6 ms·

Pynchon in Public Day (2017)

31 points by chippy 3y ago

dadarecit 3y ago
tbh, Pynchon is overrated, pretentious and tedious. If he were an engineer, he’d be the kind that implements event driven microservices architecture just to recommend new items for users. Sure, he so smart - but if he so smart, why he so stupid?
- shever73 3y ago
  I've only started reading Pynchon lately. I'd seen too many comparisons to James Joyce, and I struggled and gave up on Ulysses at least 4 times. Anyway, I picked up a copy of V at a second-hand bookshop recently and, so far, I'm enjoying it. It's definitely densely packed and not a quick read, but I think he's just carrying on the post-modernist tradition of Proust and Joyce.
  - dumpsterlid 3y ago
    You can fault Pynchon for many many things (though I love him) but "carrying on a post-modernist tradition" is probably the last thing you could possibly fault him for. Pynchon is one of the most esoteric artists I have ever encountered in any medium. He did take a lot of inspiration from how Henry James writes in a sentence/paragraph level (see Pugnax the talking dog who reads Henry James all day in ATD) but his work ends up being something entirely different.
- computerfriend 3y ago
  But he was an engineer.
  - frontierkodiak 3y ago
    He was a technical writer at Boeing, IIRC
- cantSpellSober 3y ago
  A common response. > According to the standard kvetch about his work, his prose is overly dense [1] Neil Stephenson gets the same criticism a lot, but I still enjoy a lot of his work. > [Pynchon] can write some truly poignant scenes of longing, love, and loss Don't get too caught up in the details, and don't hope for endings. https://pleasekillme.com/thomas-pynchon/ https://pleasekillme.com/thomas-pynchon/
- slothtrop 3y ago
  I don't understand pretentious as a critique, it's only ever a projection. Either something works or it doesn't, works don't "pretend" anything.
  - MontyCarloHall 3y ago
    Sure they do; they pretend to be more sophisticated than they actual are.
    - websitejanitor 3y ago
      Pynchon doesn't pretend to be anything. His material mostly consists of low culture, obscenity, and engineering nerd stuff he finds interesting. He lived through the beat and hippie countercultures and draws from them for his characters and settings. I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can. People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      It's either sophisticated (in the eye of the beholder) or it isn't. Art doesn't "pretend". You can only take it at face value.
- dmreedy 3y ago
  All I can think of is a quote from the McSweeney's article elsewhere on the front page right now. "we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency." For me at least, postmodern literature isn't just about conveying a message or an idea. It's about conveying a vibe, a state of mind. And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at.
  - dumpsterlid 3y ago
    "And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at." Absolutely, postmodern literature is an extension of modernism (i.e. To The Lighthouse or Ulysses) in that it is focused on describing the moment to moment experience of consciousness, except postmodern literature like Pynchon's work dials everything up until the replicated experience of consciousness is the experience of a psychedelic state. This results in confounding literature where it is difficult to deduce what is real, what the point is, and to orient oneself. This is unavoidably a necessary part of inducing such an intense mental state in the reader.
adamgordonbell 3y ago
Pynchon comes up on here a lot. Like Infinite Jest used to at some point. So I read Crying of Lot 49. It was good – not mind blowing, but totally something that could be read for fun. Some fun word choice, some memorable scenes and a bit of a silly vibe.
- cnity 3y ago
  I know people get teased for admitting this, but DFW is the best stuff I've ever read. If anyone has suggestions along the same line I'd love to hear it.
  - davidthewatson 3y ago
    Without getting into the personal history of DFW, I think it's OK to love the art but not the artist. I certainly like lots of music like that. Clearly, from the noise arising before and after the movie-depiction of "Although of course you end up becoming yourself", the life of the artist will be dissected in modern society no matter the consensus. I've read right on into Byung Chul Han a decade later which I find resplendent for exactly the opposite reasons: minimalist vs. maximalist expression. To me, DFW was fun reading since he used a sideways default mode in writing to demonstrate that the future held this sideways aspect at its core. He'd tease us with "are you going with me" as if that sideways writing was the tunnels at Shangri-La and DFW were Bill Moyers. Except the hard part is cookie crumbing your way back from that leaf node mentally. In other words, breadth-first-search is fine in brain-space but comes with high cognitive cost of losing yourself (in cognitive psychology function) or others (in social psychology function) or maybe that was the point of the art? I find the same effect in reading Byung Chul Han because his aphoristic style leaves my brain puzzling to remember the Greeks and assimilate that knowledge with the mental wormhole he's shoved me down - which is, perhaps ironically, exactly the same reason I love conversing with AI: I can't see it coming... giving the reading an epiphanous spiritual effect.
    - cnity 3y ago
      Thank you. Oddly, I don't think the thing I get from his writing is the thing I'm _supposed_ to get. That is, the kind of tonal urgency he conveys, the sense that it is really important to get at the thing he is trying to drive at (sideways, as you put it), comes across more as an entertaining exhilaration for me, rather than something seriously important. I suspect DFW would disdain this take away from his writings and consider his books a failure for me.
bookofjoe 3y ago
>Every known picture of Thomas Pynchon (2019; 2014; 2012; 2009) https://www.bookofjoe.com/2019/11/every-known-picture-of-thomas-pynchon-blast-from-the-past.html https://www.bookofjoe.com/2019/11/every-known-picture-of-tho...
- canjobear 3y ago
  There are more: https://davidvmatthews.com/2019/02/07/never-ever-vote/ https://davidvmatthews.com/2019/02/07/never-ever-vote/
  - bookofjoe 3y ago
    Thank you!!!
DiscourseFan 3y ago
Reading Gravity's Rainbow right now. A lot of people say its "postmodern" and more about vibes than anything else, but I'm definitely enjoying it from an intellectual perspective as well.
- dawsoneliasen 3y ago
  I felt after reading Gravity's Rainbow that it was not postmodern at all, and not particularly intellectual. I wouldn't say it was about "vibes" either. It was a ride.
dumpsterlid 3y ago
FYI we are extremely lucky to have good audiobook versions of all three of Pynchon's big novels: Gravity's Rainbow (George Guidal) Against The Day (Dick Hill) Mason & Dixon (Steven Crossley). I highly recommend Pynchon, you have to relearn how read when reading one of his more dense works. It is a demanding experience in letting go of your expectations, need to understand and general framework for reading normal books you have probably relied on most of your adult life. The work of unlearning and relearning how to read is a reward in itself but additionally Pynchon is just so much smarter, more well rounded, and politically conscious than similar Big Dense Novel writers. Take for example how Pynchon focuses so much on the Herero people and the genocide Germany inflicted on them (in 1904-1908) in a novel about WW2 (Gravity's Rainbow). It feels anachronistic and unrelated until you step back and see Pynchon's argument about war, colonialism and whiteness venting off the brutal inhumanity of Europe until one day it inevitably came home. This has become a much more popular way of framing WW1 and WW2 as time has gone by (because it is the right one) but Gravity's Rainbow was written in the 70s long before people were really talking about things this way. Pynchon in my opinion diagnoses the sickness and violence at the heart of western society and tracks how it evolved into a globalist structure of business in the 20th century better than almost any other writer.

