I’m currently reading GR, and I’ve found that it has really been influencing my writing lately. One of the scenes I’ve been working on is this part were the main character is tripping acid at a Trump rally. I’d be interested to hear your guys’ thoughts on if it scratches your pynchon itch- i don’t trust my own judgement on this stuff, but hope you like it:

It became so clear to me, so obvious, as I stood in that conference hall, that soon, maybe not now, but soon, these people would win. There was no stopping it, this thing, this thing knew what it was doing, it was a machine, whirring and puffing, taking in fury and cruelty and burning it like gasoline, feeding on delusions, imagination, white-hot to the touch, spewing out fantastical fictions, everyone excited to add their own bit to the story…something beautifully childlike in the collective storytelling going on, something very human about it, if we’re being fair…but what was also quite clear, as I took it all in, was that the animating force behind this monstrosity was not human by any means; it was simply a runaway train, a old old contraption, which for many lifetimes now, has been chugging along, throwing out harpoons in every direction, setting down roots, taking in pure, hot human blood as fuel, and seeking ultimately to gorge on the next ripe bed of capital, using opium as fertilizer, gun-running, tapping the earth with its sharp mosquito-prodders, sucking it all up, every last bit…and the humans, don’t get me wrong, they’re culpable too, but really they can only guide this beast, aim it vaguely at a region of the world, and proceed to turn around and lie directly to their peoples, as behind them, just over their shoulder, the beast is doing its cold, hard, spectacular work of killing human beings with large explosions, snuffing out lives with computerized bombs forever increasing in sophistication, sacrifices all around, those brown bodies destroyed, those families ended, throw a dart at the map, aim a little low, and you’ll probably hit some warm place where in living memory, we already did this… so that endless frontier, which was expanded quite regularly at first, one scalp at a time, that lovely, untouched, pure new land, was then taken to sea, and then air, and then airwaves and banknotes and sea-floor cables…and every few years, along that frontier, always growing, it was sometimes necessary to, shall we say, feed a population to the beast, to its wood-chipper gullet, when things would get testy, when situations would develop fast, we always seemed to be on that end of things…but it didn’t matter so much, because, well, they were so far away! …but recently, the unthinkable has been happening…we have been losing, we have been shrinking, and we can not have that, we simply can not! That frontier, in its many ways, has been collapsing in on us, brought here through legal ports of entry and not, through the sad, shuddering breakdowns of the beast, grown fat and blubbery, dopesick from the spoils, the wheels coming off, these odd, disbelieving death throes…so that suddenly, those testy edges, where desirable outcomes have generally required the use of force, are pulsing inward, flying back to the vortex in our core, the center of that five-sided building…so that now if you really look around, really pay attention, you’ll see that they are quite obviously, quite horrifically inside the borders of our own nation, these people from the frontier, in every state and every city, and so…one realizes that it only takes swivel-step, a reorientation of mind, to now turn the bayonets inward, to strip the machine down to its bare essentials, the bones of whiteness it was built on…and after all, why not get back to basics? We have shown an aptitude for it in the past, a deep concentration. We’ve got plenty of practice. Sure, we’ll lose the PR war, but it was only a matter of time, with all these new devices everywhere! We might as well start now––it was always going to come to this, really, and as things start heating up, as things start getting bad, we’re going to want as much of a head start as possible.

A very long time ago I read Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow. Really enjoyed M&D, GR not so much. Right now I'm trying to get into Against the Day, but I'm 70 pages in and although I find the writing engaging, this book doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly I'd like to try to read instead.

Gravity's Rainbow is known for being a "systems novel." So is DeLillo's Underworld, and so are others that are written by 20th-century writers. But we live in a different world today with different challenges. We're well past WWII and the Cold War. Are there any books that are all-encompassing about the world we live in today, well written, longish, maybe exhilarating/challenging to read, maybe systems-novel-adjacent?

Reading a text by Pynchon is spiritual corrosion. I really think people in general should do a full stop. When I first dove into a Pynchon book I was going to church every Sunday and even sang in the choir. I would like any resoures you people may have in regard to lighter works that don't make me wonder about the feel of hot leather against my skin while being force fed human excrement.

Hey guys. The first Pynchon novel I read was The Crying of Lot 49, three years ago, and I absolutely loved it. The mystery, the humor, the beautiful prose. It was probably one of my favorite books. Next, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow, but I couldn't really get into it; it probably just wasn't the right time, so I set it aside after about a hundred pages.

This year I read Vineland. I liked it, though I wasn’t as captivated by it as I was by TCoL49. The story is quite straightforward, and the writing is accessible, but I didn’t care that much about the characters. I felt that Frenesi wasn’t very well fleshed out, and while I enjoyed the zanier episodes, I think I need a central storyline that grips me a bit more to fully enjoy those sequences. I appreciated the historical context of the sixties and eighties, and the prose remained beautiful, though I occasionally found myself getting distracted, probably because I didn’t connect with the characters.

In TCoL49, I found his prose challenging in the best way, and any difficulties felt rewarding. However, I just finished reading V., and it was tough. I had to take a pause in the middle and read other things, which was a much needed break but, of course, affected my experience of the rest of the book. Once again, I couldn't connect with most of the characters (except Rachel, mainly), the plots V. was involved in felt too big and abstract, and I found myself reading entire paragraphs without really absorbing anything. As I said, I don’t think this is due to the prose being more difficult, I just felt less gripped by the story. [I should add that when I read, I don’t like going online often to look up things I don’t know. I prefer to stay away from my computer and phone, which might not be ideal for this kind of book. If I try GR again, I’ll have to be more flexible.]

