Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon. Due September 2013

So it sez:

Thomas Pynchon's new novel BLEEDING EDGE will be published on September 17, deals with Silicon Alley between dotcom boom collapse and 9/11.

uhhhhhhhhh no thanks

well maybe

it would be cool if it was actually all about hewlett and packard huddled over a garage shop bench in suburban palo alto 1939

i don't want to hear what he thinks about boom collapse and 9/11, it's a little too close to "here tom, have a go at cosmopolis"

Considering Inherent Vice ends with that bit about the Internet starting up I half wonder what further connections will be drawn. Also this makes his third Northern California novel.

the title is off-putting too

i didn't finish inherent vice, was that one of the good bits?

Well I guess I'll start staking out the line of people that are actually looking forward to new Pynchon, I'm not going to let a nine word preliminary description scare me off.

xpost Well, I liked it, but then I liked nearly all of it.

(september 2013, right?)

Ha, true, hold on.

this is set in Silicon Alley, NYC. it's not another n.california novel.

...which would make it another 9/11 novel ;)

posted some thoughts about this on 'new pynchon (x3)'

lol

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Monday, 25 February 2013 14:45 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not read any neal stephenson yet (cryptonomicon lies in wait) but isn't that his turf

― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Monday, 25 February 2013 14:51 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kinda :/ that 9/11 seemingly plays a pivotal part in this (yes, I read Falling Man, no it wasn't very good) but if anyone's gonna extract something profound from it, well...

just seems like so much else he could write about in the contemporary world, hopefully 9/11 will be ghosted beyond, beneath and above much like world war 1 in ATD (and world war 2 in GR)

― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Monday, 25 February 2013 14:55 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think they're really comparable (despite what… Charles Shaar Murray maybe?… says on the back of Cryptonomicon about it being like Gravity's Rainbow - that might be one of the wrongest points of comparison I've seen on a blurb).

Makes me a little anxious that he's taking this on, but then it's Pynchon, so pretty sure I will enjoy it at least.

― woof, Monday, 25 February 2013 14:59 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as far as pivotal california moments go, this is a great one to pick.

― s.clover, Monday, 25 February 2013 15:08 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have they said how many pages it is?

― just sayin, Monday, 25 February 2013 15:09 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haven't read Cryptonomicon, because I was afraid it would be like attempted GR Redux--also oh no, not WWII again---but did like Diamond Age, where his developing novelistic sensibility, incl reflections of a citizen of the world and grown-ass man, overtake cyberpunk tropes/cliches.

― dow, Monday, 25 February 2013 15:18 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, that wasn't even meant as a slam on Stephenson (who I run hot & cold on) it's just that he's not really like Pynchon - there's some subject matter/theme overlap, but Stephenson is pulpy, fun, not really a stylist, nowhere near as extreme, just not really in the same zone at all

― woof, Monday, 25 February 2013 15:28 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah and can well imagine him wincing when first seeing that blurb on the jacket, invoking comparisons to GR

― dow, Monday, 25 February 2013 15:45 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So this will be the latest period Pynchon has written about ever. Excited for that. Hope it will be a long one.

― Frederik B, Monday, 25 February 2013 16:03 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean a number of his novels were contemporary at the time he wrote them...

― s.clover, Monday, 25 February 2013 16:18 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, of course. But they aren't any more, was my point. There are so many interconnections in his fictions, so many things that he describes the foundation of in his historical fiction, and then shows what happened to it in the sixties in other books. I'm excited to see those threads being taken up to the millenium.

― Frederik B, Monday, 25 February 2013 16:23 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this, really

― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Monday, 25 February 2013 19:21 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is set in Silicon Alley, NYC. it's not another n.california novel.

Huh, so it is. I thought that was a typo, I have no idea what the hell Silicon Alley is.

he'd already used the V so he left it out.

Ba-dum-bum

oh, huh, missed that.

anyway, this is a new pynchon. of course it will spectacular!

I don't envy Pynchon having to read the proofs of a Pynchon novel.

could we pre-cover this, one chapter each?

