for Pynchon fans -- advice please

mason & dixon is the most entertaining.

or, wait for the new one.

I'll usually give an author 100 pages to lull me into the rhythm of the work. if his or her voice has not caught me by then I will likely move on.
thanks for the feedback so far

vineland's opening hundred are some of his most forced, zappa-ish, unfunny-in-a-bad-way-as-opposed-to-funny-in-a-good-way. that's what i thought at the time, at least.

You don't need a guide for GR! Maybe it might be fun on a rereading but man, slowing yrself down with a guide first time through sounds like it'd kill the fun. Just, y'know, reread trhe occasional paragraph, it's mostly not that obscure

Sorry it's just I'm adoring it, no guide, and just got through reading Lolita WITH the notes which frankly half ruined the thing at the start (gave up after 50 or so pages, tho. Footnotes for the French would've done me fine). ALso it's plotheavy but he leaves plenty of bits of the plots OUT, (the boring bits mostly) so I think you just notice them as they happen as almost discrete events, rather than having to follow etc. It isn't a detective novel or anytnhing.

A guide really helps the 2nd time round though, or maybe not a guide so much as various summaries or papers about themes or articles or this hypercard stack which I remember from back in the day as really awesome: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/hyperbola.html although how you can view it these days is beyond me.

Really the point being that there's lots of different mixed up thematic elements that just sort of sink into you, and being reminded of them and thinking about them before going in and tackling it again makes it much richer. I don't think there's a "one true" interpretation though, so much as a bunch of overlapping connected notions to explore.

I.e. read some Rilke, read up on IG Farben, learn about this and that other thing, and certain sections become much richer.

https://drunkpynchon.com

i actually spoiled GR for myself by doing too mch back-reading (maybe also by rereading it too often): it's probably now slipped right down to my list

least favourite still always V. (which is just too beat generation for me)

i'd need to reread the last three for this to be definitive (AtD took me ten years -- with several interruptions and restarts) but i think my current order is

M&R
AtD
VL
BE
IV --- need to reread this as the actual sequel to VL
GR
CL47
V

i'd say the main thing that makes him unlike zappa is that latterly he has tremendous affection for almost all his characters (and also for LA): CL49 is the most zappa-esque i think

CL47

yes oedipa was wrong, lot 47 is actually the item which explains the conspiracy

📯

latterly he has tremendous affection for almost all his characters

AtD was kinda revelatory in this regard

was noticeable already in mason & dixon but i had assumed it was a func of the narrative focus on the title relationship

but then AtD had a GR-style endless wandering cast -- seems like every chapter in the second half is someone "running into" someone somewhere -- but is also, incredibly, a tolstoyish Family novel (thought after the early fleetwood vibe chapters that it was going to be a Families novel, but there didn't end up being much focus on any vibes but scarsdale and his surrogate -- incidentally these fleetwood chapters are p much 9/11 retold via the plot of the beast from 20000 fathoms right? as well as idk a refracting mirror of GR's opening knotting-into -- maybe not. anyway i read them over and over, they were v good. clocks high overhead told us how late, increasingly late, we would be.)

GR really opened itself up to me the second time and the third time was nonstop pleasure but feel like going back to it now (having finished AtD) would feel in contrast unpleasant? my memories of it now are pretty unpleasant. not that that's bad. the books have the same nightmares in them obv -- capital, control, death -- but the attention to relationships, partic familial, in AtD made its vision of an alternative/escape feel more imminent (odd cuz in the end this vision is literally of a castle in the sky)? more of a grandpa's book than a freaked-out young man's. was comforting, which i've heard could be good or bad depending on whether or not i am "the disturbed". anyway would now put AtD atop the list but tbh i have tended to do that with whichever large pynchon book i paid close attention to last.

have weirdly read none of the short(er) ones except lot 49 (meaning: L49, v-land, IV, BE) but i bet vineland's secretly more "major" than V.

