.

death of the author changes everything

yeah i've reread half of mason & dixon a couple times, is the thing

so over thomas pynchon

get out

The first novel I've read that has made me burst into tears for about an hour afterwards, crying for Slothrop's beautiful disintegration, for the heroic Counterforce that is the whole damn novel, for the scattered and headlong resolutions of those astonishing, damaged characters, all resolved truth by the Rocket's catharsis, for the dreams and the visions, thegenuinely Gnostic harnessing of High Math as religious conduit, for us all, and our comedy in the face of oppression...this would make for the greatest movie of course but only really if done as a ten-hour anime...fuck, this was so much of what is real to me

i kind of want to see it made in the style of 'inglorius basterds'

i mean, whatever. we all read anthony powell down here kid

damn, once a week, that is the most compelling 'reaction' to pynchon i've ever heard. maybe it is time to force myself to read all of this damn book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NBPpM--pY

once a week is ample still otm

:)

Had I but world enough and time
I still wouldn't make it to the end of this book

this would make for the greatest movie of course but only really if done as a ten-hour anime

oh dearie me..

Couple of days ago was @ nu-Foyles - looking for a new book (which they didn't have). There was a guy looking over which Pynchon to buy first. He had a good look at GR but went for Lot 49 instead. I felt the urge to shake him out of it, but you know..

how are you finding nu-foyles xyzzzz__? haven't been in yet. but went in to the old one for the first time since I worked there in the late '90s before it moved and felt it still had the best range and depth of any bookshop in London. hoping move hasn't involved a "rationalisation".

Fizzles its really good - actually been to the coffee shop a couple of times just to read. I think the shop is just as strong in terms of depth as the old one if not more so.

Compare to Waterstones CX where the fiction section is def slimmed down.

waterstones near the university is the only great waterstones in town now, imo

Gower st has an ok 2nd hand section. Reminds me I should go there in August to have a look.

love Gower st – the academic remainders make it for me.

tbh I think the Piccadilly branch is a great browsing bookshop – some really good tables, like the little by-publisher sections in fiction (if they're still there), so that all the NYRB or Dalkey or w/e is together. It's a bit lifestyley and Foyles has better stock for most of the things I care about but it's much improved, nice inviting version of a giant bookshop.

Yeah, had forgotten about the academic remainders, possibly deliberately, as the last couple of times I've been have made me frightened at what I might do when I go back. different thread really.

Gravity's Rainbow has the heft of being The Great Pynchon novel to recommend it as a first read for toe-dippers, but M&D would be my choice for ease of enjoyment.

At this stage I'd have Against The Day only a tiny, tiny smidgen behind GR and miles ahead of anything else I've read (so take this with a pynch of salt). I think it'd make a fantastic introduction, length notwithstanding. Perhaps the way to go would be to read in chronological order of setting :D

this thread is best when people discuss bookshops, not Gravity's Rainbow.

have started to notice that everywhere I get laid, a bookshop closes

the book depository

Really enjoyed this review of GR by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Also there is a talk. C4 journo Paul Mason is a fan!

oh i'm there

rosenbaum review is brilliant. read it a while ago. discovering that my favourite movie writer was a massive pynchon fan basically made my day

Mason's own novel, Rare Earth, is quite enjoyable in a sub-Pynchon way. The Pinefox and myself were talking about going to the Mason event - impromptu ILB FAP?

Looks quite good, revive the thread nearer the time...hopefully I'll be able to attend.

I think I will go.

couldn't find my copy and was thinking about rereading so bought my third copy in 10 years, a $2 used paperback from 1974, and lol @ its flimsy spine being totally pristine: not once in forty years has this book been read

i feel silly when i think about how many times i've started and abandoned this book. probably at least 10. then again i had a similar experience with moby-dick and when i finally did buckle down and read it it became my favorite book in the world for a couple years.

imo you're better off reading ATD or M&D or Vineland

ATD is p much just as good, M&D great but slightly less great, Vineland IDK, need to read

I'm going to that Paul Mason thing, ticket confirmed. Expect to see London ILX there in force

I've attempted to listen to this on audiobook for the sake of speed. Not sure if I'm taking any of it in though.

I gotta say, Paul Morley on Nabokov looks way more like the keeper there

Never really got into this guy, as noted upthread, but am in a contrary mood so maybe it's time to give him another try.

I think Vineland is an entry point if you like something more grounded (bit of a political novel, written (one assumes) around the Reagan years). Also mid-length to the bulky novels. This was a good piece on it:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/31/thomas-pynchon-vineland-rereading

Thanks. Either that or Inherent Vice, which that article describes as a prequel of sorts.

