new pynchon new pynchon new pynchon

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years
just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado
to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna,
the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska
Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood,
and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of
unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and
evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or
should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers,
corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents,
mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians,
spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo
appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an
unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue
their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives
that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what
they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange
sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always
idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the
world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two.
According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

that first paragraph seems very: "oh, what a very thomas pynchon set of things to get yourself into": but then it sounds a lot more conventionally epic than the others do, when you think about it. i'm not sure whether, i mean, i just realised i have no idea what i want from pynchon at this point. which is good! probably.

the release date has been moved forward to november 21; the page count has gone up to 1040(!) pages; the description is back on amazon.

but yo check THIS OUT

new excerpt:

Back in 1899, not long after the terrible cyclone that year which devastated the town, Young Willis Turnstone, freshly credentialed from the American School of Osteopathy, had set out westward from Kirksville, Missouri, with a small grip holding a change of personal linen, an extra shirt, a note of encouragement from Dr. A. T. Still, and an antiquated Colt in whose use he was far from practiced, arriving at length in Colorado, where one day riding across the Uncompahgre plateau he was set upon by a small band of pistoleros.“Hold it right there, Miss, let’s have a look at what’s in that attractive valise o’yours.”
“Not much,” said Willis.
“Hey, what’s this? Packing some iron here! Well, well, never let it be said Jimmy Drop and his gang denied a tender soul a fair shake now, little lady, you just grab ahold of your great big pistol and we'll get to it, shall we.” The others had cleared a space which Willis and Jimmy now found themselves alone at either end of, in classic throwdown posture. “Go on ahead, don’t be shy, I’ll give you ten seconds gratis, ’fore I draw. Promise.” Too dazed to share entirely the gang’s spirit of innocent fun, Willis slowly and inexpertly raised his revolver, trying to aim it as straight as a shaking pair of hands would allow. After a fair count of ten, true to his word and fast as a snake, Jimmy went for his own weapon, had it halfway up to working level before abruptly coming to a dead stop, frozen into an ungainly crouch. “Oh, pshaw!” the badman screamed, or words to that effect.
“Ay! Jefe, jefe,” cried his lieutenant Alfonsito, “tell us it ain’ your back again.”
“Damned idiot, o’ course it’s my back. Oh mother of all misfortune--and worst than last time too.”
“I can fix that,” offered Willis.
“Beg your pardon, what in hell business of any got-damn pinkinroller’d this be, again?”
“I know how to loosen that up for you. Trust me, I’m an osteopath.”
“It’s O.K., we’re open-minded, couple boys in the outfit are evangelicals, just watch where you’re putting them lilywhites now--yaaagghh--I mean, huh?”
“Feel better?”
“Holy Toledo,” straightening up, carefully but pain-free.
“Why, it’s a miracle.”
“Gracias a Dios!” screamed the dutiful Alfonsito.
“Obliged,” Jimmy guessed, sliding his pistol back in its holster.

AND news that THE ZAK SMITH ILLUSTRATIONS ARE GONNA BE PUBLISHED INNA BOOK!!!!!!!

i'm jumping up and down!!!

2. But that makes another edition of GR that I have to get now?

(and, comically, i have since read vineland but not touched m+d in some time.)

YOU CALL THAT ART??interrobang?

the uk edition will probably go for a chick-lit angle.

(is anyone going to order it from america, or would that be silly)

it strikes me than the whole thanatoid thing is the first time pynchon was so deliberate about making something semi-supernatural-abnormal-surreal-mythological seem constructed, invented, made up. and i thought it made it more awkward. that kind of connects with the references to the tube, as a thing, i suppose. those things especially combined to make it feel pointedly like the book had an argument, which is not something i'm used to from pynchon.

i know it will grow with rereading but i'd much rather read gravity's rainbow again. : )

also, he wasn't consistent about putting dates on the films that people mentioned. i wonder why.

i think it's probably the first time that pynchon tackles the kind of 60s 'politics' which rather underpins the first three, and maybe manages to get a lot of that out of his system: viz its not really being present in mason and dixon? well okay it totally IS present in mason and dixon but in different ways.

the popcult stuff - there's a scene in a mall at the end which was really formative to how i looked at this stuff myself, when i read this. it's a hard one to unpack, tho.

apart from the cyberpunk bit it seems to avoid the kind of uh structural and/or superficial parodies of various genres that underpin most of his novels.

the cop show / police procedural
godzilla movie
spy thriller with some kinda la femme nikita shit thrown in
a bit of road movie maybe?
the classic retreat-to-a-sanctuary-full-of-nuns-or-ninjas

i take it there are some more but those are off the top of my head.

and just to be clear, in what sense do you mean 'tackle'? in vineland he seems pretty argumentative and i suppose more direct about failures and weaknesses of countercultural/subcultural political action, and a bunch of other stuff, but isn't that kind of a big theme of part 4 of gravity's rainbow?

yeah, tackles needed a qualifier like "directly". it is the first time he writes about countercultural/subcultural etc by writing straightforwardly about campus protests and such.

the movie thing divides the movies that are real from the ones pynchon made up, or at least i thought so.

