Pynchon refers to On the Road as one of the finest American novels. Why don't you?

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Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:12:15 2014 No.5915360 [Reply] [Original]

Pynchon refers to On the Road as one of the finest American novels.

Why don't you?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:13:03 2014 No.5915363 >>5915360 I despise beats and don't support the movement.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:13:07 2014 No.5915364 >>5915360 Because Pynchon is a brain-fried drug-addled paranoid freak. But he has cute teeth.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:13:16 2014 No.5915365 I liked it when I was 18

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:13:25 2014 No.5915366 >>5915360 I grew up in completely different circumstances as Pynchon and have a different idea of what makes a fine novel.

>>	truman !!cO9KVBDtkqQ Sat Dec 27 20:13:33 2014 No.5915368 thomas pynchon wrote one good book 40 years ago

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:14:41 2014 No.5915372 >>5915368 He knows it, too.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:14:48 2014 No.5915373 >>5915363 bit harsh my fellow virgin

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:15:49 2014 No.5915380 >>5915368 pleb

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:17:21 2014 No.5915385 >>5915368 He also published another good book last year, and another good one 4 years ago, and another good one 8 years ago, and another good one 18 years ago, and another good one 24 years ago, and 2 other good ones about 50 years ago

>>	truman !!cO9KVBDtkqQ Sat Dec 27 20:19:28 2014 No.5915394 >>5915385 hi tom

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:21:53 2014 No.5915402 >>5915360 Yes, the quintessential inauthentic writer should be taken seriously when he talks about his opinions on literature. This just better shows that On the Road is a piece of shit.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:22:15 2014 No.5915403 >>5915394 Sir, I am not worthy to lick the boots of that great master. I humbly tell you I am not he, although I did indeed have the rough publication dates of every one of his books memorized.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:23:16 2014 No.5915408 >>5915402 kill yourself

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:23:59 2014 No.5915414 >>5915402 >quintessential inauthentic writer I can't tell if you're actually you (inauthenticity guy) or someone writing a parody of you. How does that make you feel?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:27:43 2014 No.5915422 >>5915402 Pynchon isnt his books. His life isnt performance art. That idea of yours is dumb

Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:38:31 2014 No.5915460

>>5915360
>>5915360
Pynchon has terrible taste regardless of how great of a writer he is.

Beats are shit.

And Pinecone probably sucks a lot of heroin junky cock so by eating all that stained cum ...does he really have a choice at liking On the Road?

At least he picked the only half assed book that's tolerable out of the Beat shit.

I guess he doesn't like Burroughs or the kike fuck because he's not the type to fuck a 10 year old twinks ass.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:40:31 2014 No.5915469 On the road was pretty mediocre sad to hear Pynchon liked that book so much

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:41:34 2014 No.5915476 File: 147 KB, 1500x1500, maxresdefault.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5915408

Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:41:46 2014 No.5915477

On a more academic side, he describes the literary conflict of Traditional vs. Beat Writing, and the transition from Modernism to a new kind of writing. He discusses the awakening of college students to the "other world" existing outside the safe walls of academia, citing jazz clubs and marijuana as important factors associated with the beats. He cites important beat texts On the Road, The Naked Lunch, and Howl as influences. He nicely expresses the movement's role as transition point between Modernism and Postmodernism, stating, "We were onlookers: the parade had already gone on by and we were already getting everything second hand, consumers of what the media of the time were supplying us." He sees the end of the Modern Era and the emergence of a new voice, one combining high and low culture, and incorporating consumer capitalism.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:41:48 2014 No.5915478 >>5915469 It seems that he likes On the Road in the same way that someone likes Harry Potter because they loved it as a kid

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 20:45:34 2014 No.5915490 Because I haven't read it. Should I?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:04:04 2014 No.5915563 >no citation Nice meme :-)

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:13:40 2014 No.5915615 >>5915478 I would like a decent argument against the novel itself. Meaning, On the Road. I haven't read it, by the way, but I just got a copy. Thanks, have a good night.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:14:33 2014 No.5915620 >>5915563 slow learner introduction

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:18:29 2014 No.5915639 >>5915620 >not quoting it nice blog!