Well, it takes place in California as well, and deals with post-hippes. But in that case, Crying of Lot 49 is really the start of a 'California-trilogy' of sorts.

update: the front cover came off around page 150

then again i had a similar experience with moby-dick and when i finally did buckle down and read it it became my favorite book in the world for a couple years.

slothrop's disintegration always reminds me of ishmael's weird fade into invisible omniscience, altho it's not as formally adventurous tbh (and ishmael finds himself again on the other side, to tell the tale)

(, escaped alone to tell thee), rather, idk what children's-illustrated-classics version i was remembering there

http://quarterlyconversation.com/now-playing-at-pynchon-cinemas-whats-going-on-in-pynchons-three-california-novels

^this is is another good piece I came across yesterday - certainly reading GR (and so much Pynchon) as the channel hopper that it is (and now things are evem more like that) is somewhat useful. Spends a lot of time on it, even though it isn't strictly a California novel.

talk was good fun. meeting fizzles, pinefox, stevie tunn was gr8. so so drunk now after a party and on a night bus. anathema on headphones. sudden sense of ending. maybe join in the riotous conversation around me? pynchon finds salvation in chaos maybe

pretentious over rated bloody old rubbish!

Paul Mason was great: so impressive always
Anne Enright I thought thought it was more about her than it was
I still hate GR but impressed by PM's ability to summarize it

Impressed by Imago (?!)'s account of his creative teaching methods at his college.
Thanks for the good friendly vibes last night Imago.
Fizzles, FAP some time?

Later Stevie the Nipper and I met up with someone who was taught by DFW!

yes, this was great! Really like Paul Mason - came out of that wishing there were more prominent, strong, intelligent, anti-establishment voices like this available on TV.

He rehearses and articulates arguments that seem to me absent from TV generally, and perhaps more widely, which in itself results in the impoverishment of public political discourse.

More specifically to the evening, once Ann Enright and Paul M had worked out who was interviewing who, it was very enjoyable. I don't think anything staggeringly new was said about GR - and the point that the below-zero nature of Slothrop's deconditioning means that each piece of V2 desctruction is also a life and love giving action in the darkness could have been made earlier.

However, it was interesting to hear P Mason speak about how the book fit into his high establishment conspiracy of power v hidden resistance model of late 20th C early 21st C world affairs, both existing in the shadows.

Some good questions (inluding imago's - I did feel he kind of pushed the burlesque aspect of Pynchon too far to one side, which was interesting in itself).

Good to see everyone as well - yes pinefox, a FAP would be good!

Anyone seen this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%BCfstand_VII

No gamer but this headline caught my eye.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/27/jonathan-blow-designer-video-games-braid-the-witness

I would eventually like to play this game, which looks like a long pretty variation on Riven, but I think the comparison speaks more to Blow's investment in his own prestige than to the formal properties of his work.

(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!

unfortunately gravity's rainbow has put me in the mood to attack both mason & dixon and against the day but i might hold off for at least another year

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

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), 1. maj 2018 22:44 (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is amazing. The whole book is so high-strung and outrageous, but the sad and more low-key parts really hits as well. There's one part, which from memory goes something like He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls know nothing about fireflies, and that's the only thing Slothrop knows about English girls. Out of knowhere, and the homesick loneliness of it gets me every time.

That section is haunting, I’ve forgotten a fair bit of the book but that sticks

the big franz pokler chapter is like a 40-page wave of brutality. it's hard to do much else after it ends

just finished! that was. really good

poor gottfried

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

― sciatica, Monday, May 2, 2016 11:12 AM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a great post

The ending of GR makes me too weepy to face it some days

Mason & Dixon is even better

this would make for the greatest movie of course but only really if done as a ten-hour anime

this old lj post is prob easy to make fun of but i’ve been thinking about gr’s overall relationship to film and how often its long descriptive passages feel like scene setting in a film script, but the sudden tonal shifts prob wouldn’t work as well in a live action film as in animation bc it’s fundamentally a looney tune

“Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”

― s.clover, Tuesday, May 15, 2012 11:00 AM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

poptimism

i've slowly come to accept that i'm simply not smart enough to read gravity's rainbow, and i'm ok with that

*i* am not smart enough to read gravity’s rainbow

just hold the reins and ride

what was the moment you were like 'my god I'm finishing this wonderful bastard'

mine prob custard pie dogfight

it's no good. at some point reading becomes a merely mechanical activity, the neurons or whatever stop carrying the information to my brain out of self-defense, and eventually i give in and start paying attention to what my nervous system is telling me.