Maybe you guys will suggest I try GR again, and that could be the best idea, but I’d like to fall back in love with Pynchon through a shorter novel before tackling that one. So I was thinking of Inherent Vice or Bleeding Edge. I know Mason & Dixon is great, but (aside from being about as long as GR), I’m not a native speaker, so the older English style might be a bit much for now.

Thanks!

Please recomend me something like Deleuze and Pynchon

Haven't seen (or maybe missed) much discussion of this aspect of M&D on this subreddit -- I'm wondering how many people read the relationship between M&D as romantically charged. Below are a selection of passages I've bookmarked, haphazardly organized with minimal analysis from me for now -- I just wrapped up my re-read, and my brain is still pretty mushy, so apologies for the low-effort post.

First things first; obviously, with any close male relationship, Joaks about Bromances abound throughout:

Mason squints thoughtfully, Dixon shifts his Hat about till presently nodding, “Why aye, thah’s it,— the Lad with the mechanickal Duck . . . ?”

“Too true, alas. A Mechanician of blinding and world-rattling Genius, Gentlemen, yet posterity will know him because of the Duck alone,— they are already coupl’d as inextricably as . . . Mason and Dixon? Haw-hawhawnnh. (372)

“What Crime am I charg’d with now, ever for Thoo, how convenient?”

“Wait, wait, you’re saying I don’t take blame when I should, that I’m ever pushing it off onto you?”

“Wasn’t I that said it,” Dixon’s Eyebrows headed skyward, nostrils aflare with some last twinkling of Geniality.

“I take the blame when it’s my fault,” cries Mason, “but it’s never my Fault,— and that’s not my Fault, either! Or to put it another way,— ”

“Aye, tell the Pit-Pony too, why don’t tha?”

“Children, children,” admonishes the Patriarch, “let us be civil, here. Am I not a Justice of the Peace, after all? Now,— which is the Husband?”

This is greeted by rude Mirth, including, presently, Dixon’s, though not even a chuckle from Mason, who can only, at best, stop glowering. (642)

“You seem about to swoon, Sir.” He takes a delighted breath. “Ah don’t know how much of my story tha may already have heard,” bringing his Chair closer, “— or, to be fair to Mason, our story.”

She shifts her own Chair away. “You and Mr. Mason are . . . quite close, I collect.”

“Huz? We get along. This is our second Job together . . . ? The Trick is all in stayin’ out of each other’s way, really.”

“There are Arrangements in the World,” she explains, “too sadly familiar to Women, wherein, as we say among us, with the one, you get the other as well,— ”

“Lass, Lass . . . ? Eeh, what a Suggestion. We’d make thah’ one only to our Commissioners, I vouch. . . . Unless, that is, tha’re indicating some interest in Mason?”

“Or asking ’pon Molly’s behalf,” her Eye-Lashes indulging in an extra Bat. “This gets very complicated, doesn’t it?” (300)

Then,

“Perhaps I’m only trying to get thee to eat something. This self-denying has its limits,— tha’re down to skin and bones with it, ’tis an Affliction Sentimental, in which Melancholy hath depress’d thy Appetite for any Pleasure.”

"...Thanks for your concern at the altitude of my spirits,— but what you’re really seeking, is an Accomplice in the pursuit of your own various fitful Vices.”

...

So, by the time the Snow abates enough to allow them to rejoin the Harlands, the Surveyors, having decided thereafter to Journey separately, one north and one south, to see the country, return to the Harlands the use of their Honeymoon Quilt... (393)

(I'll admit including this quote on the grounds that this conversation is alluding to latent Homoerotick Desire is a bit of a reach -- the Honeymoon Quilt after this conversation that precedes this is an interesting choice, though perhaps it's just my own paranoia...)

There is also, of course, the symbolism of the rose quartz monument at the point of origin for M&D's journey, as referenced in the original group read discussion post, to mean love (though of course not necessarily Romantick in nature):

Here went we off upon the most prodigious such Line yet attempted,— in America, where undertakings of its scale are possible,— astronomically precise,— carefully set prisms of Oölite,— the Master-valve of rose Quartz, at the eastern Terminus. Any Argument from Design, here, must include a yearning for Flight, perhaps even higher and faster than is customary along Ley-lines we know. I try not to wonder. I must wonder. Whenever the Surveyors separate, they run into Thickets, Bogs, bad Dreams,— united, they pursue a ride through the air, they are link’d to the stars, to that inhuman Precision, and are deferr’d to because of it, tho’ also fear’d and resented. . . .

Most of the direct speculation on M&D's relationship comes from Cherrycoke's commentary, after the Warrior-Path. See the first of which:

“This is beauteous Work. Emerson was right, Jeremiah. You were flying, all the time.”

Dixon, his face darken’d by the Years of Weather, may be allowing himself to blush in safety. “Could have us’d a spot of Orpiment, all the same. Some Lapis . . . ?”

“It is possible,” here comments the Revd Cherrycoke, “that for some couples, however close, Love is simply not in the cards. So must they pursue other projects, instead,— sometimes together, sometimes apart. I believe now, that their Third Interdiction came when, at the end of the eight-Year Traverse, Mason and Dixon could not cross the perilous Boundaries between themselves.” (689)

And, of course, the most salient passage being Cherrycoke's speculation after the Dixon and Slave-master confrontation:

In his heart, Mason has grown accustom’d to the impossibility, between Dixon and himself, of Affection beyond a certain Enclosure. They have spent years together inside one drawn Perimeter and another. They also know how it is out in the Forest, over the Coastal ranges, out of metropolitan Control. Only now, far too late, does Mason develop a passion for his co-adjutor, comparable to that occurring between Public-School Students in England.—

(“Oh, please Wicks spare us, far too romantick really,” mutter several voices at once.) (697).

