/lit/ - Literature

>>19703890
There's nothing to understand really, its 800 pages of schizo. If you gathered a hundred people who believe they "got" GR in a room, they'd all explain it in a different way

>>19703907
Is it somewhat enjoyable?

>>19703972
If you have the "artistic mindset" then possibly

>>19703982
Fair enough, I'll give it a go right now. Thanks.

>>19703982
>artistic mindset
Literally the opposite.

>>19704003
You know what I mean when I say "artistic"

>>19704003
engineer here. how so? you ever been in a room with engineers before? they would not understand GR and more than they would understand Van Gogh's wheatfield series. they are barred by empiricist stockholm syndrome from understanding art or having any creative ideas outside of whatever depressingly specific problem they are manufactured to focus on

>>19704023
I have a 153 IQ, am an electrical engineer, and understood GR easily.

>>19704023
There are more people besides Engineers na'mean. There's nothing artistic about his Zaniness and humor, it can be enjoyed purely for that.

>>19703890
It's not as hard as it's hyped up to be, as long as you focus and take it slow you'll be fine, but it is quite easy to enjoy. Great humour

>>19704083
I have like a 1330 IQ, so
My cousin is at 2000+

>>19704023
Pynchon was literally an aerospace engineer you fucking dolt.

>>19704106
>aerospace engineer
He wrote technical reports of their work.

>>19704106
im well aware, why do you think i brought up engineers numbnuts?
>>19704083
do you seriously think what i was saying was,
>there are no engineers that can understand GR
>>19704092
>there are more people besides engineers
but what i replied to was, "literally the opposite of the artistic mindset". humor is not the opposite. i brought up engineers because he studied engineering. i'm referring to a mindset endemic to all STEM students, which is antithetic, i.e. the "opposite", to art

>>19704118
im the guy he was responding to. i dont know if pynchon ever worked as an engineer but he studied physics engineering which is basically the "jack of all trades, master of none" field, and we can at least call him an engineer to be charitable to upset anons that want to flex their vague knowledge over wiki pages

>>19703890
It is like Malazan in the fact that it tries really really hard to filter you in the first 100 pages, and then becomes surprisingly readable.
Some tips:
The fuck they are doin over there:
The setting is a little village/military base where the brits have send a bunch of occultists and other assorted retards to wage some kind of spiritual/psychological warfare on the nazis. They gather a bunch of people from an old insane asylum, do weird psychic tests with them, and film Nazi BLACKED interracial porn and broadcast it to the axis to lower morale.
Concerning Pirate:
Pirate has the weird ability to siphon daydreams from other people. The military uses this to keep high officers free from daydreams. If things go SCHIZO and Pirate is somewhere it is a daydream which Pirate syphons from someone
Concerning Slothrop:
Slothrop is an American send to England to fuck women and predict rockets in weird ways. His ability to predict rocket strikes has something to do with the conditioning done to him as a little child. It is not clear at first what that conditioning was, only that he now gets hard ons days before rockets strike. Also the assorted retards running psyops test some interracial warfare on him and thus broadcast fantasies of niggers fucking his asshole to him.
I apologise for any errors, Pynchon has sworn eternal emnity to the concept of properly formatted text, paragraphs or even chapters in this book, so it can be easy to misread his walls of text which draw on for 15 pages in a single ramble about christmas carols or some shit.

>>19704023
The autismo feud between the creepy pavlovian and the cucked anarchist statistician might get some chuckles from the engineer crowd

So... You never did the kenosha kid?

>>19703890
>>american take you schizo meds dear diary

FUCK YOU

>>19703890
pay attention to the people who pull the strings, if you loose track of what they are doing you will get lost.

>>19703972
if you havent read much, maybe

>>19704402
postmodernists have no poetic interest

>>19703972
GR wrote the book on modern day pop culture, so yeah

>>19704460
Only somebody who's never fucking read any of them would say that.
Pynchon writes beautifully when he's feeling more serious than zany.

>>19703890
Don't waste your time

>>19707342
You bumped the thread just to say that?

Page 350 atm, as soon as Slothtrop leaves Britain and enters the Zone, the race focus of the book heavily drops. No more niggers and negroes in every second paragraph, and while Slothtrop actually meets his first African in the zone, it is the least sensationalised description of race in the book yet.

