
Difficult, Dated, Frustrating, Prophetic – Teaching Thomas Pynchon - elemeno
http://www.themillions.com/2015/04/difficult-dated-frustrating-prophetic-teaching-thomas-pynchon.html
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mlangdon
I for one would have loved to have had the author as my AP teacher. Senior
year was when I discovered (in the Columbian sense) David Foster Wallace, who
would not exist as such without Pynchon. It would be a couple of years and
attempts before I could get into Pynchon, but when I got to it, Gravity's
Rainbow was an ecstatic experience.

David Foster Wallace writes (in an essay collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing
I'll Never Do Again) about the connection for him between higher math and
logic and writing fiction. About the "click" that happens when things fall
into place. For several years, I chased exactly that in fiction, before
returning to my teenage passion for programming. I was immensely pleased to
find the same "click" in software. The same challenges of world creation, of
collecting, balancing and combining incongruent, contradictory and abstract
thoughts in my head before committing them to screen.

What I'm suggesting is Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, let's add,
William Gass, are programmers' writers.

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weeksie
Thomas Pynchon is everything that's wrong with postmodernism. I get that he's
difficult and I get that he's creating an internal system of signs but come
the fuck on, already. It's literature to prove a point. It's the problem with
assholes like Derrida who drone on endlessly in what is—has got to be—a
massive practical joke/performance art project.

And that's, in its own way, _awesome_. The problem is that people take it
seriously. People read the tea leaves of these chaotic texts and derive their
own meaning (which means they're falling for the ruse). I have a deep problem
with post modernism in literature and elsewhere because of the nature of the
joke. It's a virulent meme that has made both art and literature indigestible
and that's a shame.

Markets sort of win out and we get real art from television and popular
entertainment these days. It's just sad that the legacy of postmodernism is a
sort of flypaper trap for minds that would have been put to much better use
elsewhere.

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failrate
I read Pynchon, because his books are fun.

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TheOtherHobbes
This.

Bleeding Edge is full of laugh out louds - and possibly of some minor interest
to HN.

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MaysonL
I'm sorry, the first sentence of _The Crying of Lot 49_ may be long – somewhat
run-on – but it's not really at all difficult to understand. After running
into that misstatement, I'm not sure I want to read much more. After the
author then throws out the $20 word "profluence" (which wiktionary calls
obsolete or rare) where "flow" or nothing at all would serve at least as well,
I become convinced of it.

Which is not at all to say that the novel is not worth reading, and rereading.

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tjradcliffe
It isn't described as "difficult to understand" but "labyrinthine and
recursive: full of noise", and that's an accurate description:

"One summer afternoon, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party
whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she,
Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of
one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two
million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled
enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

This is loaded with irrelevancies (full of noise) no matter what the "single
thought" it is supposed to convey might be. If it's about her role as
executor, why the detail about the kirsch in the fondue at the garden party?
If it's about the garden party, why the anecdote about the loss of two million
dollars?

And given that "profluence" is a term specifically associated with Gardner, it
is no surprise that an essay that opens by discussing Gardner's opinions
should use it. It doesn't mean "flow" but rather the way in which fiction
actively draws us forward in a continuous waking dream.

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anigbrowl
There's a _lot_ of characterization going on in that sentence.

A tupperware party: Oedipa's social circle consists of housewives who lack
financial independence or grand ambitions.

Too much kirsch in the fondue: the tupperware business is distinctly secondary
to an excuse to get a bit drunk with friends, which tells us a bit more about
her social cohort.

to find that she, Oedipa: her role in this story is thrust upon her from the
very first sentence, in contrast to the the passive drift suggested above.

She supposed executrix: Oedipa is la little pendantic, not to mention well-
educated, although we should already have guessed that from her upper-class
name.

Pierce Inverarity: Inverarity is a remote village in Scotland (and a very nice
one too; I've driven through it several times, but that won't be on the test).
We may suspect that the late Mister Inverarity was a typical Scottish penny
pincher...

once lost two million dollars in is spare time: ...or maybe not. This will be
a whimsical story that confounds out expectations.

more than honorary: Oedipa must have a certain level of professional
competence to have been selected for this task.

Besides all this, don't neglect the more poetic aspects of the language - the
rhythm, alliteration, internal rhyming and shifting subjective clauses are
engaging, the word combinations euphonious. I find Pynchon a pleasure to read
despite the lack of plot or clear narrative motion. He has _voice_ , bringing
in sense of children's stories with their odd givens, the mild daytime
drunkenness, the sense of having been selected for a task bigger than one
might have chosen for oneself.

As you can guess, I'm personally rather fond of this book :)

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clairity
yup, i'm fond of it too. crying of lot 49 was way more approachable than
gravity's rainbow, which is absolutely puzzling without a _lot_ of re-reading.
i also read v. and vineland, which are also easier than gravity's rainbow but
are still relatively convoluted compared to, say, a delillo novel. i was
introduced to both authors in a history of science class, of all places. =]