*n.b. pedants i am sure that the sweeney or whatever was awesome but it was long long long before my time

From Publishers Weekly. Starred Review. Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader's, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses. It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man. Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads. Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder. Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.). Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

LA Times review

Sans punctuation, the previous statement can be interpreted in more than one way. I think I interpreted it in a manner different from the original intent. (Kinda a caveman announcing his conquest of a large, war-like woman.)

So why's Amazon decided to bundle Against the Day with Life of Pi, emphasizing that if I purchase both I shall save an additional 5%?

this is gonna be the best thing since "the english assassin"

man FUCK amazon, i ordered new headphones on the weekend and they already showed up in my mailbox today!

Any other potential referents for the title?

AGAIN with the talking dog?

faulkner: "We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say: 'Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?'"

book of peter: "But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men."

tyndale (a 16th cent translator of the bible): "I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me."

Like you can have too many? Wait til you get to the runcible spoon fight in chapt... oh, but I've said too much already...

Ezra Tessler gives a summary:

the most striking example of Koch’s literary inventiveness is ‘The Red Robins’ (1975), the longest piece in the collection and perhaps the most well known of Koch’s relatively unacknowledged fiction. This dizzying 56 chapter, 150 page novel-like epic explodes into free-form prose, poetry, drama, and countless other incarnations of literary expression. Resiliently difficult to summarize, Koch’s hyperkinetic tale loosely follows the adventures of a group of pilots led by a morally ambiguous figure named Santa Claus as they swoop in and around Asia. The Red Robins inhabit—as if at random—jungles, cities, beaches, and clouds, while the story’s fantastical whims burst in and out of narrative, dialogue, list, rhyme, unconnected to specific time or event. There are no ‘characters’ in the traditional sense of robust personage. Instead, the reader meets a barrage of people, things, and places, some of which appear multiple times, most of which only momentarily. Together they get heaped in a spontaneous whirlwind so schizophrenic and bawdy as to rival the likes of Rabelais, Sterne, and Burroughs.

(click on 'tuesday' and fast fwd to 35 mins and available for a week)

"squints from needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light, women in headscarves, crocheted fascinators, extravagantly flowered hats, no hats at all, women just looking to put their feet up after too many hours of lifting, fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day..."

I also enjoyed Frankie Ferdinand saying " 'st los Hund?".

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nXknRDZBs0E/SUaMDxbkY2I/AAAAAAAAChI/X-U3-R60Pz0/s400/pynchon.jpg

So... Vineland Redux?

Publisher Penguin's catalog reveals details about the upcoming book by Thomas Pynchon. As previously reported, it will be a detective novel hitting shelves next summer; the news is the title, "Inherent Vice." And details about the plot:

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

man, i haven't even reread against the day yet

honestly that description is not too promising.

yeah it sounds terrible to me. and definitely reminiscent of vineland which i still am not keen on (maybe i need to re-read it?)

Yep, Vineland much better the second time. I thoroughly enjoyed it the 2nd time, and didn't really like it at all the first time.

vineland is grebt but the first chunk of it (before the explication of the DL & Takeshi plot, mebbe) is total autopynchon zappaishness, maybe kind of sours most first reads

The most striking thing about is that if you had handed me the first 30 pages, I would have staked my life I was reading the opening of the new Elmore Leonard.

apparently, according to amazon uk, people who pre-order inherent vice are likely to at the same time buy the kindly ones by jonathan littell

So the Kindley ones are buying The Kindly Ones?

Never had a clue this was coming out till BBC discussed it tonight. I see now the few posts here, but it has not generated any noise in my hearing till now.

They said 'unaccustomed territory for him'. Um, drug-addled paranoid psychedelic CA eccentrics with daft names in the late 1960s?

Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

I swear, that is practically the least unaccustomed sentence about Pynchon I can imagine.

Haven't read Against The Day, or any Pynchon novel, but Dale Peck's review of AtD might lead me to:

http://dalepeck.com/exclusives/heresy-of-truth.html

it makes me want to unread it tbh

not sure what his point is by the end. he liked the book?

