Pynchon: Skool Me

One of like three known pictures on the man. Supposedly when he finished Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon called his agent and said it was done and could be picked up at his office. The whole novel hand-written on graph paper, and on the desk there was an old fan, a metal rocket, and lots of books about pigs.

Doesn't really get into the whole philosophy/meaning business, but how can you not love that?

Lot 49 probably his worst: dashed out between attempts at writing Gravity's Rainbow, and feels like an attempt to write something that reduces the other work to something that makes sense: not really a "key" to it, which I think some people say, per se; kind've a fixed reference point opposed to GR's supposed trajectory-then-explosion.

more like his best.

also i love crying of lot 49

I got about five chapters into V, put it down for a week, and when I came back to it I realized I couldn't remember ANYTHING.

1) Gravity's Rainbow
2) Mason & Dixon
3) Crying of Lot 49
4) V
5) Vineland

Of the stories in 'Slow Learner', 'The Secret Integration' is really good.

A thought I had the other day which may or may not be interesting: TRP is the Dylan of postwar American Fiction. TRP takes his wholesome beat inheritance and electrifies it via surrealism, temporal displacement, scientific counterhistories etc etc.

TRP's new book is rumoured to be about the German mathematician David Hilbert. I would be interested if the ILx Skrewball Algebra Skwad could tell me something about him.

this is nonsense!

the nipper's ranking is correct, as is the observation that 'the secret integration' is great.

hilbert: i don't know all that much about him. most famous for proposing a list of problems at the ICM (= international congress of mathematicians, i think) in 1900 which he considered worthy of attack. some turned out to be v easy, some v hard. he also did some stuff in class field theory (there's a "hilbert class field") and i guess lots of the foundations of commutative algebra too. his name gets attached to quite a lot of stuff.

http://babbage.clarku.edu/~djoyce/hilbert/problems.html

it's quite funny to compare eg problems 3, 5, 6, 7. 3 turned out to be quite easy, 6 is pretty vague, whereas hilbert turned out to be right about 5 but wrong about its importance (afaik this result has no applications), but 7 was solved in the 1930s and led to lots of important mathematics.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200007/fea-grattan.pdf

Do you have any inkling of why Pynchon might be interested in Hilbert, Toby? What's his significance outside of maths?

on a modern amercian authors/maths note, it looks like david foster wallace's cantor biography's definitely doming out this year.

cf recent argts on infinity especially: he aaid, why bother ourselves if this "thing" can't be pointed to in some way, we are still discovering things as long as there are no contradictions

mathematics = a world in itself, not a part of the "real" world

the foundationalists (mostly russell) then tried to construct all maths from purely logical axioms, and failed

while the intuitionists (brouwer) started chucking out all the concepts which couldn't be "constructed" (eg cantor's clouds of infinities), and working out other — often v.clever and subtle — ways of proving the results which had required those concepts

hilbert said: "what's all the fuss?"

i hope after the DFW book this joke will magically beomce actually publicly funny

Although part of the whole point of Pynchon (what I've read of him at least), is that its SUPPOSED to be overwhelming, surely?

Gravity's Rainbow: urgh. These are books that I should (extrapolating from experience) like, I know.

I'm currently reading Charles Portis "Dog of the South" and it is funny and clear.

But it's where I got my name! *sigh*

Obviously it has one major flaw.

Meh, that link speaks the truth - the maths in IJ was probably the worst thing about it, and is just made random and inexplicable by the fact Wallace clearly does know what he's on about and is just choosing to be obtuse. I mean, sure, some stuff can be wrong because it's being channeled through Pemulis via Hal, who's hardly a mathmo, but either his miraculous recall doesn't work with numbers or there's something weird going on. I mean, there's a fairly basic integration which is just wrong, and that rings kinda false with Pemulis' apparent character.

So, ok, riddle me this, ya ponces. At the end of Lot 49, everything collapses into binarism, right? Compare the "almost pure terror" with the mirror at the beginning to "the loss pure, instant, spherical" at the end, blah blah blah excluded middles = bad shit, etc. SO, surely this goes directly against communicative entropy? Or is this the point?

Also, the t.A.T.u album is good.

I'm now about 100 pages from the end of Mason & Dixon... I'm beginning to think it could well be Pynchon's best work. I'm certainly finding it more rewarding and thought-provoking than GR on a first reading.

Mason and Dixon it took me a couple of months to finish and i understood hardly any of it but still quite enjoyed it. I couldn't see "the point" though, really, i'm just utterly bewildered by it. I was still quite moved by the last few pages though, i dont know if that was because it was some sort of release/relief.

I think I might reread Mason and Dixon this summer.

Do I read it or continue reading trash sf?

