/lit/ - Literature

>>18750412
annnd now there is shit. this is gross

>tfw pynched

>>18750449
its just gross, why is he so fixated on shit and piss. its revolting

am I surrounded by fecalpheliacs? you people make me sick and I see you everywhere

>>18751007
Because shit/piss and excretion/consumption are prevailing themes throughout. The eating of shit is a way to consume death, as per a later portion where it describes a toilet, but there are other instances

>>18751890
don't try to intellectualize away your perversions around me.

imagine getting filtered by this scene

>>18752041
another feces-obsessed pervert. What was your childhood like?

>>18750412
>mfw he is gonna read about sex with animals

>>18751007
He has survivor's guilt because all of his friends died in WWI.

>>18750412
that is nothing, op. in rabelais' fabulous gargantua and pantagruel, there is much pissing, even in gigantic amounts -- deluges of piss, a real flooding, a genocide of piss. imagine actually wiping out an entire village from one piss. such are the tales of gargantua and his sonne pantagruel. so as you can see pissing has a noteworthy history in the western canon.

>>18752071
no reason to want to get shit on man you sick freak

>>18750412
>>18751007
>>18751949
>>18752059
>>18752193
obvious b8

>>18752228
No, obviously it's disgusting.

poor pudding was conditioned to associate death, sex, and shit as one disgusting clusterfuck of a stimulus during the war. sad really.

>>18751007
eat the turd wagie

>>18752544
>sex

What? Were they having lots of gay sex on the fronts

>>18752087
That's merely vulgar. What >>18750412 >>18751890 describe is a perverted fetishism. There is a difference.

>>18750412
>pissed on
keep reading :^)

>>18752719
yeah, I did, it got worse and more revolting.

>>18752939
But why is he eating shit? Who is really making him eat shit? Is there any critique of the person who is eating shit or forcing him to eat shit?
Ten points if you answer correctly. Ten fucking points, man, think about it!

>>18752595
iirc it mentions something about pudding getting a boner thinking about using the machine gun. but its been some time.

>>18753134
oohh fuck are you saying that the American Government is responsible for his shit-eating because they were the ones that forced him to fight in ww1 and he became traumatized and developed perverted sex freak fetishes?
So it's beyond his control, he is a broken man who has been so thoroughly abused by an indifferent gluttonous government that he has been reduced to getting pissed on.
also, it's clear that Pointsman has a very detailed profile of his psychology.

>>18753655
No i'm saying that it's governmental forces in general, but mostly british. Pointsman analyzes his past, etc and organizes everything about his meets with katje (alot like blicero does but blicero does it from a place of sincerity and genuine love and not a completely hopeless conviction that he's in the right like pointsman has - come at me laura) to keep pudding from pulling funding, lays out all the freaky psychological abuse going down there, then gets funding to do even more terrible shit with his military/governmental powers.
Pointsman is pimping a preexisting kink for his own benefit. The reasons the kink exists in the first place are because of something like what you say and that >>18752544 says.
The satire in this book is fucking ruthless. It never gets as horrific or demented as it is in this scene, but its consistently fucked up or inappropriately jovial. Just read the most fucked up sections in this book as making a point. There's also the amazing sentence where pynchon describes the pilot of the Enola Gay - the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on japan - as having his finger poised over the atomic clit of Miss Enola Gay, ready to set the japanese ablaze in a hiss of fat crackling or some shit like that

>>18751007
>its just gross, why is he so fixated on shit and piss. its revolting

Bump. Great thread desu

>>18753753
>come at me laura
lol no, I like your take G

>>18751007
This ain't your daddy's book!

>>18756453
yeah, I wish I would have known. I recommended this book to my sister before I got to this part, now if she reads it she will think I'm some kind of sex pervert.

>>18756442
Thanks baby

Essential posturing author.

oh great now a horse is shitting on people who passed out from too much hasish. does the literal shit never end?

'at this rate Tamaras gonna get here before tonight'
ok that was funny slothrop

>>18757352
Just some people with issues that evolved in a scat fetish. Just ignore them.

>>18750412
Wait till you get to the Nose-Sex scene...

when does this start making sense? is there going to be a payoff or eureka moment?
Im like half way through and all i know is slothrops boners seem really important to people, but it kind of seems like all the scheming at 'The White Visitation' is pointless. What the fuck is going on at the Herman Goering casino? What is slothrops job? who does he report to? what is up with the octopus? What was going on with the hansel and Gretl femboy nazi stuff? fuck man

>>18757380
MAJOR MARVEY SUCKS NIGGERS

>>18757763
By the time it starts making sense (the west's original sin being modern analysis) you'll have forgotten what you're supposed to analyze ;{
It's supposed to be overwhelming - just be overwhelmed and grab at what you can.

