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I've felt the sinister urge to read another Pynchon novel after finishing Gravity's Rainbow earlier this year. I've started reading Vineland, which is Pynchon-lite, as far as I understand. The tone of the book, so far, is oddly sentimental. Zoyd is a single father who lives off of government checks for acting crazy and jumping through windows annually, an act he doesn't seem proud of. His daughter is in that weird teenage phase where she's old enough to date a punk-rocker who's obsessed with violence, but she still looks at her dad with the hero glasses on. There's a father-daughter bonding moment as they watch television together, and there's already been a noticeable amount of references to movies and TV shows in dialogue. It's considered Pynchon's weakest book by many, and I've barely scraped the surface, but I like it.
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Jul 22, 2015 16:09
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That also reminds me, has anyone heard about the new movie about DFW with Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel? Segel plays DFW, and I'm intrigued.
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Jul 22, 2015 17:16
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Are you high?
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May 19, 2016 01:21
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newtestleper posted:He's my favorite writer. His short stories are what he's known for. Sixty stories contains most of his most famous stories. Do you like audiobooks or podcasts? Because The New Yorker Fiction podcast has a bunch of free episodes of writers reading their favorite Barthelme stories and then exploring their tbemes and ideas.
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May 24, 2016 15:08
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Frankenstein: A letter to a failed writer from her brother who, on a ship in the North Pole, met a dying weirdo.
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Jun 20, 2016 20:13
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Nah, de Cervantes travelled through time and wrote a thinly veiled history of his travels when he returned to his modern day.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:34
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ultrachrist posted:I read The Recognitions last month (my first Gaddis), and it was fine I guess. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the DFW-Pynchon-DeLillo trifecta. I wrote about it here but generally I found it enforcing an extremely repetitive point that is somewhat difficult to connect with nowadays. But of course the bar and party conversations were great. I laughed out loud often. I appreciate what the guy's attempting, but I lack any urge to read him. I've only successfully read through The Fifty Year Sword, a decent short story marketed as a full-length book at a ridiculous price. It was pretty, but is done within an hour. I might attempt House of Leaves one day if I run out of other horror, but I just wonder 'Why not just concentrate on telling a good story instead of (what seems to be) disguising an okay story with weird book layouts and fonts?' A 26/27 book series just seems like self-parody at this point. Something like Sufjan Stevens's state album series goof, but more deadpan.
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Jun 21, 2016 20:55
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I haven't read Gaddis (yet), but I like his idea of the reader and the story in a collaboration for an true reading experience. That's what I've learned from reading Po-Mo. You can't understand everything in this world, but you can learn something by trying. Enjoy the journey. I like Pynchon for this, and his response to Jules Siegel's criticism towards V.'s complexity is spot on with the genre: "Why should things be easy to understand?" Which is funny, because I glean a lot of this philosophy from V. and Lot 49. Much of V's plot centers around two people given different opportunities for "understanding". Stencil is searching for "V.", but does so by trying to get in mindsets of characters in journals, looking into minute details for clues, even concentrating on words to see if they mean something with inflection: quote:“A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words—“events seem”; “seem to be ordered”; “ominous logic”—pronouncing them differently, changing the “tone of voice” from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” And Benny Profane keeps getting thrown into situations full of coincidence, as if Life or some greater force is trying to teach him something about himself, but he's just so drat content with being discontent, he can't grow: quote:“A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you "make" out of one? What can one make out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he had reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism.” quote:“Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.” But given this frame, even though characters may not change drastically from villain-to-hero or from weak to strong, when faced with their reality, they're able to at least understand themselves a little more: quote:“For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.” This is just my reading, but I like (and believe) that Pynchon would be the kind of writer to write a post-modern novel about post-modern novels quote:“Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia is any more than a romance—half a fiction—in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another “character” added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn’t so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with “reason.” their writers quote:“It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have committed, or the humors we do go in and out of. It may be only the room--a cube--having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault.” and their readers quote:“What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite. and finding beauty in the confusion. quote:“Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?” quote:“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
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Jun 22, 2016 15:06
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