Psyched. Between this & gass's middle c this is shaping up to be a good year for postmodern grandees. Against the day is one of my favourites of the last 10 years, I might finally crack open inherent vice before this drops

I just did that, it's a quick read and the only one I hadn't gotten to. Remarkably, um, straightforward or something, and it seemed like there weren't as many striking passages, but I enjoyed it a lot. AtD is one of my fave things ever.

I like to imagine Pynchon going undercover as a Kozmo delivery guy.

there are only two or three scenes I really remember intensely from IV, but they're all corkers.

Yeah I've heard that it's a bit "straighter", I remember hearing someone or other on the radio describing it as a "Pynchon b-side". Also a friend of mine said that he couldn't stop imagining the main character as The Dude

I mainly remember the stuff about the ties, which I'm sure speaks ill of me...

I'm rereading Mason & Dixon at the moment, and it's really much more understandable on a second readthrough. It was the first of his that I read, and it made me a massive fan (as in writing my thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and stuff) but I hardly had any idea what was going on with all the stars and ducks and chinese jesuits.

M&D my favourite I think. Everything I see about this from title down makes me think it's going to suck to the power of a collapsing singularity, but it's Pynchon so a) ill read it and b) even if it does suck it'll be interesting see the hash he makes of it.

all we know is a title and a setting. i have no idea how that could indicate the quality of this book.

let's at least wait until they leak the cover art people

I'm mainly waiting for the page-count. 500+ = masterpiece. 500- = boring rethread. Except that I'll read it nonetheless.

all we know is a title and a setting. i have no idea how that could indicate the quality of this book.

it's all about the pointless speculation, s. as for the title, its common usage suggests both a sort of elderly confusion about the register of newish phrases or the implication of latent or literal meanings that will be drawn out of what is a moribund cliche. it being Pynchon it's likely to be neither, but it sets my teeth on edge all the same.

iirc there were a lot of rumors pre-vineland that "this one's going to be about godzilla"

based on the title, it's going to be a thriller about a beautiful, gutsy forensic scientist on the trail of a twisted-genius serial killer on Silicon Alley between the dotcom boom collapse and 9/11

^would read

Dotcom Boom is one of the characters. He has an aneurysm and collapses. 9/11 happens in his mind as he is dying.

(SPOILERS)

sorry!

the pre-cover's off to a good start then

Fit page limit, leak galleys...

STOKED

inherent vice was great fun

I'm mainly waiting for the page-count. 500+ = masterpiece. 500- = boring rethread. Except that I'll read it nonetheless.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, February 27, 2013 2:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gasface.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html

Beneath the mockery, the light skewering of just another community, is an undertow of longing—especially poignant in lyrical descriptions of two places. One is a tiny isle off Staten Island, and the other is virtual—a noncommercial patch of the Internet, still anarchic in 2001. Pynchon compares the two: “Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends.”

IT IS ABOUT ILX

or yknow waste-l or whatever

so excited.

SPRANG BRAAAAKE

"index and corrupt" !

Within its own precincts, ilx is still almost edenic in its innocence (although we now do run ads for fun and profit - a development I dislike and would feel happy to see discontinued). However, because of its digital nature and its public quality, everything we say here is grist for the dark satanic data mills of our corporate overlords.

joek link to cr4mson4hx8a0n thred here

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/books/bleeding-edge-a-9-11-novel-by-thomas-pynchon.html?hp&_r=0

good ol kakutani, never change

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/pynchons-deep-web

tags: SF , Literary Fiction , Cyberculture , Slipstream

Consumer question: if I dug Vineland and Lot 49, and admired passages of (but came absolutely nowhere near completing) the rest, should I try Inherent Vice or BE? As Vineland was my favourite, I think I dig Diet Pynchon slightly better.

