/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15475078]

Favorite parts of Pynchon's writing? Excerpts, scenes etc

[Anonymous No.15475084]

I like the part with the shit eating

[Anonymous No.15475090]

>>15475078
Some of my favorite moments are the quieter moments where it's just people getting to know each other. The scene towards the end of Against the Day when all the Traverse brothers reunite and bond with each other and develop as a family again is wonderful.

I'm also partial to the comic relief stuff. The mayyonaise factory in Against the Day. L.E.D. in Mason and Dixon. It's all really funny.

[Anonymous No.15475110]

>>15475078
lol probably Katje and Tyrone in the Casino where Tyrone gets free drinks.

When he meets that guy that's been watching him- priceless.

[Anonymous No.15475121]

>>15475078
the constant talk of bananas had me rolling

[Anonymous No.15475126]

>>15475078
Bradley had reported upon the Comets of ’23 and ’37, but not, apparently, that of ’44, one day to be term’d the finest of the Century. What came sweeping instead into his life that year, was his Bride, Susannah Peach. Did he make any connection at the time between the Comet, and the girl? Or again, in ’57, another Comet-year, when she departed from his life?— though Mason would seem to be the one up there most ready to connect the fast-moving image of a female head in the Sky, its hair streaming in a Wind inconceivable, with posthumous Visitation,— hectic high-speed star-gazing, not the usual small-Arc quotinoctian affair by any means. It would have been Mason, desperate with longing, who, had he kept a Journal, would have written,—

“Through the seven-foot Telescope, at that resolution, ’tis a Face, though yet veil’d, ’twill be hers, I swear it, I stare till my eyes ache. I must ask Bradley’s advice, and with equal urgency, of course, I must not.”

First Susannah, then Rebekah. The nearly two years separating their deaths were rul’d by the Approaching Comet of Dr. Halley, which reach’d perihelion a month after Rebekah died,— dimming in the glare of the Sun, swinging about behind it, then appearing once more. . . . Whereupon, ’twas Mason’s midnight Duty to go in, and open the shutters of the roof, and fearfully recline, to search for her, find her, note her exact location, measure her. On his back. And when she was so close that there could remain no further doubt, how did he hold himself from crying out after the stricken bright Prow of her Face and Hair, out there so alone in the Midnight, unshelter’d, on display to ev’ry ’Gazer with a Lens at his disposal? He could not look too directly . . . as if he fear’d a direct stare from the eyes he fancied he saw, he could but take fugitive Squints, long enough to measure the great Flow of Hair gone white, his thumb and fingers busy with the Micrometer, no time to linger upon Sentiments, not beneath this long Hovering, this undesired Recognition.

[Anonymous No.15475144]

>>15475126
absolutely beautiful, have mason and dixon coming in the post soon, excited

[Anonymous No.15475150]

Strip Bottacelli. TCOL49

[Anonymous No.15475172]

>>15475084
the shit eating?

[Anonymous No.15475178]

>“The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls... each face so perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke... and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers.... All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside... all this time.... Pökler vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that “silence.... But what can he ever do about it? How can he ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works him terribly as runaway heartbeating, and with hardly any chances left him for good rage, or for turning....

>Where it was darkest and smelled the worst, Pökler found a woman lying, a random woman. He sat for half an hour holding her bone hand. She was breathing. Before he left, he took off his gold wedding ring and put it on the woman’s thin finger, curling her hand to keep it from sliding off. If she lived, the ring would be good for a few meals, or a blanket, or a night indoors, or a ride home....”

[Anonymous No.15475181]

>>15475172
Oh Anon, how do I say this...
Gravity's Rainbow is a very weird book.

[Anonymous No.15475185]

>>15475150
What's that? I can't remember that at all

[Anonymous No.15475196]

>>15475185
I imagine is the scene from the first chapter when Oedipa meets the lawyer, and they watch that movie that I think had him as a child actor. I'm not sure though

[Anonymous No.15475238]

>>15475078
The Bleeding Edge references in Liveblog were interesting. I wonder if Megan has joined the Pynchon literary collective?

[Anonymous No.15475393]

>>15475185
Chapter 2. Oedipa and the lawyer Metzger are at Oedipa's motel room and they decide to play Strip Botticelli. Oedipa then goes into the bathroom and comes out wearing every piece of clothing she has. They never really play it but the scene is very funny to me.

[Anonymous No.15475436]

>>15475181
post the excerpt

[Anonymous No.15475658]

>>15475393
Oh right, i remember that, yeah that was cute.

[Anonymous No.15475688]

>>15475126
Damn, this is truly shit. Just a bunch of melodramatic crap, which feels like Hollywood.