Intentional as Britain symbolises war insanity and the control of an old state, while the Zone is wiped free from all power momentarily?

So racial obsession is tied to the growing power of "the center" in a state.

I get a kick out of people who try and use ideology to understand GR, especially when it is their own ideology.

>>19703890
I only remember the rocket limericks.

>>19707554
My favorite.
>There was a young fellow named Pope
>Who plugged into an oscilloscope
>The cyclical trace
>Of their carnal embrace
>Had a damn near infinite slope

>>19707548
Better than not trying to understand it, or anything, at all, like the average coward on this site

>>19703890
fat shaming books i see

>>19707608
Ignoring context so you can pretend to be right in your beliefs is about as cowardly as it gets.

>>19707634
Your kind is not even able to postulate an opinion even in the shroud of total anonymity, only ever destructive, never constructive.
Truly a waste of breath

>>19703890
don't believe any of the retards who tell you it's not supposed to make sense. pynchon's entire project is masking truth behind veneers of fiction. the conspiracies you pick up on are often true. paperclip, the nuclear project. there's something in there.

>>19707646
Following an ideology is the exact opposite of forming an opinion.

>>19703890
https://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/rainbow.htm
This is a pretty good reader's guide.

>>19707548
Pynchon wrote it with an ideology so...

>>19703890
It is an amazing and hilarious book

>>19704282
You never, did the Kenosha kid?

You never did the Kenosha… Kid…

You never did the Kenosha, Kid.

You never did… the Kenosha Kid

You. Never, did the Kenosha, kid!

You? Never did… The… Kenosha Kid?

>>19705996
no he doesnt desu

>>19708811
So? That is very different from ignoring context so you can use it as proof of your own ideology.

>>19704239
thank you, not OP but this motivated to pick up my dusty copy of GR to push through it, cause there's parts i really like and parts i dont understand

>>19709791
filtered

>>19709791
Retard

>>19709791
Kek anon you're a nigger aren't you?

For sale:
Kenosha kid, never did.

>>19703890
It's just postmodern crap. There's no meaning or purpose to it. Read this way pynchon provides a sort of dry, vaguely intelligent humor that can be enjoyable to read.

If at any point you try to make sense of it it's shit.

>>19711885
didn't read it

>>19711885
To be fair, though, I only read the first paragraph. Does that matter?

This is a neat companion. I found out about it after reading and looked at a few pages, they were free online but the artist decided to put them in a book and sell them.

Physical copy is really pricy though.

I'm real interested in Pynchon the human does any one know these answers or any way to find out?

What has he been up to lately?

What is his average daily day like?

What are his interests?

What does he enjoy?

How many friends does he have?

Does he like tv, movies, books, music, which ones?

Does he go out to dinner at nice restaurants often?

Does he have a collection of objects and art?

Does he have hobbies?

Is he happy?

Does he still write?

Is he interested in any younger writers?

Does he really have no interest in writing a work for cinema or tv?

>>19713893
>What has he been up to lately?
Mostly playing backgammon and reading.
>What is his average daily day like?
Banal other than the backgammon.
>What are his interests?
History, backgammon.
>What does he enjoy?
Backgammon.
>How many friends does he have?
Either too many or not enough, depends on the day. None of them play backgammon.
>Does he like tv, movies, books, music, which ones?
TV is good, most any sitcom will do, I like how they characterize stereotypes. Not much for movies, mostly read history books and books on backgammon. Mostly listen to jazz, primarily bebop and post bop.
>Does he go out to dinner at nice restaurants often?
No, never.
>Does he have a collection of objects and art?
Backgammon sets and forerunners to backgammon. Although not everyone would consider these art regardless of how ornate and exceptionally crafted they are.
>Does he have hobbies?
Backgammon
>Is he happy?
Sometimes.
>Does he still write?
Sure.
>Is he interested in any younger writers?
These days they are either younger than me and/or dead. Some are quite good.
>Does he really have no interest in writing a work for cinema or tv?
I wrote a proposal for a documentary about the history of backgammon and the culture which developed around it but there has yet to be any interest. It is not that I do not have an interest in it, it is more that I am incapable of making the compromises required to write for those mediums.