I sorta never considering reading Vineland much but a back-to-back reading with Inherent Vice might be worth the time?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/31/thomas-pynchon-vineland-rereading

Can't really imagine how or why anyone could view Against The Day as his first "great" book. What flaws would one detect in Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon that are absent in Against The Day?

there's an argument to be made that the earlier books sacrifice readability on the altar of dramatic entropy, whereas AtD is readable and never aims to fall apart

remy did you read ATG?

has anyone here reread 'against the day'? i'm curious what the experience is like because even though it would obviously be worth something—you just can't see every little thing in the right light in a book that big the first time through—i haven't quite felt yet like there's a burning need to reread it. it's like it was too lucid or something.

whereas i've never finished 'mason & dixon' but don't mind rereading the parts i have finished over and over again.

i'm about to start it

missed this bit of news late last year

http://www.filmjunk.com/2010/12/02/p-t-anderson-to-direct-inherent-vice-starring-robert-downey-jr/

However, the book is available right now for those who just can't wait!

wow i'm a little over halfway through against the day and it's killing me how amazing the narrative has become. kit in the mayonnaise factory was a recent favorite.

the part with merle rideout and the photographs coming to life... holy shit

you all saw there's a new pynchon right

yah maybe he'll finally write a good one

I thought this would be about the signed books that hit the market last month:

Well, we have the distinct pleasure to offer four signed books by Pynchon in our April 11 Rare Books Auction #6085, all inscribed to a young man named Michael Urban, who was fighting lymphoma at the time Pynchon signed the books to him in 1986. Urban's mother, Carla, wrote to Pynchon asking him to sign some books, and Pynchon replied that "it would be an honor to help out." We know this because Pynchon's original Typed Letter Signed replying to Carla Urban accompanies the first edition of Gravity's Rainbow, a rare instance of provenance in modern books, and likely the only time a signed book and related letter of provenance of Pynchon's have been sold together.

In this case, the Pynchon TLS is a vital aspect of this book in that it informs a potential buyer that one, Pynchon indeed signed the book himself; and two, the letter tells us WHY Pynchon signed the book: he at one time had a friend with lymphoma, he understood what a struggle it was, and felt the need to help out a boy suffering the same fate.

[ read more » ]

I could find only two auction records for a signed copy of Gravity's Rainbow, the Drapkin copy inscribed to Ken Taub, sold at Christie's in 2005 and a copy sold at Swann in 1999. Each of these copies hammered for over $13,000, each an outstanding result, and indicative of the true rarity to be expected of a copy of this title graced by the pen-hand of its author. But neither of these two copies came with an additional letter, much less one signed by Pynchon himself. And neither, as far as I know, was inscribed to a young man battling cancer.

I think this is the premier copy of Gravity's Rainbow in the world, at least the best one so far revealed to the collecting public, and the book will surely be hotly contested over when our live session commences on Wednesday in New York City. A large part of the desirability is its provenance, which proves it to be a unique copy, tells us why it was signed, and also reveals a level of humanity in Mr. Pynchon not often glimpsed by those who don't know him personally.

The other three books inscribed to Michael Urban are also highly-desirable for the Pynchon inscriptions in them. These include first editions of The Crying of Lot 49 and Slow Learner, and a first Perennial Fiction Library edition of V. For Pynchon fans and collectors, this is a rare treat, as has been living with these books for the last two months. May they all find new homes, and go screaming across the sky to other collections.
http://historical.ha.com/c/newsletter.zx?frame=no&id=3709#collector-e

The letter itself is on ebay here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/American-Novelist-Thomas-Pynchon-Typed-Letter-Signed-/170968902943

yah maybe he'll finally write a good one

― johnny crunch, Tuesday, 8 January 2013 01:15 (8 hours ago)

have at ye! maybe ATD turns to shit in the second half, doubt it will though

you all saw there's a new pynchon right

no?

The Bleeding Edge

Apparently the Guardian phoned up Penguin in the UK to get confirmation and they were all "Really? First we've heard of it". But apparently it's been confirmed by the US.

Exciting anyway, I honestly didn't think there'd be another novel.

Me neither. Hope it's a long historical one, hopefully on a period he hasn't covered yet, and not another short 'wasn't the sixties cool?' one.

This is great news. I liked AtD, unwieldy and uneven as it was.

I recently picked up a copy of AtD for a song ($3). Whether I read it is still an open question, given that my last run at GR failed within 200pp.

it is much better and more readable imo, you should give it a shot. Like most Pynchon, it works best if you just wallow around in it and let it envelop you.