Slothrop's boners reverse cause and effect. Maybe - we don't know. It kind of seems like the white visitation is more or less pointless, makes the pointsman satire more brutal, but there's a struggle between scientific method and statistics at play here. Herman goering casino is the place slothrop is told to learn about the rocket so they can do further experiments with his knowledge. Slothrop's job is to basically do what the gov says but he gets everybody wasted and then muckermaffic has to go home because he's blown his cover, the octopus has been conditioned to kidnap katje and slothrop is being tested to guage his reaction to things like this. A two way relationship and katje spying, a way for these three to "play death" and find a wartime version of love laden with symbolism.
It's pretty based. The femboy nazi stuff was my fav part of the first half probably, next to the wales' tales drinking game and the pointsman satire. Part 3 and 4 are great too.

redpill me on v. His way of writing is so descriptive , yet incoherent

>>18758358
It's perfectly coherent. It's a fractured double narrative in which v rubs shoulders with fascism and discontent everywhere she goes. Also the historical sections all have implications on the present

Bump

>>18751007
Because Rabelais, obviously.

>>18759165
And because burroughs, buhhhhros

>>18750412
because it's funny. poop is funny, scrotums are funny. our human body and the antics we through over it is ridiculous and funny. think about all the work we go through just to make our hips move forward and back and cum, it's funny. think about eating food knowing ur gonna poop it out later, it's funny. it's not gross, it's just ridiculous and funny. it's even funnier that we do it knowing how ridiculous and funny it is. it also can be deeper, showing that the natural doesn't contaminate the spiritual, by keeping reality in front of you. you might be anxious over your sexual emotions or bodily functions, but it's just funny and there's no reason to feel bad about it.
>spending hundreds of dollars and so much anxiety just to apply friction to fleshy cylinder just to CUM just to say ahhhh im gonna fuckeng CUMMMMM
lol, shits hilarious, see >>18753884 >>18759165

>>18751007
Eating shit is the ultimate expression of nihilism, before torture

>>18759387
its not nihilism if it gives you a boner man

>>18759396
it's the peak of sexual deviance before you know that you're going to die soon and believe in no gods
basically it's one of activities at a limit of perversion

>>18759427
Yeah i can see this. I was gonna argue that the one doing the shitting or dominating is peak nihilism, but they're really two sides of the same coin and if one is ultimate nihilism the other is penultimate nihilism.

>>18759427
just because you are a nihilist doesn't me you have to be some sex freak

>>18759862
Bait

>>18759892
pervert

>>18759901
Shitty bait, faggot

Book name?

>>18760017
Electromagnetism's Mirage

>>18760017
Force applied to all objects on earth pulling them towards the ground's colours bent into an arch after a rainstorm

Read this next op

>>18757763
>slothrops boners seem really important to people
His erections predict where the bombs will drop.

>>18760132
But bombs don't keep dropping on him when he goes to france

>>18750412
I'll take this to be a GR general thread. I tried making this post 2 days ago but 4chan won't let me make a thread for some reason.

I just finished this book today. A lot of it went over my head although its obvious to me you're not meant to keep track of all the three letter organisations and the novel wants you to be confused and lost it. Pynchon's ability to bring many seemingly disparate and absurd things together as themes and motifs in a novel is to be admired and is one of the few things I found interesting here, how erections, rockets and Pavlovian conditioning, octopuses etc. are all connected somehow.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Pynchon is shit at writing characters it just seems to me he has no interest in doing so he's obviously more focused on plots and themes. That being said I dislike how undeveloped the characters are.

Whether or not this a great novel I can't say as I didn't understand it nearly well enough in fact at the end I actually thought the guy was somehow strapped to the outside of the rocket however I've since found out he was inside it. I can't work out why this book had to be hard to understand plot-wise? Why could he not have written it in a way more people could have understand it clearly?
I think many people rate this book so highly just because they found it difficult and didn't understand it entirely, they attribute their not knowing how x y and z piece together to the novels intricacies and genius. I really hate how books try and be puzzles like this the only person I've read that does it well is Borges in his short stories. This is why I like Cormac McCarthy so much his novels have nothing of this nonsense of having to strain your brain trying to untie the knots bullshit and its obvious to me he'd detest it. I'm reminded of something McCarthy said now along the lines of him not respecting any literature that doesn't deal with life and death, now its obvious to me that somehow death is commented upon in this book but I lack the insight to understand how.

Anyway I'm getting tired of writing about this book but I'd love to hear what you lads have to say about it especially on how it relates to life and death.

>>18760277
The common answer is about how western society is on a path towards analysis and death. Blicero talks about modern analysis being a type of original sin the west can't correct, so the novel forces you to analyze it to realize how terrible analysis truly is and how bad you've been infected by its disease.
I think it had to be difficult because it spans so many topics - race relations, governmental systems, war, etc are explored so thoroughly and they all boil down to analysis, pynchon's main point. All of these things and more are driven by the west's need to understand, exploit and kill to further its own inhuman end. The point, like i've said, becomes really meta when it forces you to analyze it. We are all complicit in this analysis death game, and we are all victims of it. But it's too complex to figure out a concrete plan to fix it or even understand it with its growth.