There is also, intriguingly, Rebekah's ghost describing her, Mason, and Dixon as a triangle:

She accosts him one night walking the Visto. “Seems sad, doesn’t it,” she chuckles. “Trust me, Mopery, there are regions of Sadness you have not seen. Nonetheless, you must come back to our Vale, ’round to your beginning,— well away from the sea and the sailors, away from the Nets of imaginary Lines. You must leave Mr. Dixon to his Fate, and attend your own.”

“You don’t care for him, do you?”

“If we are a Triangle, then must I figure as the Unknown side. . . . Dare you calculate me? Dead-reckon your course into the Wilderness that is now my home, as my Exile? Show, by Projection, Shapes beyond the meager Prism of my Grave? Do you have any idea of my Sentiments? I think not. Mr. Dixon would much prefer you forget me, he is of beaming and cheery temperament, a Boy who would ever be off to play. You were his playmate, now that is over, and you must go back inside the House of your Duty. When you come out again, he will no longer be there, and the Dark will be falling.” (703.)

(Of course, the line about the House of his Duty echoing his epitaph's 'Forever in betwixt / The claims of Lust and Duty / So intricately mix'd --' seems damning, with the exception of some gross misreading on my part.)

How could the elder Charles have forgiven Mason for leaving his children with his Sister, dumping them really, going off to the Indies with another man, another Star-Gazer, coming home only to turn about and sail off to America, with the same man? Dixon sees the pattern, the expectation, the coming Transit of Venus. Mason sees it, too. “If we went off a third time together, . . . he hates me enough already. . . . I study the Stars against my Father’s Wish,— but do I remain among ’em, only at the Price of my Sons? That is what I face,— some Choice!” So he declines the North Cape, and another posting together, symmetrically as ever, to that end of the world lying opposite their first end of the World. “Someone must break this damn’d Symmetry,” Mason mutters. (718).

“Pity . . . ? Tha might’ve had a bit of Fun in there, at least . . . ?”

“Aahhrr. . . . With its Corollary, that whatever I do imagine as Fun, invariably produces Misery. . . .”

“Not only for thee,” adds Dixon, pretending to scrutinize the Fire, “but for ev’ry Unfortunate within thy Ambit, as well.”

“Gave thee a rough time, didn’t I, Friend.” Reaching to rest his hand for a moment upon Dixon’s Shoulder, before removing it again.

“Oh,” Dixon nodding away at an Angle from any direct view of his Partner’s Face, “as rough times go, . . . the French were worse . . . ? Then five Years of Mosquitoes, of course. . . .” The old Astronomers sit for a while in what might be an Embrace, but that they forbear to touch. (737)

Upon the doorstep, horses waiting him in the Street, Mason grasps Dixon’s Hand. “If they don’t kill and eat me up there, shall we do this again?”

“We must count upon becoming old Geezers together,” Dixon proposes. They are looking directly at one another for the first time since either can remember.

“Let us meet next Summer. . . . You must come stay in Sapperton.”

“I may not travel far.” Immediately reaching out his hand to Mason’s arm, lest Mason, in his way, take too much offense. “I wish it were not so.”

Mason, as he long has learn’d to for Dixon, refrains from flinching. “No loss, perhaps,— thanks to the damn’d Clothiers, no one can guarantee what, if anything, swims in the Frome anymore,” avoiding any pro-long’d talk of Frailty, which he can see is costing Dixon more than his reserve of cheer may afford. “The Mills, curse them all. . . . Dixon, I shall be happy to see you wherever you wish.” He turns to the Straps securing the Transit Instruments, ignoring what is just behind his Eyes and Nose. “Mind thyself, Friend.”

There is, of course, the sweet passage with Mason & Dixon dozing by the fire and dreaming of each other. & this passage:

“Meant to bring you to see him one day. He’d heard enough about you. . . .”

“You spoke of me?”

“You, Willy, the Babies. We talk’d about our Children. He had two Girls, young Women I should say,— ”

“Arrh . . . and you were hoping . . . ?”

“Who? What? D’you take me for a Village Busybody such as your Aunt Hettie?”

“Two Sons,” explains Doc, “Two Daughters. And a Father wishing, as Fathers do, to be a Grand-Father.”

“Sure of that?”

“Mason-Dixon Grand-Babies.” He risks casting at his Father a direct look of provocation, that Mason finds he may no more flinch from, than answer to. For the next Hours, then, neither speaks more than he must,— at ease, for the first time together, with the Silence of the Day. ’Twas what Dixon ever wish’d from him,— to proceed quietly. (766)

I actually didn't know what to make of Mason's reaction here, and the hypotheses I did come up with actually prompted me to make this post.

There are of course many small, tender moments between Mason & Dixon (e.g. the sledding scene; Dixon teasing Mason with the coon-skin cap; Mason about to wish for Rebekah's return on the Ear and then deciding to wish for Dixon's return instead; their separation at the Cape and the friendship between the two clocks they take with them; the letter Mason never sends to Dixon) which also lend themselves to a platonic interpretation, along with the repeated likening of M&D to Gemini or the Twins. But --

To speak of the final seven years, between Dixon’s death and Mason’s, is to speculate, to uncertain avail. Obituaries mention a long descent, “suffering, for several years, melancholy aberrations of mind.” His illness at the end was never stipulated. Yet ’tis possible, after all, down here, to die of Melancholy.

(Though I suppose you could make the argument that dying of grief doesn't indicate anything more than an uncommonly deep friendship..)

Is a homoerotic reading of their relationship superficial? Granted, my analysis is extremely shallow, probably because I need to let the book marinate for a bit. Would be interested to hear other people's takes, especially any parallels between the Duck & Armand Allègre, or Rebekah and Dixon.