maybe it would help to think of as a series and only read like 150 pages at a time, then read a different book, then try another 150 pages

this has worked for me

what was the moment you were like 'my god I'm finishing this wonderful bastard'

i had a basically antagonistic relationship toward its length throughout so i was not certain i would actually finish it until the last 50 or so pages. even then, tbh, the indecipherable (to me) tarot readings in the last twenty pages nearly defeated me straw that broke the camel’s back style. it does get “easier” after the first 200 pages but there are still so many pockets of difficulty (tchitcherine’s and enzian’s hallucinatory visions of the zone, etc.). i know the object is to breeze through it as quickly as possible but i ended up always dwelling on passages i didn’t understand. weirdly however the hardest time i had motivating myself to keep reading was during the long slapsticky passages in the zone (aerial pie fight excepted)

pökler interlude is basically when i thought “i’m glad i did this”. before that i would thrill at any bend in time (the torpedo section). marvy getting inadvertently castrated was oddly satisfying

i loved that the tchitcherine/enzian conflict built to an anticlimax, one of the strongest passages in the book

oh wait, i know, i knew i was gonna finish this in part four when thanatz gets on the boat with the dude who really wants to get struck by lightning, and that section’s transition into the immortal messianic lightbulb stuff is so good

i think the disintegrated last part is the hardest and most alienating section by far. but by then yr pretty, as it were, locked in.

like, the nixon bit-- hard to think of another book i'd tolerate that in.

byron tho a major work of short american prose fiction prob. u can read it alone as a lil borges thing even (but you shouldn't).

yep!

the story behind the nixon epigraph is so hilarious imo

oh, the epigraph is great. meant the, is it "zhlubb"? part.

yeah that’s what i thought u meant

it took me a minute to realize that section was a flash forward to the ‘70s

otm that that old imago post is otm (followup about against the day also pretty convincing imo)-- i mean the book is literally a musical, not just with songs but with numbers; plus in certain places (all over but most brutally w the camp/daughter story + most universally w The Integral) the fake? unity of infinitely subdivided time that movies work by is both technique+theme, but yes, maybe only animation accustoms the audience to surreality+discontinuity in the way the book's treatment of this stuff requires?

still think laurie anderson should have called his bluff.

agreed

honestly i think pynchon earnestly wanted that to happen

the taffy skyscraper bit (is that the same bit?) is a crazed flash forward as well

i basically considered all the action plausible right up until the oneurine torpedo, at which point i realised none of it was. but still...it all really happened obv ;)

*oneirine idk

honestly i think pynchon earnestly wanted that to happen

yeah!

think it’s reasonable to assume slothrop didn’t have all that sex

only blicero gets his orgasm :(

(nah there are other orgasms in this book)

lol

btw this is such a rich thread, v thankful for ilx in times like these

Infinite jest slays GR in terms of readability

unfortunately gravity's rainbow has put me in the mood to attack both mason & dixon and against the day but i might hold off for at least another year

i would totally read w/ u, brad

i would much rather read (finish) m&d but i'd do my part for atd too

i'd be down for a group read tbh. too long since i've read pynchon. idk why i even bother to read anything else tbh.

miseducated prolly

I'm jumping into this, but we'll see how far I get. I read V. a few years ago, it had its moments, but didn't make tons of sense to me. So far this is more comprehensible, but I'm sure it won't last.

There are some great, heavily researched guides and supplements online for GR that follow basically page by page. Totally worth it. Really illuminated my reading experience.

One thing I have to say is, at least in my experience, you might be picking up more than you realize. Take those hallucinogenic detours for what they are. Pynchon shoots into space sometimes and you just have to ride it but it always comes back to the ground. Mostly.

Trickiest part for me was remembering the 2,000 or whatever characters. That’s where the guides come in handy.

The first appreciation I've read for Gravity's Rainbow in its 50th anniversary year – many more to come I'm sure. Arguing for Pynchon's relevance but asking – if reality has become as absurd as Pynchon, does that constitute an obstacle to reading him? https://t.co/4mgRk9q32C

— James B (@piercepenniless) February 17, 2023

There are some great, heavily researched guides and supplements online for GR that follow basically page by page. Totally worth it. Really illuminated my reading experience.

I should try that. I've read the book twice, have been contemplating a third read. I think a guide might add something. It did with Ulysses.

Happy 50th birthday!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fp_lwtqXgAMypQK.jpg

hb you amazing fucked-up freak :)

"tussodyne" is a 2023 meme just waiting to unfurl

nice to see Nestlé's original brand name before they went woke

hbtp

having read three copies of this to pieces (original trade paperback w swollen red sun, frank miller penguin classic ew, 70s mass market paperback w rainbow contrails-- this one in many pieces) maybe today is the day to find a copy of that nice earlier penguin w the rocket blueprints on it

...keep hearing thread title in Letterkenny voice...