I'm one of those people who can't stop proselytizing about GR since I just finished it. I tried over the years, but it finally clicked when I got the Gravity's Rainbow Companion by Weissburger(sp?) I read the notes for each chapter after I finished it, helped me immensely to feel more comfortable. Also, it's not very good but the doc on you tube "Journey Inside the Mind of P." provided background about the book, Pynchon's stint at Boeing and possible sense of guilt over "working on" the Minuteman ICBM used in Vietnam, GR as a veiled Vietnam book with the US in the role of the Nazis, etc. Those two things combined and I just gorged on the book, couldn't stop, and when I finished really had to stop myself from reading it all over again right away. Don't give up on it! (It's also a book that lends itself to being slightly high while reading it, seeing as he wrote much of it while baked out of his mind on very fine weed!)

weed goes well with all sorts of pynchon, i find. chuck i'd say you probably wanna read IV before BE -- IV's set in cali, like Vineland, and the hero, doc sportello, is a stoner-savant type, like zoyd wheeler

he used axiom of choice in reference to a finite set? HE'S DEAD TO ME

The video game stretch in BE freaked me out, was effective

slowly making my way through 'v' now, i think i finally 'get' it after like five attempts.

I could never 'get' V! iirc it had a lot less of that signature jocular tone, which is a big part of what I like about pynchon.

also dislike v

i think my problem before was actually trying to get involved with the characters and plot rather than just enjoying it as a set of semi-random picturesque episodes. seems like the general consensus is that it's a lesser work than his later stuff? some really beautiful writing on almost every page imo.

Yeah, I'm rereading V as well, and I find a lot to like. But it's so very different from everything else. I blame it on being a pre-hippie book. A lot of his later conceptions of history is absent.

http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

I'm reading this too slowly and I'm running into the usual Pynchon problem. Just spent about 20mins of my commute leafing back to try and find out who the hell Vip Epperdew was.

ha, yeah, I had a break & had a bit of that, but got back into it p quickly.

V is regularly spectacular, but it doesn't come together for me - feels like a brilliant patchwork of stiff set pieces despite the theming - writer of great talent still working out that talent in bursts - doesn't have obsessive patterning & density of Gravity's Rainbow, or fluidity of M&D's picaresque. I think of it as quite front-loaded too, but might be misremembering. It's my least favourite of his books.

not to be too spoilerish but i can't think of a novelist in the world whose opinions on 'what really happened' on 9/11 i'd rather read than poet of paranoia and king of conspiracy, thomas ruggles pynchon

Just spent about 20mins of my commute leafing back to try and find out who the hell Vip Epperdew was.

This was my first time reading a new Pynchon as an ebook, and I found that pretty helpful (indeed, I had to search for "vip" having put it down for a few hours between flights, but found it instantly and could get straight back on with it).

V also my least favourite (only read it once though).

okay the 9/10/01 princeton global consciousness project thing he cites is seriously fucked up ~

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/exploratory.analysis.html

9/11 paranoia is a great topic. it feels really pervasive and important to the modern world, and even moreso the further from the states you get. and the further away in time this gets, the more i think it will be even more entrenched, like jfk theories and the like.

Haha OF COURSE there's a Jay-Z vs Nas reference.

The rap bit was fun, mainly because you're like "yo Tom probably had to do some mad anthropological research for this"

man, i did not like this

I think I'm at the point where 9/11 is about to happen and I've been holding off on it because I'm really enjoying this up to now but I'm worried he's going to handle it really badly.

This is certainly his closest to Lot 49, even more so than Inherent Vice, with the Deep Web as the muted post horn.

yes and surely it seems sort of a dumb and retrograde step to try and rewrite lot 49 in the interstices of actual history surely; plus the novel's apparent resting point in domesticity as the best we can manage against Those Forces Which Would Seek To Control Us is, like, lame and depressing

i kind of agree. also the joeks verge on family guy references. like, i'm more impressed that thomas pynchon knows what daikatana is than i am amused by his daikatana joke. also (sorry) daikatana had been released by spring 01.

isn't domesticity the menage-marriage's best-we-can-manage in a.t.d. too?

yeah but they try pretty much *everything* else for 1200 pages before discovering that rolling peaceful is probably our best bet

even at the end, ATD hints at ongoing efforts, an anarchy more sublime. it's a masterpiece imo

Josh Cohen's Harpers review is interesting for all kinds of reasons, but makes a pretty good stab at justifying the domesticity conclusion.
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/10/first-family-second-life/

Agree about the Family Guy joeks, tho I lold like a drain at "I left my brains down in Africa"

oh huh wait, that joshua cohen?

joie de beavre is A+, 'jean paul sartre is a fartre' level

http://m.citypaper.com/news/a-screaming-comes-across-the-sky-1.1557702?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Citypaper-News-And-Features+(Citypaper.com+News+and+Features)

raymond that opening sentence is the best succinct description of pynchon's fiction i've ever read. nice!