Howdy Weirdos,

It's Wednesday once more, and if you don't know what the means, I'll let you in on a little secret: another thread of Casual Discussion!

This is our weekly thread dedicated to discussing whatever we want to outside the realm of Thomas Pynchon and tangentially-related subjects.

Every week, you're free to utilize this thread the way you might an "unpopular opinions" or "ask reddit"-type forum. Talk about whatever you like.

Feel free to share anything you want (within the r/ThomasPynchon rules and Reddit TOS) with us, every Wednesday.

Happy Reading and Chatting,

- r/ThomasPynchon Moderator Team

I'm finishing GR after two years. This been a great reading project and the rest of his books seems really worth reading! Where should I go next?

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/gallery/the-latest-person-to-give-alito-a-gift-german-princess-and-80s-party-scenester-turned-catholic-reactionary

Needed a costume and this was an easy one to put together in a day, since k already had most of it.

Does anyone else think about the similarities between the two? It's definitely eerie and both were people fictional and in real life that were involved in huge events in American history. Unlike in Bleeding Edge, it's out there right in the open and there's nothing to stop the action as it's already set in motion.

I really liked this review, even if I disagree with its tone and many of its conclusions.

It helped me understand what initially seemed to be a pastiche of certain styles (Lew Basnight is Detective Fiction, the Chums of Chance are Boy's Own novels, and there's a lot of Oakley Hall/Cormac McCarthy stuff going on with that western town with the awesome name of Jeshimon.) We know that Pynchon and Farina formed a "micro-cult" around the Oakley Hall novel Warlock when they were at Cornell together, and I'm sure Pynchon has read McCarthy. There also seems to be a cluster that either is a parody of or a homage to those turn-of-the-century H.G. Wells, Jules Verne novels, which weren't exactly HARD science fiction works but neither were they straight-up adventure novels like Robinson Crusoe. I kinda consider those books to be proto-sci fi.

(By the way, for anyone interested in enthusiastic literary criticism, Kingsley Amis has a book about science fiction with the kickass title of New Maps Of Hell. I like Kingley Amis' fiction, Lucky Jim especially, but his non-fiction is even better, I think, both New Maps of Hell and his book about drinking, called On Drink. The latter work introduced me to the uniquely British phrase "unsleeping vigilance," which I now try to use in every single thing I write because it's so fucking memorable.

Speaking of memorable, I have always thought that the first 15 pages of Gravity's Rainbow stand tall as Pynchon's highest accomplishment. I love that it breaks the Writer's Workshop Golden Rule of never having your story begin with a character waking up. Pynchon went for an encore with Zoyd Wheeler being woken up by a "squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof" on page one of Vineland, but I am not a huge fan of that book. I think it's Pynchon's worst effort by a mile. He revisited the same themes to better effect in Inherent Vice, a far better California novel than Vineland.

Time seems to have given Pynchon a better perspective on the failure of the hippies and yippies to actually transform the world. In the intro to Slow Learner, he makes the cogent point that one of the biggest disappointments of the Jerry Rubin-esque yippies was the "failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically."

They were either too busy reading esoteric Eastern philosophy and then parroting whatever they were reading at parties, alienating the very blue collar folk that could have been their allies, or they were simply too busy putting flowers in their hair, doing drugs, and having as much sex as possible. Which is fine. Just don't pretend that you're changing the world by attending rock festivals and taking LSD. You're simply participating in a generational rite of passage, not some special moment in history.

What millennials like myself find most annoying is the fact that we all have inherited cultural nostalgia for the 60s because boomers have either sought to repackage and resell the 60s back to us with tripe like Forrest Gump or making claims that the music of their day can never be surpassed.

At this point in history, The Beatles aren't even a band anymore. They are a monolithic entity that every other band that uses guitars is informed, from the outset, that they can never be better than, so why even bother? They were a good band, but I don't think that the ten hours of music they left behind represent the pinnacle of what can be done with two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer, all of whom can sing (Ringo kind of talked his way through songs, but he could still carry a tune).

ANYWAY I suppose my point is this: In Inherent Vice, Pynchon finally comes to terms with the fact that some of the people he met when living in Manhattan Beach, people who dressed like hippies and spoke like hippies, were actually undercover police officers or even FBI agents. This is one of the cases where Pynchon's paranoia seems justified:

This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who'd dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc Knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen. Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?

Oh it's possible. Damn likely, in fact. When I first read Pynchon's gripe in the intro to Slow Learner where he complains that both the Beats and the hippies "placed too much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety," I took it as sour grapes. Bitterness that Pynchon was too young to belong to the Beat Generation and too old to be an authentic hippie. Born in May 1937, Pynchon would have been 30 during the Summer of Love. I have to believe that those idiotic hippie t-shirts that said "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" stung him a little. Hit a little too close to home.

But now I think his disappointment is less personal and more an indictment of his generation. Jerry Rubin, a crazed yippie who once wore live ammunition to the White House and lived to tell about it (he didn't even get arrested), advised the readers of his 1970 book Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution to walk into the nearest bank and demand to use the washroom. If the manager refuses? "Shit on the floor. Shit on the floor." (The italicized emphasis is Rubin's, not mine.)

By the end of the 70s, Rubin had completely abandoned his former ideology and transformed himself into one of the first yuppies. From yippie to yuppie in a few short steps. His former revolutionary comrade and fellow Chicago Seven member, Abbie Hoffmann, clung stubbornly to his ideals and found himself less and less relevant to American culture, particularly the youth, who were zealously apolitical. Anybody trying to mobilize students on campus in the 80s did not have to contend with conservative opposition. They had to contend with the crushing indifference of the students. And, as anyone who has fallen out of love can tell you, hate is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love is indifference.