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:19:20 2014 No.5915643 >>5915639 ?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:24:20 2014 No.5915664 >>5915615 There's no argument against it, and you certainly wouldn't get one from this board. Anything popular sucks according to /lit/ it's a fine book. hope you enjoy it

Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:30:26 2014 No.5915694

>>5915664
>Anything popular sucks according to /lit/

Like the Bible? Shakespeare? The Iliad and the Odyssey? Don Quixote? The Little Prince? Some of the most popular books in the history of the world, in fact?

Let's officially put to bed the tired argument of this "hurr durr you hate it because it's popular." 9 times out of 10 it's soon discovered to have no merit nor truth behind it, and the tenth time is inconclusive but leaning toward the same finding.

People don't dislike Murakami or your cute little GRRM stories because they're popular. They dislike them because they are, artistically, subpar.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:31:26 2014 No.5915702 >>5915694 >the bible >popular

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:32:18 2014 No.5915709 >>5915694 >,artistically, drop yourself in the moat pls

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:34:31 2014 No.5915717 >>5915694 why is GRRM artistically sub par?

Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:41:34 2014 No.5915760

>>5915694
I think the first guy stated it poorly and you've made a compelling case that popular isn't the criterion. I submit that /lit/'s opinions on novels tend to be heavily influenced by groupthink. Case in point: the same set of authors/novels are frequently submitted as the best ad nauseam on /lit/. I can't recall a single day without a DFW, Dostoyevsky, or Pynchon thread -- most commonly Infinite Jest, Bros K., or Gravity's Rainbow specifically. While fantastic works (I'm greatly enjoying GR at the moment), there is *no* way that everyone on this board has these as genuine consensus favorites or "bests" -- it's likely /lit/ is so narrowly read and self-propagates these works as the best.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:46:37 2014 No.5915784 >>5915717 Low vocabulary, predictable plot points, unrealistic characters (basically pistaches of stock characters already well-established in the media), very little innovation, to name a few off the top of my head.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:48:40 2014 No.5915796 File: 75 KB, 640x299, 8d9abdb8daf6c360.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5915784 >pistaches also >no textual examples

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 21:56:05 2014 No.5915834 >>5915796 >She was sopping wet when he entered her. “Damn you,” she said. “Damn you damn you damn you.” He sucked her nipples till she cried out half in pain and half in pleasure. Her cunt became the world.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 22:00:05 2014 No.5915854 >>5915834 >worse than a murakami sex scene

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 22:01:46 2014 No.5915859 >>5915834 alright, you win

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 22:01:54 2014 No.5915861 >>5915834 >one tiny portion out of numerous books u sure showed me bro

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 22:03:45 2014 No.5915870 >>5915360 I haven't read it yet.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 22:41:32 2014 No.5916015 >>5915394 he's not Tom, I am

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 22:44:51 2014 No.5916029 >>5915760 I am reading Gravity's Rainbow too. How far in are you?

Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:21:48 2014 No.5916169

Keep in mind that Pynchon was in his 20s when On The Road came out and that it probably rocked his socks; nobody wrote about those topics and in this way before(at least not with such a wide audience). Whatever one may think of the beats, they nevertheless broke a lot of ground for American literature. On The Road is almost like a mission statement in that regard.

ps:I couldn't finish it the first time I tried to read it because it bored me so much.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:24:34 2014 No.5916185 on the road is a period piece, meaning that of course people who were around when it came out will love it, even if they happen to have written far greater books

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:25:51 2014 No.5916188 Never forget that Gravity's Rainbow is worse than both Mason & Dixon and The Crying of Lot 49.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:26:23 2014 No.5916193 >>5915760 >Genuinely like Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow is my favorite novel. >Spend most of my time lurking

Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:35:31 2014 No.5916221

There’s a story about a TV guide that summarized The Wizard of Oz as “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”

It’s funny because it mistakes a tale of wonder and adventure for a crime spree. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the opposite; a crime spree that gets mistaken for a tale of wonder and adventure.

On The Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.