[Anonymous No.15476583]

[Anonymous No.15476613]

V. is superior to Gravity's Rainbow. Change my mind.

[Anonymous No.15476719]

So far I’ve only read V. and the first 2 chapters of Lot 49. I fucking love the bit about Roonie Winsome being introduced and being set up as a character for Profane to have an interaction with, and then the narrative intentionally diverts from this and takes Profane away, and then at some unrelated point later in the chapter where we’re following Profane during some heated stuff, for no reason other than as a tease there is Rooney is sitting in a tree recording ambience, which gets acknowledge and then totally brushed over. And then later on Profane moves in with Roonie and it’s just mentioned in passing without any actual dialog between the two.

[Anonymous No.15476756]

L.E.D, the mechanical duck, the descriptions of the aerosol can flying around the motel room in CoL49, and the scene where Doc and company get pulled over by the cops.

[Anonymous No.15476781]

>>15475078
In Which Esther Gets a Nosejob

[Anonymous No.15476842]

>>15476756
And for some reason the scene from Bleeding Edge where the two Russian kids go set off an EMP is memorable for me

[Anonymous No.15476859]

>>15475090
in against the day when reef yash and lubjana are making their way through serbia and trying not to get caught up in the war. amazing

[Anonymous No.15476880]

>>15475078
mondaugen's story in V.
i cant fuckin believe he wrote that book when he was 24/5.

[Anonymous No.15476917]

>>15476781
>>15476880
These are both great, also Stencil's eight sketches, bc it's just such a weird but beautiful section

[Anonymous No.15476950]

>>15475078
The whole DeepArcher segments from Bleeding Edge.
The Infinite Channels Motel in Inherent Vice.
Profane singing his song while painting the ship in V.
The play in COL49.
Adventures inside the lunch box in Gravity's Rainbow.
The Cruise scene in Gravity's Rainbow

[Anonymous No.15476952]

>>15476880
Fucking seriously
Same with Broom of the System with DFW

[Anonymous No.15476963]

Inherent Vice is hilariously underrated.

[Anonymous No.15476973]

Also I know you made this thread and yes I am here too, in case I need to type this out. I saw you on the other L board like 6 years ago once, and maybe once on yik yak?

[Anonymous No.15477047]

>>15476973
Was it a Boston YikYak?

[Anonymous No.15477086]

>>15477047
Not Boston

[Anonymous No.15477176]

>>15475078
-the British Candy in GR, and the fact Tyrone's Exes are the target for the V2 rockets.
-the whole of V - but especially the bits in the tunnels and the war on Malta.
-Vineland and all the bits with DK, especially the wedding.

[Anonymous No.15477283]

>>15477047
You watched the banjo, do whatever game you want but you didn’t do good enough because view counters exist, your game is weirder than mine is and you’d better be writing something great to make this worth it

[Anonymous No.15477853]

>>15475078
Seem to remember something in GR about schwarzkommandos: like a black panther movement.

[Anonymous No.15477970]

>>15475078
I'm reading V. right now, so I've been saving bits and pieces of it, prose that has caught my eye.

>There is no way to describe the way she walked except as a kind of brave sensual trudging: as if she were nose-deep in snowdrifts, and yet on route to meet a lover.

>As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil. He would dream perhaps once a week that it had all been a dream, and that now he'd awakened to discover the pursuit of V. was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White Goddess.

>Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn't born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage pepper of mulberry street.

>Sunlight, bouncing off the Arno, off the fronts of shops, fractured into spectra by the falling rain, seemed to tangle or lodge in his blond hair, eyebrows, mustache, turning that face to a mask of inaccessible ecstasy: contradicting the sorrowing and weary eyeholes.

There is also a hilarious tangent in the plot where Benny Profane takes up a job as a gator exterminator in the New York sewer system.

[Anonymous No.15478099]

>>15475078
>And indeed, what they wanted to talk about all along was the Ocean. Somehow they could not get to the Topick. Neither Clock really knows what it is,- beyond an undiniably rhythmick Being of some sort,- tho' they've spent most of their lives in Range of it, sometimes no more than a Barrel-Stave and a Hull-Plank away. Its Wave-beats have ever been with them, yet can neihter quite say, where upon it they may lie. What they feel is an Attraction, more and less resistible, to beat in Synchrony with it, regardless of their Pendulum-lengths, or even the divisions of the Day. The closest they come to talking of it is when the Shelton Clock confides,"I really don't like Ships much."

[Anonymous No.15478151]

>>15477970
Number 4 is especially nice. I get this momentary hesitation over the word eyeholes, but it's the sort that makes you go back to the mask conceit. Which character was that?

