/lit/ - Literature

>>20375147
How far did you make it before quitting? Personally, I’ve never gotten past halfway, even though I thought it was really good, just got lost in the middle

retards

>>20375147
Look at the replies praising this garbage
>>20367456
These are the people recommending books on here. /lit/ is just like any other board.. a bunch of contrarians that praise and recommend obscure shit because popular=bad

>>20375147
You're welcome

>>20375165
I made it about halfway but I just can't do this shit anymore. I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of how literature works but I find myself reading the same page or passage like 30 fucking times not understanding a god damned thing

>>20375175
We sometimes like popular books though. We aren’t one guy or group, for we are many (but mostly retards).

>>20375178
It should be pretty straightforward if you look up all the references and words you don't understand.

>>20375185
Nah, not that anon but Pynch definitely uses a style intended to disorient you. Dreams and drug fantasies are presented as if part of waking reality, context for scenes is only given later, etc. He enjoys playing with the reader this way

>>20375201
Yes that's the point

>>20375185
what is the point of reading a book about references to other things? I read books because they present something novel, not because I want to be inundated by the author's intellectual masturbation.

>>20375209
Why should things be easy to understand?

>>20375208
It is the exact opposite of your point.

>>20375218
You just need to pay attention man I dunno what to say

>>20375217
just because something is hard to understand, does not mean it is worth the effort to understand. The message and the themes in the book could be profound, but they are always under the human realm of comprehensions; the ideas come from humans and can always be found elsewhere. At most, the greatest satisfaction one could garner from these types of books is from a sense of superiority over new readers.

>>20375254
Or its just really well written

>>20375269
I'm not going to read the book, so I'll take your word for it

If I like DFW am I likely to enjoy Pynchon as well? Not that there's any correlation between the two, just figuring if I enjoy one meme book I might enjoy another.

>>20375147
my brother in christ, not everything the laotian puppet forum raves about is for you

>>20375147
I accepted the fact that I was too retarded to read this book and put in free library.

I have it on the shelf, going to start reading it... today actually

>>20375291
No. DFW actually has things to say. Pynchon is if you enjoy le random xD moments

>>20375471
kek

>>20375147
I tried to read this eighteen years ago with my late grandmother, Anna. She taught creative writing at the local uni for 15 some-odd years before she passed, and while she loved Gravity's Rainbow and Pynchon in general, she hated when any kid tried to write like him. Anyway, I couldn't understand the book at all but she didn't give me a hard time. We were both fans of Vonnegut, so we could bond over that.

You don't need to get it. Just go with the flow and laugh.

>>20375482
lol kys

>another episode of a /lit/ recommendation being shit all along
Many such cases

>>20375147
Pynchoni didn't mean for every reference to be exhaustively catalogued and dissected. That is an ex post facto creation by academics and critics. They're not entirely to blame, since everything is a nail if your only tool is a hammer, but it's just not what mad old Pynchoni intended as he hunched over his desk with a typewriter in a haze of hash smoke. It's a primarily intuitive work. The constant assault of detail and allusion and pastiche is the substrate of the entire work. It's once you let go of that human need to make sense of everything that you really start to see the beauty of GR, and to understand why it deserves its place in the pantheon of western literary titans. You aren't SUPPOSED to get it. I doubt Pynchoni really "got it" himself, in the way people try to get it. At its best points, GR is like a timeless, shared trancelike journey to the heart of the sublime. At its worst, it's a postmodern puzzle to be unfolded by dusty-farted, autonomous argyle sweater vests. It's both at the same time. One way is a joyous experience. The other is an artless exercise in trivia.

>>20375175
>praise and recommend obscure
literally any high brow literature book is obscure if you have pedestrians in mind.
if you have in mind people who actually read literature, it's not obscure at all, many readers and critics praise GR and it is very well known.
you are just retarded.

>>20375178
exact same it's dogshit

>>20376461
No it's a bad book. The plot is needlessly obscure, some passages are nice, but it's obnoxious and has no goal of transcendence. Also your entire post is: "Smart ppol like book because smart ppol like smart book."

>>20376494
>The plot is needlessly obscure, some passages are nice, but it's obnoxious and has no goal of transcendence
The most filtered I've ever seen someone by GR.

>>20376533
>The most filtered I've ever seen someone by GR.
That's not an argument for artistic merit but an excuse for the lack of it. Christ became the archetype of mankind's messenger override Osiris, Hermes, and Krishna using elementary school level language. You don't need fancy words, high-end syntax, or even obscure plots to reach the pinnacle of human achievement which is arrived at by will and compassion along. It's a very very very bad book.

