/lit/ - Literature

>>7343729
Even if you don't love his books (you're a pleb if you don't like them, but we'll let it go for now), Pynchon is one of the coolest people to ever live, and I mean that as both the extent and limit of his greatness. His family was on the Mayflower, and he was at the center of the action when the world jumped the shark during WW2, handpicked to carry on the legacy of the Manattan project before he rejected that future to serve as a lowly seaman and disappear into the burgeoning counterculture, to form it and be formed by it. He's one of very first people to comprehend the enormity of the second world war and its aftermath, arguably the Adam of the nuclear age, and it's just icing on the cake that he's a god-tier author. All the memes really miss that he wrote Gravity's Rainbow out of fear and anger and drug-fueled paranoia over things that weren't part of the public consciousness then and are still rejected from the mainstream narrative today, and that Mason and Dixon is his conciliatory love letter to America and the western world as an older, less idealistic man.

He may not be the greatest American author, but his life is truly one of a kind, even given how little we know about it, and nobody else got as close, personally and in prose, to the heart of his generation's key events.

>>7035321
Yeah, I saw the documentary in Cambridge and saw Genesis on display in Rome.

>>6636771
I think he's saying that the critical atmosphere is changing so that people who can't identify with that have a voice, and alienating enough of them means you didn't capture America quite well enough, so the bar for what can be the Great American Novel is getting higher. We may look back on literature from this decade and find that there's a Great Jewish-American novel and a Great WASP-American novel but no single Great American novel.

My brain is seized up. I can see my cleats catch and pull the turf under me but my eyes are up and I can see two defenders approaching from the left, converging on a point behind me, Washburn, with the ball. I dip to get under the fast one, the weak side backer, and am caught short, nauseated by the wet-dog musty smell of over-roasted weenies in rained-on tin foil the paint lines on my facemask come into sharp focus and my legs buckle in time to be scooped up and over onto my ass by the backer. I stay down for a second and hear coach calling me back to the sideline. Estes is coming out to replace me.
I can hear Estes mom cheering in the front row of the bleachers, so I guess he's doing fine. That probably means the end of my season. Coach likes to play his starters hard, and there's no way I'm keeping that position after tonight. We're up, 28-19, but “The Silver Fox” clearly isn't thrilled with that lead, not against DeKalb county. DeKalb's head coach is losing his mind, jumping up and down, feuding with the offensive coordinator over his headset all night. Their field is scabrous from the summer drought and every play raises clouds of grit that have already sent one of our linemen out of the game with an asthma attack, and through this haze the packed home stands resemble a rookery of seabirds on the cliffs of a foreign shore. Following the game is impossible. My eyes bounce back and forth, the jerseys distinguishable only when both teams are lined up and still. My stomach won't tolerate the chaos, so I fix my eyes on a point in the stands, where a black woman with two young boys fans her face with a roster and hands bits of something out of her purse to pacify the children. She grabs one of the boys with her free hand and points out to the field, and my heart races for a second, thinking that she's noticed me staring at her family. “Look at that white boy, number... yeah number eighteen, Kinnaird” I imagine her exclaiming to her son “starin' at us like he broke down here or something. Better get his head in the game in a minute.”
The woman's not pointing at me, of course. She's here to fret and pray for a son or nephew battling it out on the field. I watch her until our guys kneel the ball twice and the clock runs out. We gather for a prayer at the fence with fans and the band, the team kneeling in a semicircle around Coach, our gray haired warrior priest, gloves gripping sweat-drenched collars to wobble with our heartbeats and clench our eyesg piously as Coach intones the loudest prayer ever raised to heaven over the din of diesel exhausts and trunk-sized subwoofers pulling out of a dirt parking lot, their headlights illuminating the ninth grade abstinence teacher's outstretched arms, which remain overhead several beats after Coach had finished.