>>19703890
I have a 1st edition, found it at a second hand.
Looking forward to reading it this year.

>>19713949
What's his favourite post-bop album?

>>19714414
Nefertiti

>>19713949
Can I play backgammon at your house, Mr. Pynchon?

>>19714815
I can't see that happening, Anonymous.

Anyone else find that the Byron the Bulb story kind of predicted the Internet and it's implications? Always seemed very prescient to me but I haven't found many similar opinions.

It’s the “Call of the Crocodile” of it’s generation

>>19703972
>Is it somewhat enjoyable?
It was literally the worst prose I'd ever read. Or rather, the hardest - not in the sense that I didn't understand the words being used or get certain references or metaphors. The cadence, the general rhythm, was like it had been written by an alien, or an AI that had been trained to convey meaning through the written word but still couldn't make it sound like something an actual human being would say. I had to read every sentence twice, or read each word individually rather than parsing the sentence as a whole then put the individual blocks together. 'Turgid' was the critics' favourite description of it. I myself would use 'gruelling'.

I got about halfway through; after the first couple of chapters not so much reading it as a novel as studying it like an artefact from one of Lovecraft's works - bizarre and mentally poisonous simply by the nature of its construction. And you know what? Once you got past the obscurity of the prose, it was still boring, boring, boring. Maybe in the early 1970s readers got a frisson of a transgressive thrill out of reading about taboo subjects like Nazis, sex, and diving into a fucking toilet. But I can't believe for a second that anyone these days genuinely finds it interesting, daring, or insightful.

If you want to read a too-long book about WW2 codebreaking, read Cryptonomicon. Maybe it's not as experimental or philosophically 'deep' (i.e. pretentious) as Gravity's Rainbow, but it's orders of magnitude more readable, enjoyable, and intellectually stimulating.

>>19716504
I should probably add three caveats:

- I don't read a lot of serious literature. Mostly I read serious non-fiction and trash sci-fi novels. So I'm probably something of a lightweight when it comes to serious literature. However, I do read some serious literature and GR was far and away the worse experience I've ever had.

- As I said, I didn't finish it. For all I know it really comes together in the second half (although what could possibly be worth the agony of the first half I cannot fathom). I haven't read anything else by Pynchon, so my opinion of his writing is based on a very limited sample.

- I still think you should read it anyway. You won't truly understand until you see it for yourself. And maybe you'll find something I missed.

>>19713949
Why does he hang out on /lit/?

>>19716504
I think the style of it is actually the best part. Weird. I enjoyed figuring out its puzzles and the paranoia it generates in the reader. I also felt cool whenever I got a reference (which was not often, but I enjoyed figuring out references I didn't get, which was again an enjoyable learning experience). You can call that pretentious if you like, I won't disagree. But it's a cool way to learn about stuff if you ask me.

You might like Gore Vidal's essay about literature from around that time. Can't remember what it's called but he's fairly critical of GR at the end.

>>19716558
>- As I said, I didn't finish it. For all I know it really comes together in the second half (although what could possibly be worth the agony of the first half I cannot fathom). I haven't read anything else by Pynchon, so my opinion of his writing is based on a very limited sample.

Did you read the long chapter right in the middle? I think that's the best part. From what I remember (read this in like 2019) it describes arriving at the scene of a Nazi death camp, with some emotional motifs that are totally heartwrenching. The descriptions are horrifying and it's communicated brilliantly. The way the beginning and end chapters connect is also pretty cool, though I wouldn't tell you to read the rest of the book just for that.

>>19716504
filtered hard

>read Cryptonomicon
lmao

>>19716597
It's been a while but I don't think so; I'm not sure if I actually read half of it, just a decent chunk. I've kind of been meaning to go back to it, partly just to confirm it's as terrible as I remember, partly because I know my criticisms don't carry as much weight they would if I'd read the whole thing.

>>19716586
>You might like Gore Vidal's essay about literature from around that time. Can't remember what it's called but he's fairly critical of GR at the end.
Thanks anon, I may look that up.