By the end of the 1980s Jerry Rubin was a multi-millionaire. Abbie Hoffmann killed himself in 1989 by deliberately overdosing on phenobarbital. Jerry Rubin died five years later on Wilshire Blvd (not far from where Biggie Smalls would be shot a few years later) while running to catch a bus. There is no such thing as a hippie in a hurry, but a yuppie on-to-go, probably late for some kind of board meeting, getting mowed down because instead of looking both ways, as we were taught in kindergarten, his mind was preoccupied with thoughts of making EVEN MORE money. Rubin was an early investor in Apple. Figures. Steve Jobs was a nothingburger who couldn't code, engineer, or design but who created such a successful mythology around himself that when he died, people actually left flower bouquets outside of Apple Stores. I cannot wrap my head around why ANYBODY would miss this cretin of a man, who once had millions in his checking account and left the mother of his child to languish in poverty, barely subsisting on food stamps. These are the new American heroes? These monsters? A certain morbid Nic Pizzolatto quote comes to mind: My strong suspicion is....we get the world we deserve. A world where people leave flowers outside retail outlets owned by a company run by an absolute cretin of a man who made everyone around him miserable, who took credit for work his overworked and underpaid engineers work, and who treated his secret weapon, Steve Wozniak, like shit. But he wore a black turtleneck and used buzzwords like "paradigm shift" so, naturally, he's an American hero to be emulated.

Why didn't these people just buy a book instead of leaving flowers outside Apple Stores in a bizarre gesture of consumer grief?

The rise and fall of figures like Elizabeth Sorkin, Sunny Balwani and Anna Delvey are proof that, if you tell enough people that you are rich, act rich, and pretend you know what you're doing, most people are gullible enough to buy it. Henry Kissinger was on the board of Theranos, for God's sake, a company that stole other companies tech, never delivered ion its promises, and committed so many instances of fraud it took lawyers years to disentangle all of them. The 80s never truly ended. They live on with America's true 1%ers, not the Hell's Angels, but the new eccentric rock star CEOs like Branson, Musk, and Bezos. Bezos is a particularly egregious example of how to be successful under late capitalism. He's the biggest, richest middleman in human history. He doesn't make anything. He just sells things on his website and gets the UDPS to deliver the items for him. At least Jobs pretended to know how to make an iPhone.

I usually hate memes because they suck, but this one has always made me laugh:

https://preview.redd.it/lsuz4u4h6jxd1.png?width=227&format=png&auto=webp&s=f0e4fb2a92bce9fde5c9227edf5ce4d36525b4fb

These new techbro CEOs are the legacy of the 1980s, a decade so awful that America's Last Hippie, Abbie Hoffmann, simply could not stomach the notion of another decade like it. (Anyone who thinks that the explosion of Nirvana signalled some kind of seismic shift in the youth of America's give-a-shit-o-meter is kidding themselves. Nirvana's message was a jaded one. "Here we are now. Entertain us.") And it's only gotten worse now with people worshipping Instagram influencers and our new tech overlords. Do I sound like a paranoid Pynchon fan when I say that I'm a little worried that Google, a private corporation that has amassed more money, data, information, and power than any company in human history, quietly dropped their "Don't be evil" motto? Why did they do this if not to allow for the possibility that their future army of A.I. bots, drones, and servants might possibly go Skynet on us and decided that all humans are a threat, not just our enemies? Why have we put so much trust in Google? Because Sergey and Larry like to play up their humble beginnings working out a garage? Apple started in a garage too. Hell, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers reconvened in the late 1990s with John Frusciante back in the fold, they wrote their biggest selling album, Californication, which sold 15 million copies, in their singer's garage. Humble beginnings in a garage do not an ethical person make. As far as Google is concerned, there was no war for out privacy. We just gave it away because it's convenient to have a smart phone on us at all times. Honestly, I feel like the last man on earth who does not own a cellphone. I don't want to be tracked down. And I'm not immune to the pull of technology. If I had a phone I'd spend all my time staring at it and I'd never get any reading done.

Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was supposed to "explicate and explain" the 80s. It was supposed to be the prestige novel that indicted everything bad about that decade, but it's overwrought and pretentious. The best novel about the 80s, especially the way blind corporate Wall Street greed bled over into the daily aspirations of average Americans, and the way Regan fetishistically tried to make the America of the 1980s as close to the America of the 50s, is Bright Lights, Big City.

Two novels ABOUT the 80s but published later: Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho and Arthur Nersesian's The Fuck-Up are both excellent as well. The fall of Nersesian's nameless narrator from upper class Manhattan luxury to homelessness in a few short months is one of American literature's finest depictions of a man who loses everything. Equal in its unflinching poignancy of the decline of George Hurstwood from a man of means to a homeless beggar in Theodore Drieser's Sister Carrie.

But back to Pynchon. He was probably so disgusted by the death of the hippie dream that he dashed off Vineland in a few feverish months. Nothing else can explain the shocking drop-off in quality between Gravity's Rainbow and its follow-up.

I think David Foster Wallace hit the nail on the head in a letter he wrote to Jonathan Franzen shortly after reading Vineland and being appalled by it: "I get the strong sense he’s spent 20 years smoking pot and watching TV.”

This turned out to be not too far off the mark, as Pynchon's peripheral but sustained involvement with The John Larroquette Show would demonstrate. Pynchon was and is no stranger to primetime network television. He's even voiced himself of The Simpsons. Twice! The fact that he chose to write about sloth when The New York Times approached him in 1993 and asked him to pick one of the seven deadly sins and write about it was a bit of a wink and a nod to his fans. Pynchon was well aware that his fans had waited seventeen years for a novel that almost nobody ranks as his best. We all pretty figured out that the guy probably watched a little too much TV. Writing isn't riding a bike. If you don't use it, you lose it.