31 points by chippy 3y ago

tbh, Pynchon is overrated, pretentious and tedious. If he were an engineer, he’d be the kind that implements event driven microservices architecture just to recommend new items for users. Sure, he so smart - but if he so smart, why he so stupid?

shever73 3y ago
I've only started reading Pynchon lately. I'd seen too many comparisons to James Joyce, and I struggled and gave up on Ulysses at least 4 times. Anyway, I picked up a copy of V at a second-hand bookshop recently and, so far, I'm enjoying it. It's definitely densely packed and not a quick read, but I think he's just carrying on the post-modernist tradition of Proust and Joyce.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago
  You can fault Pynchon for many many things (though I love him) but "carrying on a post-modernist tradition" is probably the last thing you could possibly fault him for. Pynchon is one of the most esoteric artists I have ever encountered in any medium. He did take a lot of inspiration from how Henry James writes in a sentence/paragraph level (see Pugnax the talking dog who reads Henry James all day in ATD) but his work ends up being something entirely different.
computerfriend 3y ago
But he was an engineer.
- frontierkodiak 3y ago
  He was a technical writer at Boeing, IIRC
cantSpellSober 3y ago
A common response. > According to the standard kvetch about his work, his prose is overly dense [1] Neil Stephenson gets the same criticism a lot, but I still enjoy a lot of his work. > [Pynchon] can write some truly poignant scenes of longing, love, and loss Don't get too caught up in the details, and don't hope for endings. https://pleasekillme.com/thomas-pynchon/ https://pleasekillme.com/thomas-pynchon/
slothtrop 3y ago
I don't understand pretentious as a critique, it's only ever a projection. Either something works or it doesn't, works don't "pretend" anything.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  Sure they do; they pretend to be more sophisticated than they actual are.
  - websitejanitor 3y ago
    Pynchon doesn't pretend to be anything. His material mostly consists of low culture, obscenity, and engineering nerd stuff he finds interesting. He lived through the beat and hippie countercultures and draws from them for his characters and settings. I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can. People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    It's either sophisticated (in the eye of the beholder) or it isn't. Art doesn't "pretend". You can only take it at face value.
dmreedy 3y ago
All I can think of is a quote from the McSweeney's article elsewhere on the front page right now. "we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency." For me at least, postmodern literature isn't just about conveying a message or an idea. It's about conveying a vibe, a state of mind. And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago
  "And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at." Absolutely, postmodern literature is an extension of modernism (i.e. To The Lighthouse or Ulysses) in that it is focused on describing the moment to moment experience of consciousness, except postmodern literature like Pynchon's work dials everything up until the replicated experience of consciousness is the experience of a psychedelic state. This results in confounding literature where it is difficult to deduce what is real, what the point is, and to orient oneself. This is unavoidably a necessary part of inducing such an intense mental state in the reader.