(maybe one reason it's comforting tho is just that vibe is not as disturbing or complete a villain or face of thanatotic capital as cpt. blicero -- for a long time he's honestly just sort of delightfully sinister until in the latter third TP designs a whole section around setting vibe up to commit an act of visceral cruelty that seems almost last-minute and which i thus honestly felt pretty removed from -- idk, different strengths rite)

^^^ honestly that post is so honest, the most honest

the affection definitely emerges in VL: the relationship between zoyd and prairie

(which has always led me to theorise that TP has a daughter, roughly prairie's age -- may be wrong abt this but i bet i'm not)

v aside (which i haven't reread for so long i don't feel able to judge) vl is actually the book with the biggest flaw in it, which is that i don't think he gets the thing between frenesi and brock vond to work, really

my goto Pynchon thread

it comes set at about '7' but readers often find it preferable to choose a lower setting for a more comfortable experience.
― Josh (Josh), Wednesday, 16 November 2005 06:03 (eleven years ago) Permalink

lol

dlh you should def read VL, it is rollicking fun and has some of my all time favorite Pynchon passages

(which has always led me to theorise that TP has a daughter, roughly prairie's age -- may be wrong abt this but i bet i'm not)

merle/dally stuff in AtD gave me similar suspicions

i will sleeve! got ~50pgs into it recently before stalling but for some reason i take warmup runs at everything these days (and i always took them at pynchon)

i'd say the main thing that makes him unlike zappa is that latterly he has tremendous affection for almost all his characters (and also for LA)

Did Zappa make concept albums with characters? There is less warmth I suppose but maybe a cynicism that both share about things, idk..

Anyway yes I quite like to do a IV/VL dbl bill @ xmas - still deciding what chunky thing I want to be reading around then but its certainly erm in the running.

less characters than "conceptual continuity"-- a zappa thing that w4tson makes a thing of throughout poodleplay only to be clowned by FZ when they finally meet (in a lolworth moment, BW's never-to-be-criticised guru compares CC to TOLKIEN: collapse of militant party)

i don't really think pynchon *is* cynical (partial exception: CL49); quite the opposite -- he's still a teenage beatnik at heart (there's MOLOCH -- the extant structures -- and there's all of us, the many naked snacks on forks)

(zappa is also a teenage beatnik4leif, but more the steve allen/stan freberg type)

^^^w4tson = b3n w4tson

I suppose I was equating the conpiratorial points in Ps books as something borne out of a deep cynicism.

i know, i think that's wrong though

Lot 49, the early stories and V got me though high school (I'm older than Mark, more vulnerable to the Beat Generation). But, although I need to read it again, and despite some beautiful passage maybe nobody else could have come up with, or done so well---the village of the children, my God! Would have liked to know more about the village of dogs, for that matter---most of GR (finally read a couple years ago) seemed like overextended sessions of punishment for feckless sheeple seeking distraction (punishing himself too? Sure was a lot of work, up to his elbows in all this dreary garble, for several years, apparently). In that sense, as well as some much more beneficial and benign ones, he was as much a 60s-70s Avatar of the Web as Steve Jobs.
Mind you, his intro to the collected apprentice fiction, Slow Learner, can be as self-effacing as the title. Says, in the 90s, that he eventually realized that young TP didn't really understand entrophy etc. And I wouldn't judge him by any one book, esp. one that I prob should read again, yes, though if I do I may be more likely to run out of time for all the later ones (some of them are just as big I think).

"beautiful passages", Ah meant to say.

And/or (intending more geezer sympathy, but maybe ending up even more of a Debbie Downer about it after all), we have here maybe the confusion of young TP: on the one hand, he wants the scales to fall from our eyes, man, on the other, he invites us to stare at thee intricately detailed scales for---quite a while. ("Look what he did with the Zodiac in here! Wow and he did the math right!")

"Pedophile Nazis! Busteddd!

FYI Alan Jacobs is blogging his reread of the Pynchon oeuvre and it's adding up to some of the best writing about TRP I've read in a long time. Begins here http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2016/12/the-big-pynchon-re-read.html

already stopped blogging about it cuz he's gonna write a book :(

baffled by his feelings regarding ATD, sure it has a particularly disorienting & lengthy diversion in the middle, but the ridiculous parts are just what you roll with in a Pynchon book, as he refers to re: Vineland