>>19716605
It may not be as great as aging 90s tech geeks think it is, but it's worth reading, if only for the fact that strip out all the technical stuff and libertarian evangelism it's an enjoyable adventure story. It also has a lot of genuinely interesting information about WW2.

It's a really good book, worth reading just for the humor and certain sentences like "personal density..."

I am not sure why the retards here keep going on about "getting it". I'm becoming more convinced that nobody in this board actually reads.

The book is quite straightforward with you most places. If you're lost, read again. The post above with the spoilers does a good job of getting you situated. There's also plenty of supplemental material if you want to dig into every reference. The /r/thomaspynchon subreddit has good threads on it.

ITT: Dishonest cunts who haven't read it.

>>19716504
This type of nonsense gets posted by filtered retards who give up in the first chapter but pretend they kept going all the time, and I always respond with this page.
The kind of person who can read pic related and use words like "gruelling" and "pretentious" to describe it can only be too dumb for their opinions to be worth listening to.

>>19716504
>like it had been written by an alien, or an AI that had been trained to convey meaning through the written word but still couldn't make it sound like something an actual human being would say. I had to read every sentence twice
the actual takeaway here is that literary english is different than how people speak at the grocery store and that the ability to understand it has to be developed by reading literature. far from encountering a "lovecraftian artifact" you are describing the completely mundane experience of reading something several grades above your current literacy level. it's too bad you picked gravity's fucking rainbow as your first book without a spaceship on the cover - oh wait it DID have a spaceship on the cover, didn't it, that's one mystery solved.

but honestly the part where instead of finding the experience humbling you decided that you're just TOO SMART for pynchon and everyone else is wrong kinda dooms you to be a retard forever lol

>>19717540
Not him, take it easy.

>>19717415
It isn't the prose that's pretentious. The esoteric aspects are pretentious; the whole psychic spies, men who stare at goats concept is handled like it's profound but really it's just fucking stupid. And it's not the plot that gruelling, it's the way the sentences are structured. Naturally not every single line is awkward but a lot are; that isn't a particularly obnoxious example, but even so it just isn't structured how I would intuitively read something. Take that big paragraph in the middle.

>The corporal screams, unslinging his Tokarev and firing from the hip, by which time the chimp has leaped for a halyard.

Every fibre of my being says that

>The corporal screams and unslings his Tokarev, firing from the hip.

is the natural way to construct that thought. You then put 'The chimp has already leaped for a halyard' as part of the next sentence. I guess if I had to explain it I would say that surely the corporal screams first, and then reaches for his gun. You stop there, keep the sentence tight and clipped, appropriate for an action scene. Then the chimp's leap, rather than being in the same sentence as the corporal's reaction, should be part of the chimps actions, linked together as a single sentence but divided by clauses. But really it's a more intuitive feeling.

That's a fairly petty example, but it's a microcosm of why I hated reading the prose. Whatever I instinctively felt was the natural choice, Pynchon would do the opposite. Maybe it is just me, but so many other critics have described loathing the prose, and I feel like I can justify why I dislike it.

More objectively, that central paragraph is a mess. It should be split up into three at least, with break points at 'gangplank' and 'somebody'. Possibly after 'personnel' as well. There's so much going on the detail gets drowned when it's in a big block like that.

And as for 'sez': no. Just no.

>>19717540
>everyone else
>everyone
Half the critics who read it and most of the general public felt the exact same way.

Also, talking about reading comprehension fails, you have completely misunderstood what I mean. It wasn't that I couldn't get the meaning. There wasn't a line I didn't understand if I read it carefully enough. It was that the effort it took to parse the structure of the sentences just wasn't worth it. I'd have had similar trouble reading something that had been translated into Japanese and translated back again; the meaning would be exactly the same but the form all fucked up for no reason.

>>19716504
Try listening to the audio book so you can hear how the language flows, your language skills seem to be failing here.

>>19717672
>Actually it's just dumb
>And I dunno why but it just doesn't FEEL right
Why are you taking pages and pages to tell us this worthless shit and then calling anybody else's prose awkward?
There is no page you can post from any Pynchon novel where his writing doesn't flow beautifully. Please try to prove me wrong, if you've actually read any of them, instead of taking one single sentence and saying you want to move a fucking comma.

