5 ms·

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 tha

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.
- dawsoneliasen 3y ago
  Same here. The Master and Margarita kind of has a similar feel to infinite jest IMO. I love Borges for the mathematical-esque concepts and explorations, but it feels nothing like DFW.
- aardvark179 3y ago
  It all depends on what you like about Infinite Jest. The reason it is often mentioned in relation to Pynchon’s work is that they are books which pull in _everything_, or at least they do to a first approximation. If that’s what you like then I think books like The Pope’s Rhinoceros by Lawrence Norfolk might be right up your street,l.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  You might like William Gaddis. The Recognitions and JR are dense and very complex novels with brilliant formal invention and prescient looks at finance, art, and skepticism bleeding into a postmodern mindset. The sheer amount of cultural references on even a single page in The Recognitions is astounding. He was a direct influence on DFW, Pynchon, and DeLillo.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  I think Gary Shteyngart (a Soviet emigre to America who has the perspective on both countries and can find eerie echoes to the dying days of the Soviet Union in his experiences in the modern US) has a similar style to DFW in many ways. I particularly recommend his Super Sad True Love Story set in the near future, as Infinite Jest was.
nemo44x 3y ago
I think one of the reasons he is popular here is because he references a lot of mathematical and engineering concepts and terms that if you understand (as I assume a good deal of the population here does) you’ll get even more out of his books.
cantSpellSober 3y ago
He said that he considers Lot 49 a "'story' marketed as a 'novel' [...] in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." It doesn't compare to his later works IMO (Mason & Dixon still being my fav.)
- slothtrop 3y ago
  Mason & Dixon might be his most underrated. Against the Day was too gratuitous and filthy. I liked V and GR best, the latter also being kind of disgusting but in more limited fashion.
- pklausler 3y ago
  Greetings, fellow Mason & Dixon devotee. It's just so damned clever and hilarious.
senknvd 3y ago
I think the entry Pynchon for people on here is Bleeding Edge. Set during the dot com boom with plenty of references to late 90s tech.
- krylon 3y ago
  I loved the passage where two guys in a club argue - and nearly fight - over HTML tables vs CSS for page layout.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    And in other passages he brings up issues in Java programming when Java was a newish technology. It is pretty amusing to find references to this sort of thing in a book written by somebody who could be the father or even grandfather of dot-com employees, but then Pynchon always liked to include technical tidbits in his books as he initially studied engineering.
  - MontyCarloHall 3y ago
    A bit anachronistic for the novel’s setting of 2001 though. Tables still unequivocally reigned supreme then, since many commonly used browsers didn’t even fully support CSS for layout (e.g. Netscape 4). I’m a huge Pynchon fan, but this is arguably one of his biggest weaknesses: his books are alluring because of their incredible depth of seemingly meticulously researched trivia, but it’s often just subtly wrong enough that it makes the depth seem superficial.
    - stonogo 3y ago
      My memory of 2001 was that CSS1 was a real contender, and CSS2 was beginning to take shape. CSS2-style class and type selectors were already strongly supported; see https://web.archive.org/web/20030803081721/http://devedge.netscape.com/library/xref/2003/css-support/css2/selectors.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030803081721/http://devedge.ne... CSS was still a short time away from any one browser fully supporting it, but already the table purists were trying to chase developers away to <div>.

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.
dawsoneliasen 3y ago
Same here. The Master and Margarita kind of has a similar feel to infinite jest IMO. I love Borges for the mathematical-esque concepts and explorations, but it feels nothing like DFW.
aardvark179 3y ago
It all depends on what you like about Infinite Jest. The reason it is often mentioned in relation to Pynchon’s work is that they are books which pull in _everything_, or at least they do to a first approximation. If that’s what you like then I think books like The Pope’s Rhinoceros by Lawrence Norfolk might be right up your street,l.
beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
You might like William Gaddis. The Recognitions and JR are dense and very complex novels with brilliant formal invention and prescient looks at finance, art, and skepticism bleeding into a postmodern mindset. The sheer amount of cultural references on even a single page in The Recognitions is astounding. He was a direct influence on DFW, Pynchon, and DeLillo.
jhbadger 3y ago
I think Gary Shteyngart (a Soviet emigre to America who has the perspective on both countries and can find eerie echoes to the dying days of the Soviet Union in his experiences in the modern US) has a similar style to DFW in many ways. I particularly recommend his Super Sad True Love Story set in the near future, as Infinite Jest was.

nemo44x 3y ago

I think one of the reasons he is popular here is because he references a lot of mathematical and engineering concepts and terms that if you understand (as I assume a good deal of the population here does) you’ll get even more out of his books.

cantSpellSober 3y ago

He said that he considers Lot 49 a "'story' marketed as a 'novel' [...] in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." It doesn't compare to his later works IMO (Mason & Dixon still being my fav.)

slothtrop 3y ago
Mason & Dixon might be his most underrated. Against the Day was too gratuitous and filthy. I liked V and GR best, the latter also being kind of disgusting but in more limited fashion.
pklausler 3y ago
Greetings, fellow Mason & Dixon devotee. It's just so damned clever and hilarious.

senknvd 3y ago

I think the entry Pynchon for people on here is Bleeding Edge. Set during the dot com boom with plenty of references to late 90s tech.

krylon 3y ago
I loved the passage where two guys in a club argue - and nearly fight - over HTML tables vs CSS for page layout.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  And in other passages he brings up issues in Java programming when Java was a newish technology. It is pretty amusing to find references to this sort of thing in a book written by somebody who could be the father or even grandfather of dot-com employees, but then Pynchon always liked to include technical tidbits in his books as he initially studied engineering.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago
  A bit anachronistic for the novel’s setting of 2001 though. Tables still unequivocally reigned supreme then, since many commonly used browsers didn’t even fully support CSS for layout (e.g. Netscape 4). I’m a huge Pynchon fan, but this is arguably one of his biggest weaknesses: his books are alluring because of their incredible depth of seemingly meticulously researched trivia, but it’s often just subtly wrong enough that it makes the depth seem superficial.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    My memory of 2001 was that CSS1 was a real contender, and CSS2 was beginning to take shape. CSS2-style class and type selectors were already strongly supported; see https://web.archive.org/web/20030803081721/http://devedge.netscape.com/library/xref/2003/css-support/css2/selectors.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030803081721/http://devedge.ne... CSS was still a short time away from any one browser fully supporting it, but already the table purists were trying to chase developers away to <div>.