Thank you very much!

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/sep/27/pynchon-woolf-women/

mendelson

just started this, was saving it as a treat for visit to NYC.

initial impressions - deliberate disorientation by baton-passing the reader down through Maxine's contacts and past, supplementing hokey/paranoid conspiracy construct and investigations of "Deep Web".

enjoying the language and relaxing into another Pynchon.

feel someone like Helen deWitt could do interesting things with *actual* mechanics of coding rather'n the slightly bogus feeling William Gibson stuff, but TP's a different writer and guess this is his manner/point? (code paranoia and economic/manhattan real estate empty spaces haunted by ghosts and fictional notions)

(oh and haven't read thread for fear of spoilers - will catch up after)

It's weird to me that Pynchon is still referred to as a "recluse," even after writing books like Bleeding Edge.

"My belief is that 'recluse' is a codeword generated by journalists ... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters'."

or critics or magazines or anything that would normally be associated with a man of letters tbh. "recluse" isn't quite right admittedly, but he's a garrulous writer in a garrulous place, and the silence of his public persona is fair game. and part of the fun.

xp that quote i posted above was when he was negotiating with cnn about that profile they did of him with the infamous shot of him on the street

my intellectual and imaginative hinterland has shrunk to the size of an allotment recently, but am wandering slowly through Bleeding Edge (it's a novel that allows you to saunter, stop, and drop in - it has a lot of space, something I think that might feel characteristic of the most recent Pynchon?)

Some notes I've made (not sure what I mean always - will try and gloss):

"back east content was king" - where is the content with Pynchon?

this isn't a criticism I think - it was question i was posing to get at an elusive definition of Pynchon's appeal. I found myself returning to an observation I made when I read the Harry Potters, about the difference in magic between Ursula le Guin in Earthsea and Harry Potter, and in another sense it's the question 'How do characters level up?'

In Harry Potter, you learn a word and that's the spell. Pretty much. Yes there's lots of stuff about not being able to do it well, or characters only being ready to do a spell once they've reached a certain level in their schoolwork, but pretty much - say a word and the spell's done.

In Earthsea, a spell is only usually the result of extreme psychic trauma. The more potent the spell, the more extreme the trauma. The act of spell learning is part of the fabric of the action of the book. It's potent to read about for that reason, in Harry Potter it feels... frivolous, unimportant, like grinding thru the levels in an RPG.

Come on, Fizzles, what's the relevance? Well, I feel Pynchon's got a touch of the Harry Potters about his books, perhaps specifically in Bleeding Edge. To say 'Deep Web' is to invoke Deep Web. The term does not need weaving or justifying, and is achieved through visual metaphors. Helen deWitt, say, with her interest in the building of knowledge, the learning of constructs, and statistics.

I don't think this makes Pynchon weak (tho I do think it makes Harry Potter weak), it's part of how his books work, particularly this one.... I think I'm going to have to leave it there for the moment, as I'm trying to grasp at something I can't express. (Tho I would say this feels different in Gravity's Rainbow, right? The notions of probability feel more tightly woven into the mechanics of the action? Hmm maybe. I want to disagree with myself here...)

"what could lie behind a front like this, when it's front all the way through?"

yeah, this, I think this fits in with what I was saying about. This is a novel that is about the stuff it's about, by *talking* about the stuff it's about. Notions of 'Deep' are only front, every time you grab at something it shows itself not particularly solid (as Pynchon's prose draws attention to its synthesis - we need an object orientated database somewhere to make the translation between words as words and words as things).

Would be at all surprised if the 'resolution' of BE, such as it is, is in fact the opposite of a resolution, an evaporation - tho clearly there is an alchemical explosion to come, so maybe it will work slightly differently.

"bluebeard's castle" is a thing. p193

yes, I think it might be in fact. it feels like a revenge of the women on Bluebeard (Gabriel Ice, clearly, but also maybe Horst).

