/lit/ - Literature

Share your Pynchon sighting stories. In 2012, I passed a sidewalk cafe in Manhattan where he was sitting alone. He was reading a copy of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”. His lips were moving as he read.

He'll be 82 in 6 months. What's his endgame, /lit/?
What's his big farewell novel?

>>12107918
Post of the year. In a word, based

Late 2019 is when the new big one is coming out.

>>12088579
Based and Pynchpilled desu. Gass, Gaddis, DeLillo, Barth, Barthelme, DFW and all the rest of the Mediocrity Squad would bomb orphanages to have half of the talent that ol’ Tommy had. People will be reading Gravity’s Rainbow a hundred years from now. That alliteration-abusing boomer snoozefest The Tunnel will fade into dust.

>>12035115
your move.

You never did The Kenosha Kid.
I did The Kenosha Kid

>Pynchon made two cameo animated appearances on the television series The Simpsons in 2004. The first occurs in the episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", in which Marge Simpson becomes a novelist. He plays himself, with a paper bag over his head, and provides a blurb for the back cover of Marge's book, speaking in a broad Long Island accent: "Here's your quote: Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!" He then starts yelling at passing cars: "Hey, over here, have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But, wait! There's more!"[88][89]
>In his second appearance, in "All's Fair in Oven War", Pynchon's dialogue consists entirely of puns on his novel titles ("These wings are 'V'-licious! I'll put this recipe in 'The Gravity's Rainbow Cookbook', right next to 'The Frying of Latke 49'.").

Kill me.

>>11934828
GR is lit

The Sousaphone and The Kazoo
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dVPqkbr1x2M

Without wanting to look edgy, is he actually worth reading or not?

Do we know anything about what kind of books he read, admired, influenced him or was used for research?

Gravity's Rainbow

Rank his books from the easiest to hardest to read.

>>11873916
Pynchon's better

Whats his hardest book?

GR is better

>... Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government...

Why hasn’t anyone on here recorded his songs?

>>11732871
>mfw unemployed

History, CIA(?), movies or music he references and other stuff that would be usefull to know.

Great opperturnity to read GR. The_Bookchemist is doing a read-a-long of GR, and i suggest we should tag along.

>Reading Schedule
September 6th: Introduction.
September 20th: 1/8: Frontispiece to "Their footprints filled with ice, and a little later they were taken out to sea." Page: VN 109; O 92.
October 4th: 2/8: From "In silence, hidden from her" to the end of part 1. Page: VN 211; O 177.
October 18th: 3/8: The entire part 2, Un Perm' au Casino Herman Goering. Page: VN 331; O 278.
November 1st: 4/8: From the beginning of part 3 to "hovering coyly over the pit of death..." Page: VN 455; O 383.
November 15th: 5/8: From "A soft night" to "So somebody has to tell you." Page: VN 561; O 472.
November 29th: 6/8: From "Halfway up the ladder" to the end of part 3. Page: VN 730; O 616.
December 13th: 7/8: From the beginning of Part 4 to "Streets." Page: VN 821; O 692.
December 27th: 8/8: From "Streets" to end of the book. Page: VN 902; O 760.

Bookchemist's video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igdp6tFhTTI&t=

Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), the poetical lame visionary and hack architect often confused for a novelist, is the quintessential spiritual Baby Boomer. He is selfish, ignorant, erudite and stupid, a spiritually dead creature. The only story he has to tell is his own, and this is a story of decay; when the author realizes this fact, he rises to brilliant. When the dead man incorrectly believes himself amongst the living, the results are banal.


The problem with Lot 49 and his conspiracy novels as a whole is that Pynchon’s deep unwisdom. The man is characteristically a Boomer, and just like almost every other doped-up, over-educated egoist of his age, he has much to express about his life experiences, yet he has nothing but trite aphorisms to share. His self-imposed exile even feeds into this phony egoism, for it is through his reclusivity that Pynchon has garnered the most fame. It cannot be that Pynchon is trying to hide anything but his rather toothy face from us; the man’s character and personality are almost embarrassingly exposed through Benny Profane, Oedipa, and Slothrop, all basically-identical and easily identifiable as the author himself. More than his narcissism is the Boomer’s myopia. Like a compelling rock n roller, he has nothing truly interesting or philosophic to say, and little ability outside his three-chord rut. The Boomer is a narcissist primarily because he cannot envision any means to see outside of himself. Ideas are dead in him. In their place are the pop culture references and meaningless sex and drugs which populate Pynchon’s work and, nowadays, the minds of the West’s ruling class. At its best, this frenetic obsession with pop is harmlessly amusing; at its worse (cf. Vineland) it is pathetic and contemptible.

Pynchon’s best work is visionary and poetical, and Lot 49 at its best offers us a Blakean vision of hell through a marijuana haze. The madness swirling around Oedipa Maas, the decay of her husband, the deterioration of society, is all well portrayed. The inherent madness of conspiracy makes what Pynchon omits more terrifying than what he writes. And Pynchon, the McLuhanite he is, is a great seer of transhumanism; perceptive in the fact that he understands the human race has already effectively moved beyond itself, lodged in the puberty of something new or the death throes of something old. Like the poor cuckold in the novel, we do not need to think very hard about what it means to be materially and spiritually replaced by machines. Pynchon does not offer us a grand vision of this hell—how we got here, why we got here, if there is anything more (we need not talk Dante here; the young and wicked Rimbaud was wise enough to be able to chart what had led him to his fate). Perhaps it is because men are reticent to explicate the religion they actually believe in, or simply because Pynchon has everything to portray and nothing to say.

slow time of the year around here. i need a challenging, rewarding, wild ride. is he my best option?