/lit/ - Literature

I'm surprised at how brazenly you admit to your own stupidity, even on an anonymous website.

GR was more transgressive wrt literary conventions (meaning I liked the dick jokes)
It also has a freaky scene like V., which M&D doesn't.

>>6707564
So enlighten me. If GR broke the mold in an important way, I'm not aware of it. From my perspective it looks like Pynchon fans and detractors alike are hung up on a book that only marks an important point in Pynchon's professional development on the way to write Mason and Dixon.

>>6707552
I think M&D would actually probably more fun to a Pynchon scholar - I could imagine writing a PhD thesis on Timothy Tox and the Pennsylvaniad or the Sino-Jesuit Conspiracy. It is almost certainly Pynchon's most "accomplished" work, and it has clear and consistent themes.

But Gravity's Rainbow is fucking manic. If I were to write a paper on it, I wouldn't know what to write because there's so much shit you could argue for but relatively scant textual evidence that your reading is the right one. It's much more incoherent than M&D, there are stretches of 10 or 20 pages whose inclusion I'm not sure anyone (including Pynchon) could justify, it's completely fucking insane in ways nothing else he wrote was (the octopus? the kamikaze pilots??). I think it's more fun than Mason & Dixon, but I like the train that jumps the rails. Gravity's Rainbow is still the definitive read for people who want that sort of completely unhinged Pynchonian fiction experience.

he's the king of shaggy-dog tales

>>6707573
And would you care to explain why you feel that way or is this going to be an argument based solely on subjective taste?

wait, so is every Pinecone novel about a conspiracy? I've only read Bleeding Edge

>>6707552
How far into it are you anyway? Also if you haven't read V. you're not getting the full story.

>>6707608
M&D is hardly "about" conspiracies, but it's one of pinecone's main themes overall

>>6707608
I'd say the conspiracies are more of a setting than a plot point, but yeah there's at least one in everything he's written as far as I can tell.

>>6707616
>>6707624

well yeah, I mean do they all involve conspiracies. It seems like they do, cool.

>>6707552
Reading V. first would have given it a bit more context, thematically and and plot wise.

you guys he can not like the book. it has nothing to do with him not reading V. first. jesus

>>6707604
We can avoid subjective taste, sure. Gravity's Rainbow was voted to win the Pulitzer and National Book Award both. Many already call it part of the western canon. Shit, some guy at The New Republic called it "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II". These things usually mean that a book set a standard for the future, broke new ground. I'm not aware of a compelling argument that Gravity's Rainbow did something funamentally new or that "every novel since is a response to Gravity's Rainbow".
>>6707585
See above for the real meat of my post. I agree that GR is fun. It really is a simple detective story overladen with innumerable sideplots and episodes written in style that ranges from near-purple to comic-book humor and that's all fun and stimulating but I could point to several novels that deserve the praise reviewers have heaped on it (see the first part of this post for an example).
>>6707600
True, and it's fun, but I think he overdid it here.
>>6707608
Yes

>>6707608
they're never really "about" conspiracies

it's broader in scale. conceivably apocalyptic.
a very serious indictment of the military industrial complex and the population's ability to turn a blind eye to their own nation's evils

mason and dixon is a picaresque tale about weed and pu$$y

>>6707647
It's a lot like a 20th century take on Ulysses (albeit much less complicated) so it's not surprising that it was seen as groundbreaking and revolutionary.

I read some of V. and didn't think it was very good. I finished Inherent Vice and thought it was significantly worse, I wouldn't even recommend it to Pynchon fans. The Crying of Lot 49 was great, Mason and Dixon was amazing but to me Gravity's Rainbow was his most interesting, funniest, strangest and most vibrant work to-date, in fact I would put it up there with works like Moby-Dick, Ulysses, etc. He really must be the greatest living writer, if solely for that work.

However, I see how if you like his other works like Inherent Vice, you might see this one dreadfully pointless. I thought of it like a Bosch painting in the 21st century in the form of a novel.

>>6707647
What books that were written at the time of GR or before should have received the praise it received? I'm >>6707585 btw, and I consider both of them to be two of my favorite books ever written - would love to read anything with the scope and imagination either has. Like, I love Catch-22, but GR, as a manic, comic WWII/post-WWII novel, is just on another level.

I'll certainly concede M&D as Pynchon's masterpiece, but when Gravity's Rainbow was published I don't think it's at all an exaggeration to say it was clearly one of the most fascinating and inventive books published in the century so far.

>>6707659
insane pedantry ahead: Ulysses was written in the 20th century. but late 20th century, yeah. also I think it's a lot more fun than Ulysses and doesn't have the goofy-ass grad student project conceit of "each chapter is in a different style!!"

>>6707667
How much of V. did you read? Also I really don't get how you can like Lot 49 and dislike V. when Lot 49 is a lot like V. on fast forward in terms of how it proceeds.

>>6707667
Inherent Vice was great fun though. Though, I suppose if you read it when it was first published without a hundred disclaimers of being 'Pynchon-lite' I can understand disappointment.

More or less knowing what I was in for, though, I thought it was great.