[Anonymous No.15478445]

I really want to read mason and Dixon but I can't get past the shitty cover art. Looks like a where's Wally picture.

[Anonymous No.15479198]

>>15476880
Honestly, how did he do it bros? Encyclopedic knowledge combined with his vocabulary and style at that age

[Anonymous No.15479253]

>>15475078
Slothrop’s death at the hands of his own mythologized image

[Anonymous No.15479518]

>>15478445
Just paint over it bro

[Anonymous No.15479694]

>>15476952
That book is shit you retard

[Anonymous No.15479704]

These two from Against the Day made me laugh and I usually don't laugh while reading.
>Kit had begun to notice Russians in the Weenderstraße. Yashmeen was convinced they were in town to spy on her. They were trying to blend in, but certain telltale nuances—fur hats, huge unkempt beards, a tendency in the street to drop and begin dancing the kazatsky to music only they could hear—kept giving them away.
>It might have been the residual effects of Cyclomite abuse, but Lew swore he could hear an invisible roomful of laughter, and some applause as well.

[Anonymous No.15479718]

great line from GR:
“She came twice before cock even touched cunt”

[Anonymous No.15479729]

>>15478445
don’t know what you mean?
the beige version with plain black text is kino

[Anonymous No.15479731]

>>15475144
How in the world was that beautiful

[Anonymous No.15479732]

the part in inherent vice when that guy falls asleep smoking a joint which starts a fire that burns through the ceiling, but the guy upstairs had a water mattress which melted and the water fell and put out the fire

[Anonymous No.15479741]

In Mason and Dixon when they have the wood chopping contest with the werebeaver, or when the automaton duck is drawn to the visto, or when Dixon wants to buy the snake brain tumor pearl, or ofc when Washington’s slave is a Jewish nigger

Srsly that is the best book of all time

[Anonymous No.15479762]

>>15479729
This monstrosity

[Anonymous No.15479766]

Gotta say, when bliceros telling his gimp in GR about fucking his ass the first time I gave the white guy blinking face and had to take a break

[Anonymous No.15479777]

>>15479762
Oh fuck, now I see
I think that’s like a certain publisher that made those covers for all of his books, and yes, it is terrible
This right here tho...

[Anonymous No.15479787]

>>15479704
lmaooo

[Anonymous No.15479818]

>>15479777
Yeah that's the copy I want but it's not on Amazon uk

[Anonymous No.15479931]

>>15479818
Get it used, mate. Plenty of good editions via bookfinder for pennies.

[Anonymous No.15480269]

>>15479762
>>15479777
Vintage fucking have all the pynch covers like dat ffs

[Anonymous No.15480312]

>>15479704
Fucking KEK

[Anonymous No.15481092]

>>15479704
AtD is interesting to me coz it seems his least read work

[Anonymous No.15481112]

I think the Schwartzkommando introduction chapters in GR, where it talks about their mission of sterility as such, is when you really realise ur in the hands of a special writer. It feels like mythology.

[Anonymous No.15481117]

>>15477176
That candy scene was hilarious

[Anonymous No.15481139]

>>15477853
It was a demoralization psyop against the nazis where they had a bunch of people in blackface ('cept the dude who could actually turn himself black) in nazi uniforms pretending to be some secret group in the nazi military

[Anonymous No.15481168]

>>15475078
Kenosha kid.

[Anonymous No.15481212]

>>15481168 never did

[Anonymous No.15481624]

the part in V. with the priest and the rats in the sewers was perfect

[Anonymous No.15481774]

I absolutely loved the Tchitcherine chapters in GR. His introduction, his odyssey on the steppes inventing an alphabet, his last encounter with his brother. Amazing.
>>15481139
Did you only read the first like forty pages?

[Anonymous No.15481817]

>>15481774
That last encounter with Enzian is amazing. It's should be anticlimactic, and it is, but in a real cathartic and beautiful way? im sure u know what i mean

[Anonymous No.15481917]

The bootleg pinball machines in GR had tears running down my face I was laughing so hard.
Honorable mention to
>repeatedly implying the Transylvanian guy is a vampire when Pirate is storming the office towards the end
>Slothrop on the verge of tears getting force-fed British candies
>Coked-out Major Marcy terrorizing that brothel before he gets castrated

[Anonymous No.15482002]

>>15481917
Forgot to add
>when they’re in the hot air balloon and start to hear limericks growing louder in the distance

[Anonymous No.15482027]

>>15481917
on the topic of major marvy, we must also pay hommage to based byron the bulb

[Anonymous No.15482715]

>>15477853
Bruh