adamgordonbell 3y ago

Pynchon comes up on here a lot. Like Infinite Jest used to at some point. So I read Crying of Lot 49. It was good – not mind blowing, but totally something that could be read for fun. Some fun word choice, some memorable scenes and a bit of a silly vibe.

cnity 3y ago
I know people get teased for admitting this, but DFW is the best stuff I've ever read. If anyone has suggestions along the same line I'd love to hear it.
- davidthewatson 3y ago
  Without getting into the personal history of DFW, I think it's OK to love the art but not the artist. I certainly like lots of music like that. Clearly, from the noise arising before and after the movie-depiction of "Although of course you end up becoming yourself", the life of the artist will be dissected in modern society no matter the consensus. I've read right on into Byung Chul Han a decade later which I find resplendent for exactly the opposite reasons: minimalist vs. maximalist expression. To me, DFW was fun reading since he used a sideways default mode in writing to demonstrate that the future held this sideways aspect at its core. He'd tease us with "are you going with me" as if that sideways writing was the tunnels at Shangri-La and DFW were Bill Moyers. Except the hard part is cookie crumbing your way back from that leaf node mentally. In other words, breadth-first-search is fine in brain-space but comes with high cognitive cost of losing yourself (in cognitive psychology function) or others (in social psychology function) or maybe that was the point of the art? I find the same effect in reading Byung Chul Han because his aphoristic style leaves my brain puzzling to remember the Greeks and assimilate that knowledge with the mental wormhole he's shoved me down - which is, perhaps ironically, exactly the same reason I love conversing with AI: I can't see it coming... giving the reading an epiphanous spiritual effect.
  - cnity 3y ago
    Thank you. Oddly, I don't think the thing I get from his writing is the thing I'm _supposed_ to get. That is, the kind of tonal urgency he conveys, the sense that it is really important to get at the thing he is trying to drive at (sideways, as you put it), comes across more as an entertaining exhilaration for me, rather than something seriously important. I suspect DFW would disdain this take away from his writings and consider his books a failure for me.

bookofjoe 3y ago

>Every known picture of Thomas Pynchon (2019; 2014; 2012; 2009) https://www.bookofjoe.com/2019/11/every-known-picture-of-thomas-pynchon-blast-from-the-past.html https://www.bookofjoe.com/2019/11/every-known-picture-of-tho...

canjobear 3y ago
There are more: https://davidvmatthews.com/2019/02/07/never-ever-vote/ https://davidvmatthews.com/2019/02/07/never-ever-vote/
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  Thank you!!!

DiscourseFan 3y ago

Reading Gravity's Rainbow right now. A lot of people say its "postmodern" and more about vibes than anything else, but I'm definitely enjoying it from an intellectual perspective as well.

dawsoneliasen 3y ago
I felt after reading Gravity's Rainbow that it was not postmodern at all, and not particularly intellectual. I wouldn't say it was about "vibes" either. It was a ride.

dumpsterlid 3y ago

FYI we are extremely lucky to have good audiobook versions of all three of Pynchon's big novels: Gravity's Rainbow (George Guidal) Against The Day (Dick Hill) Mason & Dixon (Steven Crossley). I highly recommend Pynchon, you have to relearn how read when reading one of his more dense works. It is a demanding experience in letting go of your expectations, need to understand and general framework for reading normal books you have probably relied on most of your adult life. The work of unlearning and relearning how to read is a reward in itself but additionally Pynchon is just so much smarter, more well rounded, and politically conscious than similar Big Dense Novel writers. Take for example how Pynchon focuses so much on the Herero people and the genocide Germany inflicted on them (in 1904-1908) in a novel about WW2 (Gravity's Rainbow). It feels anachronistic and unrelated until you step back and see Pynchon's argument about war, colonialism and whiteness venting off the brutal inhumanity of Europe until one day it inevitably came home. This has become a much more popular way of framing WW1 and WW2 as time has gone by (because it is the right one) but Gravity's Rainbow was written in the 70s long before people were really talking about things this way. Pynchon in my opinion diagnoses the sickness and violence at the heart of western society and tracks how it evolved into a globalist structure of business in the 20th century better than almost any other writer.