Anyway, Against the Day has some damn impressive writing. Like G.R., it's strongest section is the set piece at the beginning with the Chums of Chance at the World's Columbian Exposition, though I also really loved the Webb Traverse storyline. The scene where he realizes he has been betrayed is masterfully written.

There are SO many passages in Against the Day that rank among Pynchon's very best. You can tell that New York City has begun to rub off on him (he moved there in the early 80s soon after firing Candido Donadio as his agent and taking up with her protege, Melanie Jackson.) The Melanie Jackson Agency's first sale was Pynchon's Slow Learner. This is not to say she is not a fine agent though. Just a year later, she convinced a publishing house that had already turned down Steve Erickson's debut novel Days Between Stations to accept and publish it. That's damn good agenting. Anyway, my point is, they moved to New York City sometime in the early 80s. By the time AtD was published, Pynchon had firmly established himself as a New York writer. He went to lunch with other writers like Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie. And he began writing about New York City with a mixture of blatant fondness and bitterness.

First of all, there's a great line where one of the novel's 200 characters says "this is New York. Disrespect was invented here."

But there is also a more poignant complaint about how gentrification takes something away from a city that can never, ever be restored:

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

I humbly submit that said violator is Rudy Giuliani. There's another line somewhere in the book about Times Square being "jackhammered into somebody's idea of an improvement" which is definitely a jab at the Guiliani-led Disneyfication of NYC.

I also really love this passage which is probably from the "Iceland Spar" section, where Pynchon waxes rhapsodic about ice and how it is a living creature in the following gorgeous sunblast of prose-poetry:

But ice always crept back into his nighttime dreaming. The frozen canals. The security of the ice. To return each night to the ice, as to home. To recline, horizontal as ice, beneath the surface, to enter the lockless, the unbreachable, the long-sought sleep.... Down in the other world of childhood and dreams, here polar bears no longer lumber and kill but once in the water and swimming beneath the ice become great amphibious white sea-creatures, graceful as any dolphin. When his grandmother was a girl, she told him once, the sisters announced in school one day that the topic of study would be Living Creatures. "I suggested ice. They threw me out of class."

Beautiful fine writing. Wood may not like Against the Day but even he admits that Pynchon has talent. "It may be that he has too much." (I think what he means by this is Pynchon is so talented that he cannot help but run the gamut of styles and formal approaches. Lesser authors find themselves paralyzed by the infinite menu offered up by the blank page. Pynchon seems to relish it. It's not wrong to say that Pynchon's characters are often two-dimensional, save for Mason & Dixon, who are fully formed in that novel. The above passage has all the hallmarks of Pynchon. As Wood also notes, the best parts of the book are when the novel "'dreams' (one of Pynchon's favourite words)". There is also a subtle touch of humour at the end there. It's not as blatant as the disaster at the mayo factory or the stodgy nitpicking of Lindsay Noseworth, the second-in-command on the skyship Inconvenience. He reminds me of the character David Schwimmer played in Band of Brothers. A clueless idiot drunk on the little authority bestowed upon him. He's funny. James Wood has also admitted that, unlike DeLillo or Roth, when Pynchon tries to be funny, he is really funny. The Disgusting English Candy Drill from Gravity's Rainbow, where Slothrop is forced to eat one awful British confection after another, is fucking hilarious: The Meggazone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss alp.

I think that James Wood has a lot of (grudging) respect for Pynchon because he clearly appreciates the man's sheer talent. He just doesn't care for the silly songs or the juvenile names Pynchon insists on giving his characters. These are perfectly normal gripes. Many people find the songs irritating. I know of three people who couldn't get into V. because it breaks into song on pretty much the first page, if my memory serves me. I agree with Wood's central assessment: "There are huge pleasures to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists."

I don't think Scarsdale Vibe is scary. What disappointing about this is the fact that I get the strong sense he is supposed to be scary. Instead he comes off as a distant cousin of the character in Inherent Vice who chides Doc for paying rent to a landlord, saying it precludes him from ever becoming or joining the manor born. I also agree with Wood's theory that Pynchon is "easy to like politically" because his anger is always directed at the right targets. He hates the same things we do, which is why we like him. But would we like him if he were an outspoken far-right dude, like Mark Helprin, a hugely talented novelist with some bizarre ideas about copyright and property ownership?

I adore that novel A Soldier of the Great War but I wouldn't want to share a conversation with the man who wrote it. Then again, I wouldn't want to meet Pynchon either. I respect the guy too much to put him on the spot by fawning over him, "I'm your biggest fan!" style.

I admit to taking a peek at that recent photo someone took of him standing in line to vote with his son, but even if I did recognize Pynchon in public, I'd leave the guy alone. He's given me thousands of hours of entertainment and he deserves whatever tiny shards of privacy a person living in the biggest city in the United States, a city whose every square inch is surveilled by CCTV cameras, and whose every citizen walks around with a camera in their pocket.

I liked the Wood review because it helped me to understand Against the Day better. I don't agree with all of Wood's conclusions but I agree with many of them. I also agree with his opinion on the infantilization of literature. I do think it's silly that grown adults go around reading Harry Potter books. I've never read a Harry Potter book and I don't plan to. There's too much to read and too little time. And I'm too damn old for wizards and warriors. I loved Bruce Coville's Goblins in the Castle when I was eight because it was written to be read by eight-year olds.

My biggest beef with Wood is his hatred of Don DeLillo. Considering the fact that Wood is so damn strident about "seriousness" in adult literature, I simply cannot grasp why he gave Don DeLillo's Underworld such a savagely negative review. The book is incredible, particularly the first section (which was initially published separately as Pafko at the Wall).

