for Pynchon fans -- advice please

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