>>20376541
i didn't get calvinism until i read gravity's rainbow, it is most def a religious text

>>20376541
>You're wrong because... uh... because of Jesus Christ, OK?!?!??!

>>20376417
Except going down the rabbit hole of references layed out is easier than ever today what with the internet and such

>>20376494
No, you just got filtered

>>20376923
Sure. Now, more than ever, it's easier to engage in the artless exercise in trivia. Consider the possibility that the easy way isn't always the best way. Or even a good one.

>>20376494
>Also your entire post is: "Smart ppol like book because smart ppol like smart book."
No, I made a very clear point.
Most people do not read books at all. For those people, even Hamlet, the Iliad and the Divine Comedy are obscure books.
Out of the people that do read books regularly and are into the classics, it's very likely they have at least heard about GR and know a bit about it, specially people in the US. I'm from South America and even in our public library there are copies of Pynchon's books, including GR. I checked and it was borrowed a number of times.
So no, a book available, read and loved world-wide, praised by many critics is not obscure at all.

Plus, the thread ended with these answers >>20375628 >>20376417

>>20375482
More like the exact opposite.

>>20376931
>anything I don't understand is trivia

>>20376910

For real. Christcucks are such pseuds.

>>20376966
Go back to nigger

>>20375482
i swear to god both DFW and Pynchon are just autistic faggots who fuck with their reader

>>20377183
Nah, GR is GReat

>>20376533
>>20376925
>Filtered
This is what /lit/ pseuds say when they don't have an argument

>>20377311
yeah but that anon clearly got filtered

Mason & Dixon is his only good work.

>>20377040
Then what are you? Because even the christcuck is smarter than you. The christcuck gave an example how jesus overwrote the role of his antiquated predecessors using simplicity and clearness of expression. Out of all the avatars expressing the "christ" consciousness jesus comes out on top in part because of his relative clarity of speech. It's a valid point to an argument that convoluted delivery has dubious value. You just fucking short circuited when you read "jesus" and lost the plot entirely. Try not to be so easily triggered into being retarded.

>>20378508
GR isnt convoluted tho

I dropped it as soon as I got to the part with the adenoid

>>20377917
>I've never read V.

>>20378528
dude isn't that like the first thing after the banana stuff lol

>>20378608
yes

>>20376541
Im curious as to why your equation does not factor in entire civilizations forced at gunpoint to love the bible, or the 2000+ year headstart it has over GR

>>20376541
If the bible succeeded over its clearness of expression (a fucking meaningless point in a world where 95%+ of people have been illiterate up until the last century), what in the fuck is the point of bible study, of sunday school, of poring over scripture?

>>20378524
pynchon himself said he didnt understand large sections of the story he was high out of his mind

>>20378535
V has good bits but the overall narrative is shit. Whole Sick Crew sucks.
Worth reading for rat priest and the dentist.

>>20375222
>*hits pipe*
>*exhales*
It's actually real deep, man

>>20380338
Not large sections

>>20375147
I love how immersive he is with certain details.
>the scenes about breakfast
>or tea
>or throwing up

But the stream of consciousnesses just gets too weird and too much too frequently, and you loose any kind of anchor to the story.
That shit with the giant adenoid was weird too.

Fuck GR. Read Vineland or Inherent Vice.

What's the appeal of this book? I always here "it's so good" yet no one can even tell me why they liked it.

I'm convinced that postmodernist art started out as a joke to troll the fart-sniffing 'intellectuals'. Instead of admitting defeat, the fart-sniffers convinced the retards that it's the highest plane of artistic achievement.

>>20382880
>Instead of admitting defeat, the fart-sniffers convinced the retards that it's the highest plane of artistic achievement.
That doesn't sound like defeat to me.

>>20382886
That's exactly what that statement implies

i dont understand the book at all, but i really like the prose. the way that pynchon has a sort of rhythm to his sentences, theres something gorgeous and intoxicating about it thats hard to describe. sometimes i just like to open the book randomly and find some good prose

I’m about 100 pages in and the book is so bizarre and feels like what I imagine tripping balls on a hallucinogen is like. But I want to keep reading!
>>20382505
>That shit with the giant adenoid was weird too.
Id forgotten about that, made me giggle when I remembered.

>>20382880
It's fun

>>20375291
Yes you will don’t listen to that retard.

>>20375147
I started TCoL49 but I put it down in chapter 2 or so when the cuck scenes started. What a disgrace of a novel.