It is with joy and no little relief that we announce THOMAS PYNCHON to have last night completed a successful 'mindjack' of ilxor.com user imago, with his novel 'Against The Day'.

Said user was last seen searching for skyborne guardian angels, or at least open-minded peers, to lead this flawed human fabric to a kinder and more Compassionate place, and was also caught wondering about the theological implications of a gender-reversed Immaculate Conception - the fathering-without-issue - Cyprian as Virgin Mary...

Best Name Award goes to Bevis Moistleigh this time, speshly if Bevis is pronounced how I suspect

'mind-jacking' is a v good phrase for AtD.

I just finished Ragtime by Doctorow. Merle Rideout has to be based on Pappi, right? Just, with the daughter, and where they end up, it seemed like a homage. Or a parody. One of the two. Ragtime is really great, btw, same period as AtD. Lots of anarchists and mexican revolutionaries.

hey look its my real name, hi my real name

Thomas Pynchon's new novel BLEEDING EDGE will be published on September 17, deals with Silicon Alley between dotcom boom collapse and 9/11.

lol

not read any neal stephenson yet (cryptonomicon lies in wait) but isn't that his turf

kinda :/ that 9/11 seemingly plays a pivotal part in this (yes, I read Falling Man, no it wasn't very good) but if anyone's gonna extract something profound from it, well...

just seems like so much else he could write about in the contemporary world, hopefully 9/11 will be ghosted beyond, beneath and above much like world war 1 in ATD (and world war 2 in GR)

I don't think they're really comparable (despite what… Charles Shaar Murray maybe?… says on the back of Cryptonomicon about it being like Gravity's Rainbow - that might be one of the wrongest points of comparison I've seen on a blurb).

Makes me a little anxious that he's taking this on, but then it's Pynchon, so pretty sure I will enjoy it at least.

as far as pivotal california moments go, this is a great one to pick.

have they said how many pages it is?

Haven't read Cryptonomicon, because I was afraid it would be like attempted GR Redux--also oh no, not WWII again---but did like Diamond Age, where his developing novelistic sensibility, incl reflections of a citizen of the world and grown-ass man, overtake cyberpunk tropes/cliches.

yeah, that wasn't even meant as a slam on Stephenson (who I run hot & cold on) it's just that he's not really like Pynchon - there's some subject matter/theme overlap, but Stephenson is pulpy, fun, not really a stylist, nowhere near as extreme, just not really in the same zone at all

yeah and can well imagine him wincing when first seeing that blurb on the jacket, invoking comparisons to GR

So this will be the latest period Pynchon has written about ever. Excited for that. Hope it will be a long one.

I mean a number of his novels were contemporary at the time he wrote them...

Oh, of course. But they aren't any more, was my point. There are so many interconnections in his fictions, so many things that he describes the foundation of in his historical fiction, and then shows what happened to it in the sixties in other books. I'm excited to see those threads being taken up to the millenium.

this, really

First page of bleeding edge

http://gothamist.com/2013/04/13/read_the_first_page_of_thomas_pynch.php

I'm excited

that last para is vintage stuff. "Sunlight reflected from apartment windows has begun to show up in blurry patterns on the fronts of the buildings across the street. Two-part buses, new on the routes, creep the crosstown blocks like giant insects. Steel shutters are being rolled up, early trucks are double-parking, guys are out with hoses cleaning off their piece of sidewalk. Unhoused people sleep in doorways, scavengers with huge plastic sacks full of empty beer and soda cans head for the markets to cash them in, work crews wait un front of buildings for the super to show up. Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for the lights to change."

So many perfect constructions. "new on the routes" -- the aside with the sense of absolute locatedness in time. "unhoused people." the informality of "guys are out," the persistant image of hosing-down time. The building sense of anticipation and movement out of snapshots of static description.

Earlier, the intense present-tense nowness of "This morning, all up and down the streets, what looks like every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side has popped overnight into identical white clouds of pear blossoms."

The description (which bears the marks of being written by pynchon) makes me worry this will be a bit slight. But I didn't find IV slight, so maybe I don't have anything to worry about.

I found Inherent Vice slight.....ly hilarious <3

I think of that "yikes, scoob" scene from IV all the time.

froot loops again, i guess.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html

Really, the guy lives on the Upper West Side and we don't have a photo of him?

New book kinda...sucks. Does not live up to Inherent Vice.

on a subtextural level there's a cleverness to it but it takes reading the whole thing and musing for a bit on why it's so disappointing in a traditional sense.