I might reread GR again quite soon - I don't think I really appreciated the second half that much first time round.

http://www.culture.com.au/brain_proj/CONTENT/V_DUCK.GIF

i just finished crying of lot 49, read since it was lying around and i had nothing else to read. i liked it, but only through what would probably be considered a massively bungled reading, as a testament to america's disinherited (that passage at the end, w/ the headlights and the drifters, easily my favorite). the satirical elements praised so much on the back flap of my copy are hardly worthy of being called such, though there are some funny bits here and there.

i'm now thinking about picking up gravity's rainbow, which i've wanted to read for a long time because it's one of my favorite book titles and it gets a fair amount of praise but i fear it'll be vexing, maddening, incomprehensible (but not vexing and maddening purely because of incomprehensibility).

"So, ok, riddle me this, ya ponces. At the end of Lot 49, everything collapses into binarism, right? Compare the "almost pure terror" with the mirror at the beginning to "the loss pure, instant, spherical" at the end, blah blah blah excluded middles = bad shit, etc. SO, surely this goes directly against communicative entropy? Or is this the point?"

yeah though i don't think there's a collapse, but an awareness, and i have no idea what you mean about it going against communicative entropy either (but that's surely cuz i only understand entropy in the simplest terms) - i thought it was suggested that "tristero" was alternatively reliant on its slow steady deterioration, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of a listless society collapsed into paralysing inertia. see, i don't understand why, at the very end, tristero is presented as this malignant presence, as the "enemy". is it because its malignance lies in its need to exist in the first place? surely it represents, underneath all the grotesqueries, those ignored by the dichotomous system?

i'm sure it's significant when at the end the sun (where previuosly light, tellingly often so bright as to be blidning, is some kind of metaphor for knowledge) is shut out but i'm not sure how.

yeah i know i said it was massively bungled alright?

i've settled down some and i think i have a slightly (only slightly) mroe coherent understanding of lot 49 and after wading thru a few amazon reviews (hm) of GR and vineland i'm convinced that i'm right to believe in & hold in high regard his sympathies for, i dunno, not leftism or anything even political really but a humane anarchism of sorts. which i can dig well enough. (maybe this is common knowledge but i didn't it possible from a dude who designed ballistic missiles for boeing)

i can't believe no one has nothing to say about anything? i'd thought mentioning pynchon's name on ILX was akin to tossing a freshly mutilated calf into a piranha-infested swamp.

i went to amazon to place an order for GR but vineland looks really really good - i wonder if i should try it before wading headlong into the other?

HAHAhaha. From what I've heard of Vineland (which is his only novel what I haven't read), HAHAhehe. I could go off on my as yet amorphous ANGEL THEORY OF HIERACHIZED EPISTEMOLOGY, but I'm tired and tomorrow is teh turkey day.

the latest one i reread is Vineland, and the one i haven't read in longest is V.

but I never liked Lot 49 that much, and especially never liked its treatment as a "key" to gravity's rainbow.

why are the tristero a menace? well -- why is there anything at all positive about them, except that they're cast as underdogs? what do they have to offer except the destruction of knowledge? what's transmitted in w.a.s.t.e. that's superior to the overt world?

if anything, pynchon's attitude towards all this tends to tilt towards hope as he goes on in his career, almost as though he's casting the 60s and 70s in an increasingly warm haze of nostalgia, realizing that what came after would only be worse.

Pynchon's "Simpsons" cameo (complete with bag on head) 2 weeks back was awesome tho. "These buffalo wings are V-licious! I'm putting them in my Gravity's Rainbow cookbook, next to the Frying of Latke 49!"

sterling you're right about the tristero - they only multiply entities, increase disorder, speed along entropy or whathaveyou - but pynchon seems to regard this as inevitable anyway, any imposition of order false, incomplete, oppressive, and it just seems weird that they would be the dark scourge of society - is it because their unearthing marks oedipa's awakening? but that's still not satisfactoy - on the very last page they're still "the enemy" even after oedipa's realization that problems run much deeper than any fucked up mail delivery system, that they're ingrained into the manifold threads that hold us loosely together (replacing them, or waiting for them to unravel, the only "solutions" pynchon (via tristero, i think) presents in the book) - is it a projection...?

[It's been forever since I read '49' but um: I guess what I meant by the communicative entropy thing was that it seemed strange that a novel so concerned with the entropy of knowledge had this blazing clear resolution suspended just off the last page? Like if how you're meanta see modernism as epistemological and pomo as ontological crises, it's kinda in the former camp? I'm not sure! I was young].

The Courier's Tragedy is my favourite bit, remembering. Death in a play within the wider plot, y'know, like a revenge tragedy or something. CLEVER.

it was hilarious at the beginning as a parody/outlet for pynch's zaniness but as it went on and was infused with significance (on whatever level) it became less so. but it was one of my fav parts too.

I am still stuck deep in the heart of AtD - about page 500 or so - and at the moment I worry I will never get to the end of it. It hasn't really grabbed me :/

I'm still wondering how important the maths actually is, as long as you have a vague grasp of the basics (that are kind of outlined for you anyway?)