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>>6707659
>It's a lot like a 20th century take on Ulysses
How is it anything like that? Also Ulysses was written and set in the 20th century, m9.

>>6707667
I didn't get how amazing V. was till roughly the middle of the book... even if it never gets frantic like GR

>>6707685
Don't even really like L49 though.

GR > V > L49 > MD > VL > IV > ATD > BE

I enjoyed them all though.

>>6707714
pls

MD > V. > GR > ATD > VL > L49 > IV > BE > SL

>>6707682
Even a book with much narrower scope and imagination like "Play it as it Lays" (Didion 1970) can have a more important role in both human communication "making a case for seeing the world a certain way" and the history of literary fiction than a manic puzzle-box like GR.

>>6707686
>>6707667
With IV, Pynchon was just chilling and writing a more conventional detective novel that also conveys the atmosphere he was going for in TCoL49 (does a better job with the atmosphere, tbh).

>>6707657
>tale about weed and pu$$y
>not a scathing indictment of the way Americans view their own history
>not turning the whole continent upside down
>not evoking apocalypse-tier dread with the Civil War looming in the future
>not evoking American suspicion of European influence that the reader didn't recognize in himself
c'mon buddy

>>6707682
I dunno, I felt like Ulysses style shifts were more playful than pretentious. There's definitely a masturbatory quality to Joyce's penchant for constant references, riddles, word games, and the like but he just seemed to have so much fun doing it all that I can't consider it an attempt at being "scholarly".

>>6707714
i enjoyed all of them but only with Bleeding Edge did i threaten to drop a Pynchon novel altogether. finished it, though, and i don't think i'm better for it. with BE, it's evident his verbal dexterity is waning.

GR > AtD > IV > VL > L49 > BE

Mason & Dixon sits on my shelf and i'll soon pop it open once i'm done with Faulkner.

>sez

literally why

>>6707751
cuz

>>6707732
I love Didion's essays but have never read any of her novels...will check it out. thanks Anon

>>6707762
The case I would make for Play it as it Lays is that it directly continues Hemingway's line of thought in "The Sun Also Rises" but focuses on a woman with a wounded femininity rather than a castrated man. It makes no apologies about her being less heroic than Barnes but focuses on what a woman in the late 60s could actually experience without overzealous feminist apologetics. It's just raw and minimal and perfect. Sets the stage for "Less than Zero" and "American Psycho".

>>6707688

http://besturlonhere.tumblr.com/post/94155438136/i-promised-an-exclusive-report-about-the-day-the

is this a rare vid of thomas pynchon? ignore that it's tumblr please

>>6707862
lol I wouldn't even be surprised if Pinecone wrote the script for that video

>>6707862
best video on tumblr tbh, always will be a besturlonhere fan

>>6707862
>>6707894
>>6707894
>>6707926
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92B1JCT5jjQ

>>6707935
at last i truly see

>>6707862
this is some insightful and damning shit to be completely fucking honest

>>6707725
Terrible taste

>>6707608
Why would you start with bleeding edge?

>>6708630

I got the book as a gift. It just sat on my shelf till I started going on /lit/ and heard Pinecone was good, so I read it

>>6708650
His recent books are considered his weakest by far though.

>>6708653
yeah, I look forward to reading his earlier stuff

whats the best way to start reading pynchon? what order should i go in? I already have Inherent Vice, and iveseen the movie, would that make it a good jumping off point?

>>6708966
V. then Gravity's Rainbow, then after that the order doesn't really matter.

>>6708630
>>6708653

So is it actually 100% a rip off of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, because the blurb sure makes it sound like one.

>>6709591
Nah. It might sound like it if you pay attention to the blurb but it's mostly a goofy detective story that happens to take place in 2001. 9/11 is brought up and part of the plot but it just kind of happens in the background late in the book for the most part.

>>6708966

>>6709796
>the penguin edition below has an error

I'm pretty sure this is just a meme, unless someone can prove me wrong with a reliable source mentioning it.

I've tried to research this and I've literally only ever been able to find posts on /lit/ saying it.

>>6710035

>>6710035
Next time I'm at barnes and noble I'll do a comparison of the blueprint penguin and the deluxe one just to see if that's the only error for sure.

>>6710069
>>6710084
the "is pens" error seems legit, I haven't seen any evidence for any other major errors though. There might be a few typos but that's not a major issue.

>>6710111
The original review that pointed it out claimed there were many errors and made it sound like they weren't minor so someone actually doing a side by side comparison of an accepted edition to that one is still a good idea.

>>6710035

>>6710118
They said "typos, rewordings, and just plain deletions", the "to pens" error seems to be the "plain deletions" they mention but I'm assuming if there were any more someone would have probably pointed them out by now.

Typos aren't really that big of a deal imo and rewordings are pretty shitty but they're not as rare in books as you think and as long as they don't change the meaning if any sentences they don't seem like that big of a deal to me either.

>>6710161
You can't actually know how bad they are until you know exactly what the errors and alterations were though.

>>6710172
I'll do a comparison myself later when I get the time. I may post my findings on /lit/ if I feel like it.