I dreamt I read it last night. And liked it. I couldn't explain why.

flicked through this in a bookshop last night... opening quote from donald e. westlake!

oh man, today's the day. tempted to play hooky from work.

I thought it was today but saw it in Waterstone's on Saturday. 100pp in; I'm really enjoying it so far.

It's got its own thread by the way:

Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon. Due September 2013

ohhh the cultural references seem like they're going to make me sad

So I re-read GR last week and I was wondering what other reading this lead you to.

I think I have a copy of Scholem's book on the Kaballah, read a good article on the German genocide/occupation in South-West Africa, read some good amount of Rilke, and this makes me want to return to the latter's work. The Erotics of suicide bit was fantastic, echoes of Mishima in a way.

I want something on the Tarot? Is there a guide anywhere?

this may be nuts, and more knowledgable people may be able to point elsewhere (sure AE Waite wrote something that might even pass for scholarly) but I really like The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley.

get a Rider-Waite deck and 'The Complete Guide to the Tarot' by Eden Gray is a good place to start for a newbie.

and Fizzles ain't nuts - 'Book of Thoth' is one of the best books and essential if you get into his deck, but probably too much Crowley for the uninitiated.

Also, if you want to know more about Tarot in Pynchon, be sure to read the chapters of Against the Day where Lew Basnight comes to London. There are some really interesting ideas about characters and the Tarot, which offers a complete way to interpret pretty much all Pynchons books. Though it's obviously just a lark. The parallels between Slothrop and Basnight are really interesting, though.

Been curious abt Crowley in about forever so maybe its time. Thx for all recommends!

at one point I looked around for any other references to the Kirghiz Light and eventually assumed that Pynchon just made it up.

finished a few months back: and LOVED (it took me several years and one complete re-start)

favourite moment = when i suddenly realised the story was unavoidably approaching the tunguska incident

(more in-world overlap with vineland: the traverses are ancestors of frenesi)

Oh, I just got my hope up that a new was on the way :(

Another possible in-world overlap: Lew Basnight is described as The Fool in the Tarot conspiracy, and he seemingly has the ability to move between worlds. Tyrone Slothrop also becomes The Fool and vibrates his way out of this world.

man this thread makes me sad: I don't know whether I could imagine approaching that specific modality of enthusiasm ever again

xp

as i was reading i was often wondering if it was going to intersect more definitively with GR

(there's a throwaway bodine but i don't really count that)

thomp the film fired me up all over again :)

the film of IV i mean, there isn't an ATD film scheduled yet

was loving against the day last time i got halfway through it but then it disappeared; this was a couple years ago but just last week i ordered another copy actually.

honestly was relieved when this revive didn't mean a new one.

have the monk notes from which ATD's epigraph is taken on my wall.

i got halfway through it but then it disappeared

when the weird shift happens in ATD with the Balloon Boys section it is very disorienting, but it eventually gets back on (an alternate reality?) track. I am really looking forward to re-reading this.

Best Name Award goes to Bevis Moistleigh this time, speshly if Bevis is pronounced how I suspect

note. - the name bevis should be pronounced with a short e (the fact there is a richard jefferies ref in atd = awesomeness!)

i really do need to read this through again without the multi-year gap of my first go through.

yeah this book is like the greatest thing

I took dlh to mean his copy literally went missing, hence ordering a new one

this is probably my favourite Pynchon of the four I've read

it might be his best, which puts it somewhere at or near the literary pinnacle. maybe gr is still more mysterious and holistic or w/e but this is a thousand pages of dropped jaw

and no it shouldn't be filmed

gr = ten-hour anime
m&d = hbo series
atd = the point-and-click to end them all

I took dlh to mean his copy literally went missing, hence ordering a new one

yeah this. if it were GR i'd say it disintegrated; won't be sure until reread what the michelson-morley-metaphorical equivalent is.

displaced?

omg it happened again

Would totally play the shit out of a point-and-click Against The Day.

From the wiki:

According to Robert Bramkamp's docudrama about the V2 and Gravity's Rainbow, entitled Prüfstand VII, the BBC initiated a project to produce a film adaptation of Gravity's Rainbow between 1994 and 1997. Some unfinished footage is included in Bramkamp's film.[18] The Bramkamp movie includes other dramatized sequences from the novel as well, while the main focus is on Peenemünde and the V2.

Saw this, its ok, like lots of the footage, but its marred by a quirkyness that doesn't quite fit. However it was good to see an European take on GR

Someone should do a Pynchon inspired conspiracy/alt-history/anthology tv-show like Fargo called P.