"confidential space"

internal mental antennae p193 (tre spasserà antennae) - magical transformations (what I like about helen Dewitt is her ability to show the code by which the transformations are made.)

No idea what that non-italian is doing there, think i had my phone keyboard set to Italian so it auto-corrected. Pynchon's always about internal mental antennae, how we nose the mystical-mathematical. Are these linked to the multiple confidential (but hackable, traceable, not truly private) spaces prevalent throughout BE? The way you hit others' private spaces, with warning marks and 'stay away' signals (like the disgusting scents at the crime scene, foreshadowing 9/11 - these are spaces and places not governed by normal laws, and subject to temporal strangeness and the untanglable preternatural).

p194 typo dos

Er yes i think there's a typo on p194 ('but how long dos it have to') but had to think twice about it cos of the subject matter.

Floyd Womack p195 male/female thing - evil spell?

that's one of Pynchon's songs - again more bluebeard shit? women trying to break the enchantment of the male dotcom castle?

the names are intended to take the tone if the prose - somehow like jokes (transformative)? - but names become meaningless when they take on the tone of the prose. "lester traipse" - by sounding like they have coded meaning they seem to work the opposite of normal names - there is a poetical nominative determinism <-- the extent which writers avoid engaging with this etc is the criteria by which we normally judge fictional naming success (its invisibility). Pynchon thwarts it. they are part and parcel of the code (the code being the tone of his prose.

you don't get much of a sense of weather/atmospherics in Pynchon (see p219 and the surprise of August)p219 and the surprise of August), but his construction of place and *temporal* place, is always potent. (I don't say "spot on" cos I don't think accuracy is the point here - but the collection of items always produces a strong version of place and time and place.

hacking the Pynchon code - not sure Bleeding Edge is there yet, but possibly he's gesturing towards it.

half thinking the extent to which this book is interested in exposing his own prose as weightless - will named characters be seen as equal and equally insubstantial in some way as the notions of code present. time is particularly insubstantial in this novel. that's not quite what I'm trying to express.

the unheimlich bits so far: p194 "something's poised, vibrating, looking up at her...in this light it etc"

"the unshared interior" p218

so it matters less if a lot feels off, as when it's off it contributes to the Pynchon looseness (a recent relaxed gait to his style) to his style)

Love the use of uptalk and shorthand he uses, gives a lovely lazy insouciance to the writing (is it Blanchot who says this...?) - the whole passage on p219 onwards is great:

"She was expecting a dressing room out of some movie musical?"

He runs a lengthy O-O. "You want to audition, MILF night is Tuesdays, come back then" p219

outfits of subcultural interest — nun, schoolgirl, warrior princess.

The Blanchot - the french feels more relevant to the meaning

Il introduit, dans le souci de l'œuvre, le mouvement de l'insouciance où l'oœuvre est sacrifeé : la loi dernière de l'œuvre est enfreinte, l'œuvre est trahie en faveur d'Eurydice, de l'ombre.

(It adds a certain carelessness to creative carefulness - a carelessness that sacrifices the work of art. It infringes the work of art's most sacred law, betrays the work for Eurydice, for a shade.)

been e-skimming this, does seem pleasantly amuse-bouchey, kinda mellowed doddering bret easton ellis with bells on vibe

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/thomas-pynchon-crying-september-11/

chabon

ugh, couldn't stand the chabon review...

the review totally forgets about the Ensign Morituri's Story and hiroshima in GR in terms of dramatic irony and foreshadowing plus doesn't notice 9/11 all over beginning chapter _two_ of bleeding edge, so doesn't even catch the stuff at work in the book actually under review. given that, hard to take it seriously.

i just hate his condescending "pynchon's grown up" rap....says more about chabon than pynchon. similar to franzen's pathetic claim that GR is a "boy's novel" that helped him to focus on writing for women (see how well that worked out)

franzen waving a novel in a club, strobe rays scattering madly off its dust jacket, exclaims proudly, madly "this one's strictly for the ladies"

franzen is such a jackass

my need-to-read on this one is still so low, wonder what's up with that

still have not gotten to inherent vice either

inherent vice was a pretty quick fun read. i feel the same about bleeding edge, though. it's been on my shelf for a while, and i keep passing it over.

it's p forgettable