>>19717795
That is actually a great idea. I'm open to the idea that Pynchon and I just aren't on the same wavelength and if I could hear it how he meant it to be read it would click for me. Of course, maybe it'll still be shit but at least I'll be able to say that a little more objectively. Thank you for being more constructive than this moron >>19717813, who is clearly just butthurt that I'm questioning the intellectual relevance of his favourite thing to lord over the plebs.

>>19717672
based on your preoccupation with that aspect I know for a fact you didn't go beyond the first part of the book

>>19717856
>Y-you're just butthurt that I'm questioning it
You're rambling for thousands of words about vagueries and failing to say anything concrete.
I am providing you with samples of his prose, one to show he is in fact easily readable and the other to show how beautifully he can construct a paragraph.

>>19717856
Oy vey floorwit detected quit pretending you read it and you're worth a shit.

>>19717856
The guy who reads it does a fantastic job and has a great voice suited to the book. He did it so well that they hired him to do it again after the original vanished and all that was left were old worn cassette versions. Avoid the old cassette version, very noisy and generally the incomplete version which is on archive.org.

>>19717724
>It was that the effort it took to parse the structure of the sentences just wasn't worth it
the effort taken to read is where the "worth" is found. your brainlet insistence on dividing writing into "the prose" and "the meaning" is nerd culture retardation patterned after the "graphics vs gameplay" of videogames. i stand by my assessment that you're a stupid person who thinks he's above art and wants to epicly own it with tactics borrowed from cinemasins. DING! this sentence isn't how i would say it! why can't writers just write how i talk???

>>19716504
>pretentious
nigger this is how you describe yourself reading
>I got about halfway through; after the first couple of chapters not so much reading it as a novel as studying it like an artefact from one of Lovecraft's works - bizarre and mentally poisonous simply by the nature of its construction.

>>19717981
>reading Gravity's Rainbow = being worth a shit
Why do pseuds do this?

>>19718016
Of course prose and meaning are two separate aspects of a book, do you have fucking brain damage? They interrelate, and you can inform meaning through prose style, but they are fundamentally different things. If they weren't then translations would be completely pointless.

Continuing the video game metaphor, people who think GR is some plebfilter are like the vidya players who think their particular MMORPG is superior and anyone who doesn't like it is a casual who can't get past the game's skill barrier, when in fact the real reason they're defending is is because they've invested a hundred hours of pointless, repetitive button clicking getting the super-shiniest armour. Not only does the pointless grind not make the game better, it's actually a major reason it's terrible. There is no worth in effort for effort's sake, and people who treat literature like levelling up a skill tree are the exact kind of pseud that make everyone hate literature buffs.

I don't want Pynchon to take how I talk. I want Pynchon to write with elegance, clarity, and where appropriate beauty. GR has none of that.

>i stand by my assessment that you're a stupid person who thinks he's above art and wants to epicly own it with tactics borrowed from cinemasins
Thereby confirming *my* assessment that you are a massive pseud who only likes GR because it makes you feel intellectually superior to have read it. We notice the intellectual snobbery dripping from every word even if you don't. You couldn't just say I was wrong, you had to bring in "pleb" shit like nerd culture, video games and cinemasins.

>>19718092
I did notice the irony but I decided the metaphor captured what I was trying to convey a lot more succinctly than spelling it out could. I mean, you know exactly what I mean, don't you?

>>19718132
The way you talk about it makes it sound like every page of GR was written in some completely indecipherable code that you need a fucking decoder ring and fluency in Navajo to read. It wasn't. People keep posting samples for you and you're acting like they're in Chinese. Pynchon isn't even particularly difficult to read, you're just dumb and posting walls of text to obfuscate it.