I am in the middle of a second reading of GR (ten years since the last one) and one thought i keep having is that while it would be totally fun to see someone attempt to film it i just dont see how it wouldnt be a total disaster.

oh and the 10 year gap means that i am only slightly less lost than the first time, but i remember a unusually high number of set pieces and scenes, if in a disjointed fashion.

yeah kinda tantalizing xp cuz it lends itself to cinema better than yr average giant unfilmable novel -- frames of film as integral slices a key part of the image system; movie genre pastiches; musical sequences etc

laurie anderson says that she took his conditions for a GR musical adaptation (ukes only) as "a polite no" but why

I think a "free" -ish adaptation is the only way a film of GR might work.

Alex Ross Perry did do a very free version of it, though I haven't seen it. I haven't seen Inherent Vice either. And Pynchon is by far my favorite writer, I don't know what's wrong with me.

Inherent Vice is good but i feel like the distinctive qualities of Pynchon's voice only emerge intermittently.

gr = ten-hour anime

― imago, Sunday, August 14, 2016 3:48 AM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is exactly right: Studio Gainax or bust

ukes only = polite no
kazoos = yes do it

ows - the ten-hour anime of GR is one of the worst ideas ever and it pains me to see you subscribe to it, even if jokingly.

it's cute that someone's still hazing me in 2016

where would yous situate gravity's rainbow - in terms of difficulty - with reference to the rest of Pynchon's ooooeuvre? liked it but found it hard-going

have only read crying and the three epics but GR is comfortably the hardest

I think Gravity is by far the hardest. Pynchon is actually really careful to create red threads throughout his books, he almost never jumps into something completely new without warning you first, but some of the links in Gravity are very minor. Yes, it's stated that Slothrop will take part in some experiments with drugs, but it's still a shock when the book devolves into hallucinatory nonsense about the Kenosha Kid. The Pökler's are only introduced in a vision from a medium, before the book all of a sudden jumps back to early thirties Germany. GR really is more fragmented and 'harder', while Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are more straightforward. GR really rewards rereading as well.

Something like Infinite Jest is much more willfully fragmented than anything Pynchon has ever done.

found infinite jest an easy read, tho of course it is extremely to miss important plot points in ij because of the fragmented nature of the narrative

I agree IJ is an easier read, I'm just saying that GR is actually more fragmented. When I wrote my thesis on GR I went through the first big chunks of both books and mapped out connections between sections. And GR always makes sure to introduce the following section, while IJ does not. It's just easy to overlook because there is SO MUCH going on in GR all the time, while IJ will spend pages on a businessman watching television.

ows - the ten-hour anime of GR is one of the worst ideas ever and it pains me to see you subscribe to it, even if jokingly.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, September 7, 2016 4:58 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like any adaptation of GR (one of my favorite novels) that attempts to be faithful to its source is going to be a debacle, so I'd want it at least to be a colorful one. Really, though, my dream adaptation would be a very long Rivette film with the kind of tenuous relationship to Pynchon that Out 1 had to Balzac.

"Reef was always the reckless one," he recalled, "what folks call 'wild,' and Frank was the reasonable one, may've gone crazy now and then for a minute and a half, but I was never around to see it."

"And what about you, Kit?"

"Oh, I was just the baby."

"I think you were the religious one." Hard to tell just then if she was teasing.

^^^ ballsy

Really, though, my dream adaptation would be a very long Rivette film with the kind of tenuous relationship to Pynchon that Out 1 had to Balzac.

Yeah, I think an adaptation that can capture certain moods of the book and faithfully render certain scenes. Good shout on Rivette.

I bet PTA winds up doing a film of GR...I read an interview with him during the filming of Inherent Vice where he claimed he had never read GR. That was so preposterous it made me suspicious

enjoying ATD even more on my second round, dude sends me to wikipedia more than any other author

hurrah!

even the weird, confusing part where the Chums end up incognito as students on a campus made more sense this time

Huh was just wondering today if Bleeding Edge will be his last book, revive got my hopes up!

sorry! no dedicated thread for ATD.

"dude sends me to wikipedia more than any other author"

yeah, was always pleasantly surprised to find out so many of the weird ass historical events referenced in his books were not just totally invented things.

TP would be on my COVID worry list if he hadn't been self-isolating for the past 50 years amirite

he wasnt on mine but now he is, i tht this was a (deprecated) RIP notice >:(

No dedicated thread for ATD. I'm about 180 pages in and really like it, even love it at moments. The Tom Swiftian opening is excellent and I never knew I wanted to know about labor unrest in 1890s Colorado.

