>>7403295
I'm interested in this, too, OP. Wish I could be of assistance.

>>7403295
If it doesn't fascinate you don't read it. Go read something that fascinates you, you will grow more.
I think it is an exaggeration to say Pynchon is one of the greatest living writers, there are so many non American writers that are not usually discussed on this board that do more interesting things.

>>7403471

I shouldn't have said, "greatest living writers," I meant, "greatest American living writers."

Your first point, I disagree. I'm not a child. Just reading something that fascinates me will not make me grow more. I understand this advice said to a child, who you're trying to develop an interest in reading, but this advice should not be given to an adult. I'm not a child. Telling someone not to learn about something they don't like is horrible philosophy. SJW philosophy.

I want to try and better understand what makes him so great to the people who do think he's great. Just because I don't get "it," yet, doesn't mean I can't ever get "it," and just because I don't get "it," yet, doesn't mean I shouldn't try.

>>7403471
>I hardly ever see his prose quoted or certain passages linked or scenes as examples of his greatness. I mean, there are many famous writers I haven't gone into extensively, but I know some of their more famous scenes, passages, or examples of their prose. With Pynchon, I don't really know any.
The pithiest quote I can come up with for Pynchon is "They're in love. Fuck the war." from Gravity's Rainbow.

The problem with quotes or images or scenes from Pynchon is that each scene and line is overlayed with wordplay and irony that make them difficult to appreciate out of context. This probably sounds super pretentious and overblown, and it is to an extent, but also makes for some entertaining puzzles.

But Pynchon is enjoyable for his humor, which is some mix between "High Modernism" and cartoon characters, basically.

There are a lot of things to appreciate about Pynchon, I think, but it also depends on what you are looking for.

What books have you tried reading?

>>7403536
I didn't mean to quote that post, sry

>>7403536

I own Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Inherent Vice, and The Crying of Lot 49 (I often just buy used books at the right price to make my own little library). I have tried GR and M&D at various times, abandoning fairly quickly. I chose to abandon IV about halfway through. I recently picked up The Crying of Lot 49, but I haven't given it a shot yet.

>>7403561
the crying of lot 49 is probably the best place to start, because it's short and not overly complex but still gives you a nice sampling of pynchon memes.

with gravitys rainbow and mason & dixon, the works are much denser and less reliant on plot. iirc, pynchon doesn't really like lot 49 because he felt it was too "masculine," or linear (ie. phallic), which should give you a sense of his approach to story telling.
there's also an absurd amount of allusions and historical signposts in his longer works, which don't all necessarily need to be understood in order to enjoy the books.

but also, if you've tried reading pynchon, recognized these things, and still didn't dig it at all, you probably just don't like pynchon, which is chill.

Absolute mememan!

>>7403295
You don't have to understand it, just bluff that you understand it like the rest of /lit/.

>>7403744

Well I'd still like to make an attempt to understand it. The only thing I ever see quoted from him is the opening line to Gravity's Rainbow.

>>7403295
Well, trying to understand Pynchon through a passage, like taking some random pieces from a puzzle, won't help you because that's missing the point.

Pynchon is like a puzzle. You need to grasp the whole text (or at least huge parts of it) to understand him. That's why I recommend you to start with his short stories (Slow Learner). There's one in there - which is arguably the best one - called "The Secret Integration". From a really superficial level, it has really interesting characters and metaphors and descriptions, like any Pynchon book. But when you actually start to analyze it, even the smallest and undetectable things, like typos, build up to provide you with information until you finally unravel it and realize that everything is connected, a huge conspiracy. That's Pynchon at its finest.

>>7403768

Well, I didn't mean one passage would unlock the secrets to the Pynchon's universe, but a lot of writer's have quintessential passages (for lack of a better word) that can help me start to see a pattern or light the path to understanding them better. At least, for me.

I'll definitely check out that story if you think it could help. You're saying there are typos in it that are there purposely? Or was that a joke?

>>7403791
typos, wordplay, double entendres, ambiguities, yeah.

>>7403295
What the hell is "understanding Pynchon" supposed to mean? Are you so lost, now outside one of your humanities classes, that you still think the point of reading is to understand this or that Author, the virtual entity built by academics around a body of work? This isn't what literature is about, fcrying out loud!

This thread is ridiculous. If you want to understand Pynchon fucking read him.

If you have trouble ask for help on here.

Trying to understand an author from one quote is ridiculous. The reason you don't hear brief passages of his flaunted as literary genius is because it's a generally vapid practice to begin with and not nearly as many vapid idiots read Pynchon. Quotes don't mean jack without the right context.

Just read Lot 49. You can do it in one sitting and reflects the style and form of his early high points. It also contains some great prose passages, and right from the outset Chapter 1 introduces you to the multi-levelled wordplay and unique narrative voice he's known for.

>>7403796
Not that guy but yeah, it's there on purpose. And I kind of disagree with "quintessential passages". I know where you're coming from but I think that simplifies it too much.

>It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength—it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with years’ pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease-black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing, hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant—perhaps the true turn of the sunset—that is wine to you, wine and comfort

>Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

>So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love— love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child . . . what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind-tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you could speed or slow at will. . .)?