I'm suspicious of a critic who demands seriousness from his American novels but then outright dismisses DeLillo's ultimate achievement. Underworld is a very long, very serious novel about baseball, nuclear waste, infidelity, and a thousand other things. It seems like it would be right up Wood's alley. I think maybe he just doesn't "get" America. He also dislikes Donna Tartt, which I can't abide.

One last thing: Isn't it kind of creepy that DeLillo's Underworld and Rushdie's Fury have such similar front covers that seem to anticipate 9-11? I know that's not the World Trade Center on the cover of Fury, but that gathering storm cloud positively smacks of menace. The front cover of Underworld shows one of the World Trade Center towers shrouded in smog and shot from a low angle, which diminishes the size of the tower because it seems to disappear as it rises. There is something eerie and prescient about both these front covers and the novels themselves. (The comparisons end there. Fury is a minor effort from Rushdie. Underworld is the Mt. Rushmore of postmodern literature.)

https://preview.redd.it/l41t05lc5fxd1.png?width=258&format=png&auto=webp&s=e8a6f15533ee764883915b1a3c7b2f3ca4890ae8

https://preview.redd.it/k70hu6mb6fxd1.png?width=218&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c2a1067637fac813e4b799eea26e2281a250a03

The photographer André Kertész took the Underworld photograph through his apartment window in Manhattan. He took a similar photo on a rainy day which is almost identical, save for the drops of rain on the window. I like both photos, but the one chosen for the novel's cover is better, I think. It really captures what DeLillo calls the "raw sprawl of the city," how cities are never, ever complete. They are palimpsests, with layers built on top of other layers. There is even a bible quote about how there is no such thing as a "finished" city.

Hebrews 13:14: For here we have no lasting city. We are building the city that is to come.

https://preview.redd.it/77typf8lajxd1.png?width=546&format=png&auto=webp&s=31b33456ebd785aa38dd29e8200fb15bb1a23ba5

Against the Day obviously came out half a decade after 9-11, but the paperback version has a front cover that also seems to obliquely reference that day, specifically those poor people who were forced to jump from the windows to escape the intense heat of the burning jet fuel. There is a line in Against the Day where a character stands on the precipice of a very tall building, kind of like Adam Driver quivering at the precipice of a very tall building in Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. This character imagines what it would be like to jump off, thereby "asserting his reality against them all in one last roaring plunge from rooftop to street."

Check out the paperback cover below of the first paperback edition of Against the Day below. It's almost as if the cover designer had that very quote in mind:

I might be grasping at straws, but this could be an oblique reference to those poor souls trapped in the burning towers who had no choice but to leap out the windows to their deaths. Either way, the similarities between the covers of Underworld, Fury, and Against the Day (paperback version) are undeniable, IMO.

What else could that crazed pilot be doing but "asserting his reality against them all one last roaring plunge from rooftop to street"?

Anyway, Against the Day is a great book but it will never generate the enormous amount of literary criticism that Gravity's Rainbow produced, both because the novel received so many hostile reviews (though I suspect the hostility came from the fact that Penguin only gave out advance copies to reviewers about a week before the novel's publication date. James Wood is known to be a very fast reader but not all literary critics are. Perhaps their gripes with the book were their way of getting back at Pynchon for forcing them to read a 1,085-page novel and then write a review about it, all in a seven-day window. It took me a month to read Against the Day, and I took it with me everywhere.

I also think that there is a new strain of anti-intellectualism in American literary criticism. This, coupled with the fact that postmodernism is no longer the cultural force is was in the 1970s (can you imagine a book as hard to parse as Gaddis' J R winning the National Book Award, as it did in 1976? Or even a book as accomplished and formally inventive as Gravity's Rainbow winning the same award, as it did in 1973? Nuh huh.

Also, certain White Male Authors are being kicked out of the literary canon faster than an actual cannonball. John Dos Passos comes to mind. Somerset Maugham was hugely popular in his day too but has been all but forgotten by modern society. Not even the beloved Bill Murray could get audiences excited to go see his 1984 adaptation of Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which made a paltry $6.6 million on a budget of $13 million.

So there are plenty of reasons why Against the Day doesn't get the same respect as Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon (Pynchon's two best books, in my opinion). I think the general feeling amongst critics is that Pynchon has had his day, and the sun has set on his career. I don't agree. I loved Inherent Vice and I liked Bleeding Edge, though I don't think the latter is quite good enough to be Pynchon's swan song.

Here's hoping he's got one more book in him, a great big book that sums up the the central themes and concerns he's been grappling with since 1963, or maybe even before when he wrote juvenalia and musicals in high school. Even those early attempts at writing featured what would go on to be hallmarks of his later fiction: manic plots, characters with ridiculous names breaking into song, and an unbudgeable paranoia.

I think Against the Day should be read by any serious Pynchon fan, but I don't think anybody thinking of checking Pynchon out should start with it. Mountaineers don't start with K2. You have work your way up to the big long epic ones. The entry point for Pynchon should still be either The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow, the former his shortest and most accessible, the latter his most respected and beloved.

Howdy Weirdos,

It's Sunday again, and I assume you know what the means? Another thread of "What Are You Into This Week"?

Our weekly thread dedicated to discussing what we've been reading, watching, listening to, and playing the past week.

Have you:

• Been reading a good book? A few good books?
• Did you watch an exceptional stage production?
• Listen to an amazing new album or song or band? Discovered an amazing old album/song/band?
• Watch a mind-blowing film or tv show?
• Immerse yourself in an incredible video game? Board game? RPG?

We want to hear about it, every Sunday.

Please, tell us all about it. Recommend and suggest what you've been reading/watching/playing/listening to. Talk to others about what they've been into.