One of my favorite parts of any Pynchon is when he outdoes Lovecraft in narrating the arctic expedition and what is brought back. Wiki says the destruction here is a reference to 9/11 NY. Also that the terrorism of the anarchists seems likewise drawing a sympathetic, or at least conflicted, viewpoint re: the 9/11 terrorists. Makes one wonder why he had to write an explicit 9/11 book later.

dude sends me to wikipedia more than any other author

He was quite a challenge in the days before the Internet.

suspect it's the beast from 20000 fathoms that he's thinking of / superimposing on 9/11 in that section (tho monster-as-cargo is more king kong, and the style is lovecraftian yr right). breathtaking yeah. remember thinking it a real trick that ATD is the most conventionally "human" of his doorstops-- about a family like it's the corrections, "optimistic" even (despite its final image being a castle in the air)-- while also being the one that's switching to a different pastiche every fifty pages. (even mason+dixon more or less sticks to just one.) reassembles the 19c novel out of postwar scraps.

(also his best title imo: a physical description of the 90-degree angle that is the book's "rainbow"; a phrase for millenarian preparation or insurance; the title of a polemic.)

I have already gotten some indications of acronyms of organizations popping up (like in GR) and perhaps the Chums of Chance org being conspiratorial. Is Pynchon going to link the origins of modern capitalism in M&D to the robber barons in AtD to the military industrial complex of GR? I sure hope so.

lol keep reading

you haven't even started the damn thing yet

love ATD so much

The section where Reef goes to find his father is like Pynchon doing Cormac McCarthy and is great.

The part where Lew goes to England is interminable.

lol is that the theosophical section, i liked that bit

(tbf i liked it all)

i need to reread it

the part I had the most trouble with was the weird bit in the middle where the Chums Of Chance go undercover and lose their identities

it was easier my second time through, but still

The only bit that threw me was the very end of the monster fourth section with Lew, which felt a bit tonally odd after the breathtaking wonders preceding it. But the subsequent coda restored matters at least

the part I had the most trouble with was the weird bit in the middle where the Chums Of Chance go undercover and lose their identities

― thinkmanship (sleeve), Friday, 15 April 2022 16:20 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pure literary magic iirc

The sections so far with Lake Traverse and Deuce Kindred are really great. Almost Faulknerian in spots.

I add for posterity my reflection that Oedipa Maas in CL49 is an oddly more obscure character than we might think.

We know that she calls herself a political Republican (but almost nothing she says or does corroborates this - it's like a label that Pynchon conveniently attaches, but doesn't fulfil), and that she is a 'suburban housewife' - all this part of setting her up as an orthodox figure who can then be shaken up.

We know that she studied at Berkeley in the 1950s - English I think - probably graduating in 1957. That's as good as the back story gets.

As far as I recall, we don't know:

1: how she met Pierce Inverarity or why she had an affair with him.*

2: why she married Wendell Maas - as they don't seem to have anything in common - and don't seem to have had any plans to have children.

3: why she readily begins an affair with Metzger -- but more to the point here: why, as a married woman beginning an affair, she is not more worried about the consequences of sex, above all pregnancy. The guess must be that she is on the contraceptive pill - which would in turn relate to her marriage and, again, a reluctance to have children together. But as far as I recall, this is not mentioned, though it would arguably be a very new, 1960s theme and would relate to the drug aspects of the novel. A more general point here is that it does not seem to occur to Pynchon that contraception of some kind would be important to a woman in her position.

4: what has happened to her parents. Are they alive? If so, why, in increasing desperation, does she not think to contact them - or alternatively, think "Mom, I wish you were still around - I could sure do with your advice now"? Pynchon has made her effectively an orphan, but as far as I know he doesn't explain this.

*5: how old was Pierce Inverarity? Note that he died a few months before the novel begins, and changed his will a year earlier. He MAY have been killed by sinister forces (she wonders this near the end) - which would obviously be significant for the plot. Or he may have just died of illness (but then what illness?) or old age - but if the latter, how old was he? 70? That would make him over 40 years older than Oedipa!

I suspect that a few of the points above may in fact be addressed in the novel and that I have forgotten or missed them.

The most general point to emerge from these observations is that in this short novel, Pynchon rigged up something that feels quite plausible (Oedipa the housewife and her adventure), but in a way that actually has lots of holes and gaps that we probably don't notice because he keeps it moving fast. This principle could possibly be true of lots of other novels.

i don't know if this is helpful but this is the painting that oedipa remembers seeing = remedios varo's (embroidering the earth's mantle aka bordando el manto terrestre

https://nickholdstock.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/mantle.jpeg

I know it well and was thrilled to see it in person at Tate Modern this year !! (this is the centre of a triptych with two other parts - as you may know.)