>>20382880
The book is a trip and if you let go of your preconceived notions it’s a super fun experience.

>>20384587
lmao

>>20384587
Should be a critic.

>>20384587
Back to /pol/

>>20382880
I explained what's so captivating about GR here >>20376417. It's fantastic writing that ushers you into something like a trance once you let go of the need to make sense of everything. GR is a magnum opus of intuitive and imaginative art. This attitude of "nobody can explain to me why it's good" precludes the enjoyment of the work on the level Pynchoni created it. GR beats your analytical brain into submission with references and allusions, and once you finally submit and interact with the work in that capacity, you start to see its beauty. It's a deeply ironic work of fiction — not just in the sense that it's written in an ironic manner — but in that it misleads you into believing that the "final step" is intellectual comprehension, and that understanding is the key. In reality, it's just the first step of interacting with the work. You need to try and fail to resolve allusion and reference and breakneck actions, character introductions and disappearances, to contextualized meaning.

I don't mean to say that the references are themselves meaningless. Most are actual, "real" references. They are real in the sense that they references discrete and knowable concepts, objects, and events. The real meat of GR grows out from the substrate of these arbitrary and inconsequential pustules of meaning. In the universe of GR, meaning is a cheap commodity. It's everywhere, and the reader is constantly pulled under the currents of specialized and esoteric knowledge. Every character, action, and event exists under the yoke of capital-m Meaning. The carrot dangled at the end of the stick is the idea that if a reader can just understand enough, the Real Meaning will become deducible. The beauty in GR is not getting the carrot, and it's not defeating the stick. It's the fact that a carrot dangles on a stick, in and of itself. It's that there exist sticks from which carrots can be arbitrarily dangled.

In this sense, GR is primarily an epistemological work of postmodern fiction. It wants you to step back and admire, with childlike awe and often irreverence, how queer it is that carrots dangle from sticks. It wants you to admire the carrot's dance, to see it with joy, sorrow, boredom, annoyance. It wants you to observe the carrot-and-stick mechanism in its entirety, but to remember that the carrot is forever out of reach. If you built a carrot-clasping mechanism the length of the earth's distance from the sun, Pynchon would just move the carrot an inch further out of reach, while bombarding you with shit metaphors for missing the point.

GR asks you to interact with meaning on a different level. It ultimately tolerates no less. And therein lies the beauty.

>>20382880
The irony with this image is that the low-res photo of the lower painting most likely hides what makes it beautiful. From that bird's-eye view, you literally just can't see the rivulets of paint, the texture, the artistry that went into creating a painting with one solid color. The image sets up the false dichotomy of beautiful, detailed Renaissance art against drab, pretentious modern art that anyone could ostensibly create. First, you can barely make out the artistry in the above photograph. As a viewer of this image, you have to make the assumption that because there is detail and identifiable subjects, that it is better and requires more artistry than the bottom. You have to assume that the lower image is just a couple of pure red slabs of paint. It's just a really dumb assumption, and the image was obviously created by someone who cares more about making bottomtext images for your Twitter feed than he does about appreciating and understanding art.

>>20384810
bla bla bla bla bla
nerd

>>20384587
There's a cuck scene? I thought she was just cheating?

I'm at page 54 and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. This book has the most beautiful writing I've ever come across. Yes, the plot is a bit weird and jumbled but so far I've been able to connect the dots. I do notice a proclivity for lists and unresolved sentences tho... not sure if that'll start to annoy me later

>>20384939
>This book has the most beautiful writing I've ever come across.
you must be high or on coke or something

>>20384939
I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the book anon. it's a wild ride!

>>20385202
lmao filtered

>>20385380
maybe I did but I still think that Inherent Vice and Vineland are his two best books. The prose is just stunning at times.

>>20375175
stick to dosto, kid, and leave the big books to the big boys, yeah?

>>20380338
that is not an accurate representation of that quote, and i’m tired of how it has become something to wield for detractors of this book. what pynchon actually said was that when he looked over what he had written (in some ”state” or other) he didn’t get all of it, but — and here’s the key bit — that was before he sat down and edited/rewrote it. he didn’t put out a book filled with large swathes of incoherent babble, like some people want you to believe

>>20385501
lol

>>20385549
>he didn’t put out a book filled with large swathes of incoherent babble, like some people want you to believe

>>20384851
>bangers and mash innit

ITT: zoomers getting filtered

>>20375281
based, legendary even

>>20375147
The part when MC is in a German Village dressed as a pig was lit.