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/lit/ - Literature

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17909540 No.17909540 [Reply] [Original]

you know i thought this was nonsense for the first 400 pages but once i got to the Pokler section i was blown away.

>"Learned to feel the gathering, the moving toward war that is unique to weapons programs. At first it simulates depression or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophageal spasms and unrecoverable dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing in the morning: calm, reasoned assurances to the screaming mental case inside - 1. It is a combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2. Its negative aspects are distributed isotropically. 2. It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is not a vector. 2.11 It is not aimed at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed at me . . . The coffee begins to taste more and more metallic. Each deadline is now a crisis, each more intense than the last. Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation. . . .('The new planet Pluto,' she had whispered long ago, lying in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon that ruled her, 'Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves slowly, so slowly and far away . . . but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust . . . deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling it the planet of National Socialization. Brunhubner and that crowd, all trying to suck up to Hitler now. They don't know they are telling the literal truth'. . . ."

>> No.17909663

>>17909540
I initially gave up at the slothrop toilet sequence, started again two weeks ago and am enjoying it so much more. I just finished the first part. I had to appreciate the style and stop insisting that everything had some deeper purpose, or that the plot is totally developed, etc.

>> No.17909689

>>17909663
the first section is far more disjointed than 2 and 3. i found it hardest to get through of the book so far. once the plot with Solthrop takes off it really kicks into gear.

>> No.17909744

>>17909689
I'm two chapters or so into part 2, and it certainly seems that way. Which I almost feel sad about, I loved his abrupt excursion into dutch people fucking up dodo island, for example.

>> No.17909755

>>17909744
don’t worry, wait till section 4.

>> No.17909775

>>17909540
I read it all through on my first attempt, understood it perfectly, grasped every reference. It was okay. Pretty disappointing compared to the reputation. The sex stuff was boring and repetitive despite its thematic relevance. Pynchon's lol XD robot chicken zomg random style just falls flat compared to, say, the restrained maturity of a true master like McCarthy.

>> No.17909789

>>17909775
apples and oranges

>> No.17909795

>>17909789
Au contraire, two postmodern authors.

>> No.17909799

>>17909775
>grasped every reference
So explain what Roger was doing with the Poisson distribution. Maybe you can start with the power series in part 1.

>> No.17909828

>>17909799
Elementary stuff to anyone who's taken undergrad probability courses, or even read an introductory book on the subject. The book itself even explains it.

Is your ego invested in being the only one to grasp the work? If so, try Finnegans Wake or something, the accomplishment would be more impressive.

>> No.17909865

>>17909828
>Is your ego invested in being the only one to grasp the work?
Not at all, I enjoy talking with other people about the books I read. I was just challenging you based on what you said in your first post (I'm a high T individual, you see), and you're not really meeting expectations...

>> No.17909888

>>17909865
You felt threatened that someone claimed to understand your favorite book. I get it, we've all been there.

Just remember that GR is math fanfic written by a guy who was rejected from a math degree. He wrote it as a cope while editing science papers for Boeing. As a cope, it really insists too much on itself. "I'm smart!!!!" he seems to scream at us on the page.

Thankfully his ego became much more secure after GR's success, and the later Mason & Dixon is a huge improvement, in this regard. It focuses on characters, with ideas put in the background where they belong.

>> No.17909921

>>17909888
It felt refreshing to me, actually. I've never seen anyone write competently and poetically about math and science. Makes me appreciate the work I do as far as it relates to math more than before I read GR.
In x-ray crystallography, you consider x-rays reflecting off of crystallographic planes (which are just two dimensional arrays of crystal atoms). It all seemed a bit boring to me, before. But to Pynchon,
>She has glanced into it, and out, but the truth's crystal sheets have diffracted all her audible words—often to tears—and he can't quite make sense of what's spoken, much less infer to the radiant crystal itself.
That's pretty beautifully put, imo.

>> No.17909945

>>17909921
Of course, I don't have to mention it to you because you got all the references, but x-ray crystallography was used to first determine the unknown internal structure of various materials, DNA for example, but also of crystals. So the analogy is quite good.

>> No.17909949
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17909949

>>17909540
I remember that part being where it really clicked for me too, especially the section with Kekulé. When I finished the book I had the idea of drawing some kind of pretentious diagram that combined the parabola and ouroboros images to plot out the novel's cyclical narrative structure, but I never got around to it and now I've forgotten everything. It's one of the few books I've read that's given me such a strong impression of being laid out geometrically.

>> No.17909992

>>17909775
This is slick bait that will get (you)’s

>> No.17910064

>>17909795
Pynchon's species of pomo is entirely discrete from McCarthy's. Don't act like you don't know this.

>> No.17910080

>>17909795
McCarthy is my favourite author and for all his dick sucking you don't even know that he has never ever been postmodern, you retard. McCarthy is literary "genre writer" or late modernist if you want to act like a high brow.

>> No.17910236

>>17910080
You clearly wouldnt recognize any postmodern work that didnt throw a pie in your face from a hot air balloon. Guess what, the term is not a synonym for wacky.

>> No.17910443

>>17910236
I know that. It is also not a synonym for experimental artsy writing.