Especially as someone who was raised as a Republican in the 1950s, and tended to think of myself that way into the early 60s---between the fall of McCarthy and the rise of Goldwater---I'm among those who think of it as being more inclusive back then, and a Berkeley grad who is curious, open-minded, has some educated sense of agency---but of isolation, of being a traveler, and is attracted to glimpses of the meaning of things, the order, the true System, whether it's something she's going to try to embrace or not---that sounds like a plausible Republican-identifying character to me.
She could eventually take it in a more Right or Left, John Birch or Aquarian direction, to where they might merge, in terms of conspiracy theories and "organic" pre-Covid anti-vaxxers etc, or not. Part of the attraction to Wendell "Mucho" Maas ("Mucho baby," as she addresses him at one point, indicating that he may well have mucho sex appeal), is the intensity and curiosity, idealistic tendencies, that they share, which he takes in the Aquarian direction, with LSD. Disturbing to her initially, but she may join him later, or go on a parallel path.
I think at this point some form of birth control could be understood by the reader as a given, ditto the sense of isolation I mentioned, in big old and modern California, with its own traditions of transition, whether she's literally an orphan or not. She's married, but not a period-stereotypical American Wife, incl. Mom, forever fixing dinner etc. He's currently preoccupied, maybe always has been to some degree, which may even be part of their compatibility, so far.

Also, it's hard to picture, unless she had a really open-minded and Cali-savvy Mom, consultations about Thurn Und Taxis and Wendell's adventures with LSD.

Hard to picture in that era, but doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Could have been good, but maybe taking away from the tension of her isolation, of mysteries left along the road to revelation, as can also happen off the page.

And of course California, the Promised Land and so on, is such a complicated place, grids and sprawl and sunshine and smog and so much else. Even if you just want to keep your head to yourself and write code or pan for gold or smoke it, you have to have a plan, develop it or find it, for The Purpose-Driven Life, even one with cruise control as your goal.

A leading physical metaphor for shore.

at some point in the last decade i realised i was kind of reading oedipa maas against joan didion: not that they're identical but there are some useful points of similarity (social background, sensibility perhaps) which help triangulate the differences (tho they don't really answer any of PF's questions)

(oedipa's husband briefly turns up again in vineland, the second in TP's "californian trilogy")

I strongly agree about the common ground between the texts ie: between Maas and Didion. There are a number of specific points of such common ground.

I had forgotten about the Vineland appearance, though did know of it. But I only ever read half of Vineland, and do not think it is my kind of novel.

re poster dow's post: it's not that I think CL49 should have a scene with OM's mother (though it could have been interesting for sure, and reminds me of another question: what was Oedipa Maas's maiden name?) -- rather that in 120 pages in which we feel intimate with this character and experience all her concerns, hopes and traumas, it's odd that she never once thinks of the existence or non-existence of any of her family (save her husband).

My general observation, again, is that there is an element of smoke & mirrors in the fictional process, in which OM feels quite a full and compelling character, but in some ways isn't; is a facade with less depth then we might think, who exists as a function and role ('actant'?) in the fiction and is less fully thought through and realised than she may seem.

I also reflected that the one novelist who WOULD, for good or ill, have thought through family backstory and brought it in, is ... Franzen.

Maxine Tarnow in Bleeding Edge is possibly TRP compensating for the underwritten aspects of Oedipa - she's a much more fully drawn mum-gumshoe. Though funnily enough Mike Davis thought this was a virtue of CoL49 in comparison to Didion - he praised the novel for "wasting no time grappling with the alienation of its subject".

That sounds a good comment from Davis (whom I've almost never read).

I agree that Bleeding Edge comes over like a return to CL49 territory (I suspect that INHERENT VICE did too), though I also thought it was dire.

On the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow’s publication, it’s worth remembering that Laurie Anderson once asked Thomas Pynchon if she could stage it as an opera. His answer? Yes, as long as the whole thing was scored solely for banjo pic.twitter.com/jh0REahy0O

— David Hering (@hering_david) February 28, 2023

Paging Bela Fleck…

Lol

Part of the attraction to Wendell "Mucho" Maas ("Mucho baby," as she addresses him at one point, indicating that he may well have mucho sex appeal)

"Mucho" means "Lot." Oedipa is Lot's wife.