But it’s okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.
>http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:37:01 2014 No.5916229 >>5916185 from a superficial level it is a period piece but its more about relationships and discovering the world for yourself than an exploration of the beats

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:52:45 2014 No.5916279 >>5916185 >period piece i mean it was published 7 years after it was written. >far greater books i challenge you to read Doctor Sax and tell me pynchon is a better writer As time goes on keroac's contribution will become less social and more literary

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:53:32 2014 No.5916281 >>5916188 you are a fag

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:53:55 2014 No.5916283 >>5916221 kill yourself if youre so fucking pessimistic and sardonic about everything

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:55:37 2014 No.5916288 >>5916221 >>5916283 lel, it's true doe, lel

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:57:27 2014 No.5916291 >>5916288 >>5916221 huehuehue also >crime spree implying that law is tantamount, even if no one is being hurt, and that disregard for laws is bad

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 27 23:59:54 2014 No.5916299 >>5916291 *paramount fuccboi

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:01:56 2014 No.5916304 >>5915403 >Sir, I am not worthy to lick the boots of that great master. God you are a loathsome shill aren't you?

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:05:25 2014 No.5916315

>>5916221
Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends are brought to the brinks of a lot of things, actually. Aside from stealing things and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t, being brought to the brink of things is one of their main pastimes. Enlightenment, revelation, truth, the real meaning of America, the ultimate, the sacred – if it has a brink, they will come to it. Crucially, they never cross that brink or gain any lasting knowledge or satisfaction from the experience. Theirs is a religion whose object of worship is the burst of intense emotion, the sudden drenching of their brain in happy chemicals that come and go without any lasting effect except pages full of the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”.

The high priest of this religion is Kerouac’s friend Dean Moriarty. Kerouac cannot frickin shut up about Dean Moriarty. Obviously he is “holy” and “ecstatic” and “angelic” and “mad” and “visionary”, but for Dean, Kerouac pulls out all the stops. He is “a new kind of American saint”, “a burning shuddering frightful Angel”, with intelligence “formal and shining and complete”.

Who is this superman, this hero?
His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in town.
Okay, but you have overwrought religious adjectives to describe all of this, right?
[Dean’s] “criminality” was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming.
I feel like once you steal like a dozen cars in the space of a single book, you lose the right to have the word “criminality” in scare quotes.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:07:35 2014 No.5916324 File: 58 KB, 604x453, image.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5916304 What do loaves have to do with this?

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:10:15 2014 No.5916332 kerouac fans fucked /lit/'s girlfrend at a party in college

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:10:38 2014 No.5916333 >>5916315 h-hey man

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:12:33 2014 No.5916339 Dr. Sax was better

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:16:58 2014 No.5916350 >>5916332 that was me >>5916339 my facking boiy "[my best book was] doctor sax, but i was the only person who understood it" JC in an interview with an italian woman

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:25:58 2014 No.5916377 >>5915385 >Bleeding Edge >good Jesus Christ

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:29:37 2014 No.5916392

>>5916377
i have mad nostalgia for the dotcom bubble days in nyc ( i was there, man) but i couldn't even get into the book even on a nostalgia trip... i couldn't even listen to the audiobook since it was read by some old granny with a voice like how i imagine ruth bader ginsberg's voice must sound

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:38:14 2014 No.5916425 The Day of the Locust is the superior "American" novel. Predates the beat generation, yet offers a more thorough, younger look at American culture.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 00:39:57 2014 No.5916431 >>5916221 man that review is so true

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 02:27:08 2014 No.5916827 >>5916377 i'm about 100 pages from being done with it and i think it's pretty great so far. better than inherent vice i think, but maybe that's because i get more of the super idiosyncratic references

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 04:59:52 2014 No.5917208 >>5916827 Yes but isn't Inherent Vice supposed to be shit? As for the super idiosyncratic references, I think you mean 'super forced and unnatural references which play like that South Park parody of Family Guy'.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 05:11:45 2014 No.5917220 >>5916315 Based SSC with based true opinions.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 05:40:28 2014 No.5917255 >>5915861 That's what a textual example is, dope. This is a 4chan post, not a dissertation on why GRRM sucks.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:14:44 2014 No.5917341 >>5917255 then dont make claims you arent willing to back up, dope

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:20:13 2014 No.5917352 File: 83 KB, 541x385, 1379144038929.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5915861

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:24:31 2014 No.5917362 >>5917352 God I love a good laugh. Keep posting GRRM, I'm pretty sure he seriously uses the word 'spooky' as a descriptor.