FIrst read that as "in Lemmy's voice"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wSTVMRkIk

(6'53" if you don't want to sit through the whole thing)

Hmm...

"These masterpieces have come to Deep Vellum and to Lawton thanks to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Andrei, a Russian-speaking book blogger from Eastern Europe, launched The Untranslated in 2013. He has described the idea for the blog as having come from reading Gravity’s Rainbow as an undergrad and wondering if there were similar works in other languages."

https://t.e2ma.net/webview/3ss14i/5ba151f32c3c2e783aa4db148566b1e7

First of all, its incredible for a blog to have that much of an impact. That the niche idea it promotes has been taken up is something.

I feel this is all a bit of a dead end. We'll see...while this stuff is still niche there will be a lot more focus on it. I have struggled with The Untranslated's writing on these books.

much as i love gigantic excessive (post)modernism there's something about seeing them all bunched together as a genre that leaves me a little eye-rolly maybe?

the thing that leaves me eye-rolly is that solenoid, while not without interest, was also very much not without boredom - tho i feel equivocal, as some aspects of it have stayed with me. it should be much much shorter tho.

i feel totally unequivocal tho about garden of seven twilights being just utter crap.

so, something’s off. big books doing lumpy or tangled things isn’t enough to justify reading or publication really imo, though fair play to the original blog for surfacing writing, it’s just they’ve all been amplified above their intrinsic power (someone will surely tell me that’s a bad metaphor - that not really being what amplification is but hopefully ykwim)

kinda breaks the veneer of sui generisity right

Feels like Biographical Entries for a Catalogue of Vast Untranslated and Unreadable Postmodern Novels is already its own fully realised metafictional exercise.

This is also, more than anything, another twitter-related production. All of the translators and Andrei are on there constantly tweeting about these things, so something was definitely brewing.

On twitter there was a big bust-up (its niche but you know) with some other people over the translation of this book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutunamayanlar

Which I think was translated into English by his then partner. Could see them all trashing it one night. These boys are passionate! Which makes me pause, yes.

Atay's short stories are getting a translation. Which I am v much looking forward to.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/waiting-for-the-fear

The discourse has blown up a bit on twitter, via this piece.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/

"Most concerning, for me, is that brodernist criticism interprets foreignness itself as “difficult.” The brodernist measures of “challenging” literature are a constrained series of attributes: winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists, brick-length tomes, cringey and misogynistic sex scenes, the stench of once having read Nietzsche, the words “psychedelic” and “oneiric,” half-hearted genre-play. Kafka, poor guy, gets thrown around a lot. The problem, to be clear, is not these traits—honest-to-God masterpieces compose much of the brodernist corpus—but their reduction into a series of attributes to be repeated as kitsch. Not the literature of exhaustion but an exhausting, at times exhausted, literature. A zombie avant-garde."

Would say there is much to be said for this. But after all is said and done we are not talking about big sellers that will have much impact.

Nevertheless, questions must be asked of it.

This is the next big brick:

https://store.deepvellum.org/products/schattenfroh

call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau

He knew it was awful and he did it anyway!

That's right

Funny, I read but did not finish Krasznahorkai‘s first book Satantango or whatever and was deeply unimpresssed

I do agree with that paragraph above from the review, Pynchon has a lot of shit to answer for

I liked 'Seiobo There Below' quite a bit and wanted to read 'Melancholy of Resistance' (I love the title)

Satantango (the film) is all time for me.

re: GR. Obviously not Pynchon's fault he had copyists but its worth saying his own fiction went through some evolution from GR onwards.

On ILX I remember we had some discussion on many American made bricks that were comparable to GR, but not as good either (or that was some of the judgment, I haven't read Underworld).

The piece is being seen as minimising women who write, read and like this stuff. Many are citing Marguerite Young but Macintosh is (from what I read of it) working at a different angle to GR. That para I pulled out attacks a particular niche and it feels like a sub tweet of that blog.

Yeah I would say Macintosh is nothing like Pynchon, maybe they are even opposites.

I only recently found out that John Holmes (no not...), the artist who painted the cover for the first UK paperback of Gravity's Rainbow, also painted the cover for the UK paperback of Jaws:

https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/61QAAOSwkwxnhjMC/s-l1200.jpg

https://i0.wp.com/m.bookcoverreview.co.uk/JawsFrontCover.png?w=2000

This bump reminding me I have The Luminaries and Ducks, Newburyport lying unread on my shelves. Yes yes I'll get to them...someday...

haha wow re: Jaws and GR

I finally traded in my unread Infinite Jest this week, after a good twenty years' aging on the shelf. I figure I can easily get another copy if I ever do decide to read it.