>>19718132
anon do you understand we're talking about a book that contains an extended airborne cartoon pie fight, a guy running all over central europe in a novelty pig costume, mickey rooney smoking weed, and over a dozen limericks about having sex with rocket ships
it is not the fucking voynich manuscript

>>19718165
>Pynchon isn't even particularly difficult to read, you're just dumb and posting walls of text to obfuscate it.
Then why have decade after decade of reviews from professional critics kept describing it with words like 'turgid', 'overwritten' and 'unreadable'? People who have decided to read literary fiction for a living still hate having to slog through his work. As I have said, I'm open to the idea that it's just that my tastes and Pynchon's don't align and that if I could hear it as he hears it I'd understand, but I think after fifty years we have all the evidence we need that it's disliked by more than just the ignorant masses

>>19717672
>Every fibre of my being says that "The corporal screams and unslings his Tokarev, firing from the hip." is the natural way to construct that thought.
Why do you want a sentence describing a man spontaneously pulling a gun on a wild chimp aboard an out-of-control tugboat to be broken up into discrete fragments like some kind of technical manual? That's the most boring way you could possibly write an action scene, especially if the intention is to make it crazy and over the top. If Pynchon had followed your writing advice, Gravity's Rainbow would be exactly as "turgid" as you think it is.

>>19718213
You keep mentioning critics and reviews going back for decades as if we all know them and it's self-evident that this is what most people think.
I don't go back and read decades of reviews for books I put down after the first chapter, and I suspect you don't either and are just posturing, especially because you aren't naming any of them. The book is in fact lauded as one of the greatest works of 20th century American art. I can find more "professional critics" expressing that opinion than you can whining that it's hard.
But instead, I'll post more of Pynchon himself. For somebody who's actually fully literate, is this turgid? Is this unreadable? You've bloviated for about an essay's worth of text now but have conveniently avoided pointing out what is so fucking hard.

>>19718213
>decade after decade of reviews from professional critics kept describing it with words like 'turgid', 'overwritten' and 'unreadable'?
you took that from the opening blurb on the wikipedia page from the book lmao

>>19718282
Not him but it is common knowledge that GR has split critics since the day it came out.

>>19718301
and to be fair most literary critics are dumb as shit and too lazy to read the book themselves
look at the fiasco that happened with gaddis

>>19718312
That is a moronic argument. I love GR but it is not difficult to see reason why some would dislike it, other than their being filted plebs. It is heavily dependent upon style, something you could easily make the case that Pynchon also saw, his entire output after GR is much more balanced in this regard.

>>19718292
yes, obviously. If you wanted a quick overview of the general, mainstream opinions on a book, where would you go first?

>>19718213
>>19718292
not only is he taking it from wikipedia, he didn't even understand what wikipedia was talking about in that paragraph. the pulitzer FICTION JURORS, ie the only actual literary critics on the pulitzer board, were extremely enthusiastic about gravity's rainbow and unanimously voted to give it the fiction prize. they were then voted down by the rest of the board - various journalists and newspaper editors who couldn't make heads or tails of the book presumably because contemporary fiction was not their field.

so this shit:
>decade after decade of reviews from professional critics kept describing it with words like 'turgid', 'overwritten' and 'unreadable'
is something he's hallucinated based on misreading wikipedia. he's not naming any of these "critics" because this phenomenon of widespread critical hared of pynchon does not actually exist - at worst there was controversy over the sexual content.

>>19718457
well if you were a moron googling "why is pynchon bad" in a desperate attempt to save face then misquoting wikipedia would be a likely result, yes

>>19718213
>defering to "professional critics" as they they have any sort of authority
That other guy is absolutely correct, every single post you make further illustrates that you're a 115 IQ pseud who diverted his attention away from video games and youtube videos for a momentary attempt to read "that hard book /lit/ talks about", and, failing to achieve that, are now assuaging your ego as "the smart kid in class" by claiming the book was a poopy stupud dumdum book anyway.

Cryptonomicon >GR kek
You actually believe it and I love it anon

I was in court appointed rehab years ago and met an eccentric old man who just walked around and read GR all day. Never talked to anyone. Just read. I finally approached him. Said I read that book and it was crazy. He said he’s read it 6 times. I said M&D was one of my favorite books. He never heard of it. Apparently he never read any other books but GR. I don’t know what to make of it

>>19720132
Sounds like you met ol' Ruggles himself, anon

Where can I write to him? An e-mail address would be great, just to ask him about music and gauchos, nothing personal

>>19720652
Send a physical letter c/o to his publisher. Most reliable way to contact any author.