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:28:21 2014 No.5917368

>>5915760
It's because books take time and you only can appreciate so many in your life. Be selective with what you read.

I read primarily non-fiction. But, I have read Gravity's Rainbow and while I deem a lot of fiction to be puerile I must say, Gravity's Rainbow is the exception: truly an expansive breathtaking creative endeavor.

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:32:19 2014 No.5917372

>>5917341
>The three men were erect. The sight of their arousal was arousing, though Daenerys Targaryen found it comical as well. The men were all of a height, with long legs and flat bellies, every muscle as sharply etched as if it had been chiseled out of stone.

>Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

>"Ten thousand of your children perished in my palm, Your Grace. Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons off my face and fingers one by one, all pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but in the darkness I would eat your heirs."

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:33:28 2014 No.5917374 >>5917372 >The sight of their arousal was arousing... this can't be real

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:34:34 2014 No.5917377 File: 39 KB, 799x137, Screen Shot 2014-04-19 at 8.36.59 AM.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5917362 >and she knew it was a question

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:43:05 2014 No.5917388 >>5917377 >he looked into his eyes

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:44:25 2014 No.5917390
File: 57 KB, 798x248, Screen Shot 2014-04-19 at 8.31.40 AM.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>5917388
im pretty sure that was a typo in the ebook i was using to get these quotes

btw i just scrolled through asoiaf books randomly for like 5 minutes one day to get most of these. they aren't cherrypicked at all. it's garbage throughout

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:47:06 2014 No.5917395 >>5917390 I really can't get enough of the childish Onomatopoeia

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:49:27 2014 No.5917399

>>5917374
Oh, it's reall, all right.

>Hey, wait a minute!” some of you may be saying about now. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Where’s Dany and the dragons? Where’s Tyrion? We hardly saw Jon Snow. >That can’t be all of it... .”
> Well, no. There’s more to come. Another book as big as this one. I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I wrote lots about them. Pages and pages and pages. Chapters and more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that the book had become too big to publish in a single volume... and I wasn’t close to finished yet.
...
>Tyrion, Jon, Dany, Stannis and Melisandre, Davos Seaworth, and all the rest of the characters you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance with Dragons...

George R. R. Martin is really just a hokey little fat guy scribbling with a boner.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:55:02 2014 No.5917406 >>5917399 He's the quintessence of popular 21st century fiction: shit with no thought put into it that could easily be made into a TV series.

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 06:59:04 2014 No.5917415

>>5917406
i wouldn't say it has anything to do with "the quintessence of popular 21st century fiction" but i would say that yes grrm's writing is basically just events taped together in the manner of a tv drama which is why the adapted tv drama is a success

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 07:24:29 2014 No.5917459 File: 610 KB, 817x720, I am cum, the conceiver of children.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5917390 >Stannis is come

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 07:48:28 2014 No.5917512 >>5915360 because the way the book is structured all it has going for it is the prose, but there are books out there with better prose and actual plots

Anonymous Sun Dec 28 16:48:41 2014 No.5919166

>>5917208
how are they forced and unnatural? i feel like those are really empty terms that require some explanation to actually mean anything, yet people throw them around to justify their hate for perfectly good stories found in pynchon-lite. i mean, i don't even consider BE pynchon-lite, more like modern day GR. it's just easier to read because the average /lit/ poster is just more familiar with the subject matter

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 19:26:51 2014 No.5919927 File: 283 KB, 1808x1080, Aristocats-disneyscreencaps.com-8349.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>5915360 >>5917512 youre a motherfucking snobby patrician aristocat.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 20:29:17 2014 No.5920232 >>5915360 Because, even though I enjoy his work, I don't automatically agree with everything that he says.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 20:49:39 2014 No.5920311 >>5917390 >horses nickered

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 23:29:53 2014 No.5920995 >>5915368 Can you guys believe 1997 was already 40 years ago???

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 28 23:33:39 2014 No.5921015 >>5915360 >Pynchon picture >Guaranteed replies

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