Tell us:

What Are You Into This Week?

​

​

- r/ThomasPynchon Moderator Team

I just finished watching inherent vice and loved it and now I actually want to give his books a try. I have gravity's rainbow, V, and bleeding edge. Which of the 3 would you recommend I start with? Btw I know nothing about any of them and I'd like to keep it that way. I like going into books blind

صراخ ينقطع عبر السماء

One of the words for "Screams" in Arabic صراخ/Sur-Akh is coincidentally rooted in the same word the name for rockets صاروخ/saw-rookh. Aside from the obvious opening line of GE, he even delves into the conflicts of creating a national script for the Kyrgyz people when Tchitcherine is reminiscing his days when he was sent to the VTsK NTA's Voiced Uvular Plosive committee as he blasphemed in translating the Quran angering the Arabists.

As casting director for the upcoming film adaptation I am pleased to announce that we have found an actor to play Dominus Blicero. Some of you may know him as Lieutenant Weissmann from his time in Deutsch-Sudwestafrica. The Oven awaits us all! (Let’s hope for good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes!!!!)

Anyone else catch this? Page 122 of my copy of Inherent Vice, one of the sketchy right wing provocateur groups Coy is maybe working for is called the Public Disorder Intelligence Division. Perhaps hyphenated in a telling way??? Diddy freak offs were an open secret in the 2000s but seems to me Tom had some deeper suspicions…

This may be a bit of a dumb question, and not one that I expect anyone to have a definite answer to, but it's been something that I've been wondering. I'm currently working on a final project for school centering on Pynchon's use of pop culture, specifically in Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, and wanted to hear other reader's interpretations.

Howdy Weirdos,

It's Wednesday once more, and if you don't know what the means, I'll let you in on a little secret: another thread of Casual Discussion!

This is our weekly thread dedicated to discussing whatever we want to outside the realm of Thomas Pynchon and tangentially-related subjects.

Every week, you're free to utilize this thread the way you might an "unpopular opinions" or "ask reddit"-type forum. Talk about whatever you like.

Feel free to share anything you want (within the r/ThomasPynchon rules and Reddit TOS) with us, every Wednesday.

Happy Reading and Chatting,

- r/ThomasPynchon Moderator Team

Just laughing at this XD

[contains spoilers to V.]

Hello, fellow weirdos.

Background:

I've been ghost-reading this sub for about a year now. I discovered Pynchon after reading Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and after reading a lot about Pynchon (mainly Reddit posts and overviews of GR), attempted to read him chronologically.

So after swallowing Slow Learner, I embarked on my V.oyage. (excuse me)

To say that this opus of a 26 year old (my age) rewired the way I used to think about literature is to say nothing (I suspect most of this sub's dwellers are past this whoa-point already). Naturally I have billions of questions and no one IRL to discuss them, so.

Main question:

What, in your understanding, was the cultural atmosphere in the '50s Nueva York that Pynchon attacks with his portraits of the Whole Sick Crew? Does he actually attack it, or is it my misreading? How common was this sort of "bohemian circles" back then?

Commentary:

It is comparatively easy for me to relate to Profane's disorientation and fear of commitment, and to Stencil's obsessive need for structure and rationality.

I can very much feel the animate/inanimate dichotomy - a struggle which is very much present and hard to ignore in our daily lives, with social media, digital porn, yada yada... (brain-computer interfaces? synthetic humans? sex robots?)

Sure, but what's the deal with the decline in morality and culture?

I've never been to US, and was born half a century after the year of book's setting, so naturally I would expect lots of lost-to-time-and-space bits of cultural field which Pynchon was native to while I'm not. Which is fine when it comes to easily googlable Proper Nouns, brands, places and songs. (I use Grand's «A companion to V.», John David Ebert's cycle, and all three of Russian translations [all of which are bad btw]).

But the way Pynchon portraits the "decadent bohemian" group (am I getting this right?) - these aimless individuals, who do questionable art, find heavy boozing and being not able to "keep their flies zipped" funny - this entire group feels so deeply unsettling and at times hostile to me.

The only person from the Crew I find relatable (apart from Profane) is Rachel, with how hard she cringes at the creeps like Pig. Ok maybe also Winsome a bit.

No secret Pynchon wrote under «The Waste Land» influence: his first short stories are full with T. S. Elliot's allusions and quotations. Would you call the Crew's worldview a product of such post-Depression post-WWs wasteland?

More questions:

Does 26 years old Pynchon mock such "bohemian" lifestyle? condemn it? (For example during Winsome's soliloquy before his defenestration attempt.)

What would the parallel of the Foppl's siege party / Poe's Prospero masquerade and the Crew's lifestyle imply?

What does he see as a better alternative? At some point Winsome, disappointed and upset, tells Ruby/Paola about Walden and the countryside - does Pynchon hint that isolation and forms of social disobedience, that rival the big city's turbulent lifestyle, are (in his rendition) the solution?

Do you think that Tom himself was a frequent guest on such parties? If so, do you imagine him a "party goer who suddenly realized the meaningless of the decadence", or rather that meme guy in the corner?

I find it believable that Pynchon might have criticized the real people he knew and use them as prototypes for the Crew's members. Do you think Richard Fariña might've been one of them?

Why on Earth every single female character in this novel is so overly sexualized? Do you believe this to be a young's writer thing? Or rather a stylistic device to demonstrate a) how horny the protagonists and the like are b) the extent of the objectification and commodification of beauty? How does it fit the overall decadence Pynchon feels is happening? (was happening in the '50s US)

Bottom line:

I feel like I might lack the cultural context (I definitely do, lol).

Please help me to obtain it, if you're interested.

Would appreciate any comments! Thanks.