|
rngd in the womb posted:So I looked up images of Pynchon because I didn't really believe that that was actually him in the Imgur link and then stumbled onto this article. It goes in a lot about his life, but this bit stood out to me because of the rhinoplasty thing: I believe it's in Slow Learner's introductory essay where Pynchon playfully hints that, like most authors, his works are not as fantastical as they appear, that they are all grounded in autobiographic reality. We as the reader just aren't in on the joke, since his personal life is shrouded by privacy. It's interesting when Pynchon's friends talk about him. They all respect his privacy, and they're quick to say he's very friendly and social, just not to journalists. The people that know him just know to respect his privacy (and that he doesn't like getting his picture taken). When Thomas Pynchon is Just Tom The Fake Hermit
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2019 13:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 20:15 |
|
|
I found my old V. post in the old Post Modern thread: Spoilers may follow: ~*~ That's what I've learned from reading [Post-Modern Literature]. 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.”
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2019 14:10
|
|
|
Done. Wow, what an ending. Had to immediately go back and reread the Florence chapter. So good.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2019 21:50
|
|
|
poo poo it's almost the end of the month, I guess i should actually write up my pitch for Winter Tide (or the entire 2.5 book series, they're fairly easy reading and one's free)
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2019 02:02
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:Done. Wow, what an ending. Had to immediately go back and reread the Florence chapter. So good. if anyone missed it the waterspout bit is lifted from moby dick, thus alluding to another large book about a man's destructive quest after the sole object of (constructed) meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2019 18:53
|
|
|
Some people have compared Pynchon to Lem as well, both tend to have themes of technology and characters who tend to see phantasmagorical meaning in meaningless reality. I really like the scene early on where Benny Profane is afraid of the "inanimate" ocean, reminds me of Solaris. I also just recalled that there is a scene where a woman basically jacks off a car. I wonder if Pynchon uses truck nuts.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2019 19:00
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:if anyone missed it the waterspout bit is lifted from moby dick, thus alluding to another large book about a man's destructive quest after the sole object of (constructed) meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world Cool thanks for that. Welcome back BTW
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2019 19:07
|
|
|
Am now seeing Malta referenced in the news all the time help
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2019 04:21
|
|
|
if you all are craving more maltese content might i recommend the 1985 film "final justice"
|
|
#
?
Mar 31, 2019 02:41
|
|
|
Hello BOTM thread. I coincidentally started reading V. the other day and just now found this thread. I read the passage describing the nosejob half an hour ago and it's still taking everything I've got not to toss my cookies on this train. I haven't read the rest of the thread yet for fear of spoilers but I felt like I needed to share with people who would understand. I really like the book so far but holy moly that was a lot. I mean woof.
|
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2019 01:30
|
|
|
I had to skip most of that chapter. I guess it’s a testament to pynchon’s writing style that’s it’s so vivid but I don’t think I’ve ever had such a negative and visceral reaction to any piece of writing like that.
|
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2019 03:32
|
|
|
So. On the topic of parallels between V. and GR, in the discussion about the fusion of the human and non-organic (can't recall if in the Siege Party or Paris Ballet chapters) specifically mentions an "artificial vagina", which immediately brought to mind the final launching sequence for 00000. I bet Pynchon has a strange PornHub search history
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2019 16:22
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:So. On the topic of parallels between V. and GR, in the discussion about the fusion of the human and non-organic (can't recall if in the Siege Party or Paris Ballet chapters) specifically mentions an "artificial vagina", which immediately brought to mind the final launching sequence for 00000. I bet Pynchon has a strange PornHub search history that's the ballet and after i believe. and yeah, i was making mélanie and gottfried connections too. but i think there's a larger through line here with mélanie's desire to become a fetish and linkage with the artificial (including the end of the ballet and its connection with the erotic and the artificial), the automatons at the ballet, SHROUD and SHOCK, and rachel and her car, where technology and eros are getting just sort of jumbled off in a way that doesn't "pay off" in the same way as it does for mélanie and for gottfried.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2019 16:46
|
|
|
oh and of course the radar array as sterilizer/castrater, and kilroy as phallus but also circuit diagram.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2019 16:50
|
|
|
Tree Goat posted:oh and of course the radar array as sterilizer/castrater, and kilroy as phallus but also circuit diagram. The radar "temporary" sterilizer bit was pretty damned funny and believable given the WWII ship stories I got from my grandfather
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2019 23:54
|
|
|
Tree Goat posted:that's the ballet and after i believe. and yeah, i was making mélanie and gottfried connections too. Also all of the artificial elements connected to V.'s body at the end too. Its an interesting thing for Pynchon to get so hung up on though. Is he concerned about humanity's place in the face of horrific, world-ending technology? I bet he'd have written a hell of a cyberpunk novel had he come from a different time SHROUD is my boy. e. this book was really damned good. Thanks for giving me the impetus to read it all! Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Apr 3, 2019 |
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2019 00:00
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:Also all of the artificial elements connected to V.'s body at the end too. Its an interesting thing for Pynchon to get so hung up on though. Is he concerned about humanity's place in the face of horrific, world-ending technology? I bet he'd have written a hell of a cyberpunk novel had he come from a different time Bleeding Edge is a cyberpunk novel.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2019 13:37
|
|
|
Bilirubin posted:Also all of the artificial elements connected to V.'s body at the end too. Its an interesting thing for Pynchon to get so hung up on though. Is he concerned about humanity's place in the face of horrific, world-ending technology? I bet he'd have written a hell of a cyberpunk novel had he come from a different time a motif that popped up a good few times is the moment or process by which an animate person transmogrifies, or is transmogrified, into an inanimate thing. the Mondaugen bit engages with this the most obviously, I think, and also frequently alludes to the holocaust
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2019 05:52
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:a motif that popped up a good few times is the moment or process by which an animate person transmogrifies, or is transmogrified, into an inanimate thing. the Mondaugen bit engages with this the most obviously, I think, and also frequently alludes to the holocaust Never made that connection before but for whatever reason it makes sense to me right now. Its a rare book that has me thinking about it like this months later.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 04:43
|
|
|
The animate/inanimate stuff also has to do with the idea of statistics and chance that show up in GR
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 06:50
|
|
|
Shibawanko posted:The animate/inanimate stuff also has to do with the idea of statistics and chance that show up in GR Oooh that's a great tie into Rogers maps
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 06:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 20:15 |
|
|
Bilirubin posted:Oooh that's a great tie into Rogers maps the poisson distribution is centrally relevant to almost every unlikely event in pynchon
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 07:02
|
|