I'll indulge your request for a great passage. Here's one of my favorites from GR:

>The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop’s horizons, apses out to four sides like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires… chiseled in the sandstone he finds waiting the mark of consecration, a cross in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon. Black hounds and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose breeds have been lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat as the spectators gather, it’s the fourth hanging this spring and not much spectacle here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant of who can say what lifted smock, what fat-haunched gnädige Frau Death may have come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his neck breaks, he actually comes in his ragged loin-wrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak of Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth at the exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it changes into a mandrake root. Next Friday, at dawn, the Magician, his own moving Heiligenschein rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass, comes with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn’t been fed for a few days. The Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till it’s held only by the finest root-hairs—ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own ears with wax then comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed dog rrrowf! dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and lets loose its piercing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he’s halfway to breakfast, his holy-light freezes and fades in the million dewdrops. Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes comes to visit. “Inflation?” the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing hand-moves.” ‘Capital?” “Never heard of that.” “No, no,” replies the visitor, “not at the moment. We’re trying to think ahead. We’d like very much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was the scream, for instance?” “Had m’ears plugged up, couldn’t hear it.” The delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. “Can’t say as I blame you… .”

Why do I like it?

It's sort of a self-contained short story that is narratively disconnected, but thematically deeply integrated. There are TONS of these, repeating leitmotifs looking at things from different angles.
It's extremely dense. In one paragraph you have sex, religion, rockets, corrupt capitalism, American imperialism, conspiracy, (systematized) death for profit, etc. All of these things connect to the greater novel.
The language is fantastic. I don't even know what to begin highlighting, every sentence is incredible.
Pynchon is not afraid to break the rules, and he does so with great effect.
What imagery! "his own moving Heiligenschein rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass"!
I like how he takes the mythology of the mandrake and adapts it for his own purposes.
It's funny.

>Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can’t bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she’s ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow— But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders. Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop. . . . They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable to touch. Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me.

>“Micro grams,” Krypton striking his head dramatically, “that’s right, micrograms, not milligrams. Birdbury, gimme something, I’ve OD’d.”

>How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady’s stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It’s easy for nonfetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses . . . singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn’t take . . . mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden . . . the edges of steel razors, always holding potent mystery . . . rose thorns that prick us by surprise . . . even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded. . . . In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky—just before the last firing-switch closes—watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where the fuze is. . . . Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose?

>This morning it looks like what
Vikings must have seen, sailing this great water-meadow
south, clear to Byzantium, all eastern Europe their open
sea: the farmland rolls gray and green as waves . . . ponds
and lakes seem to have no clear boundaries . . . the sight of
other people against this ocean sky, even the military,
comes welcome as sails after long days of passage. . . .
The Nationalities are on the move. It is a great frontierless
streaming out here. Volksdeutsch from across the Oder,
moved out by the Poles and headed for the camp at
Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin regime, others going
back home, the eyes of both parties, when they do meet,
hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what’s
forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians
trekking north again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles,
shoes in tatters, songs too hard to sing, talk pointless,
Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling between Berlin and
the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks,
Croats and Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians,
Magyars, Vlachs, Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars stirred
and streaming over the surface of the Imperial cauldron,
colliding, shearing alongside for miles, sliding away, numb,
indifferent to all momenta but the deepest, the instability too
far below their itchy feet to give a shape to, white wrists and
ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped prisoncamp
pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland
dust, caravans of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses
dying, families leaving the vehicles beside the roads for
others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot
Autobahns, trains full of their own hanging off the cars that
lumber overhead, squeezing aside for army convoys when
they come through, White Russians sour with pain on the
way west, Kazakh ex-P/Ws marching east, Wehrmacht
veterans from other parts of old Germany, foreigners to
Prussia as anyGypsies, carrying their old packs, wrapped
in the army blankets they kept, pale green farmworker
triangles sewn chest-high on each blouse bobbing, drifting,
at a certain hour of the dusk, like candleflames in religious
procession—supposed to be heading today for Hannover,
supposed to pick potatoes along the way, they’ve been
chasing these nonexistent potato fields now for a month —”Plundered,” a one-time bugler limps along with a long
splinter of railroad tie for a cane, his instrument, implausibly
undented and shiny, swinging from one shoulder, “stripped
by the SS, Bruder, ja, every fucking potato field, and what
for? Alcohol. Not to drink, no, alcohol for the rockets.
Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could
have been drinking. It’s unbelievable.”

>>7403812
>>7403823

k.

>>7403849

I understand what you're saying. I'm not properly explaining what I mean.

>It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . . Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible —but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardens of human sultans, human elite with no
right at all to be where they are—” We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid . . . we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling . . . this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kab-balists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others . . . And if it isn’t exactly Jamf Ölfabriken Werke? what if it’s the Krupp works in Essen, what if it’s Blohm & Voss right here in Hamburg or another make-believe “ruin,” in another city? Another country? YAAAGGGGHHHHH! Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes Enzian’s been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk of the refinery—named, incidentally, for the famous discoverer of Oneirine—is behind them, and Enzian is on into some other paranoid terror, talking, talking, though each man’s wind and motor cuts him off from conversation.

>>7403891
>>7403939
>>7403943
>>7403963
>>7403984

Thanks for posting some of your favorites. It helps me learn.

I think of it sometimes like trying to get into a popular band you don't like. Understand what makes them popular or "good."

Asking a huge fan of a band what their favorite songs are and why, often helps me understand a band's popularity better and to listen with a different ear. Of course, this doesn't always work. Some bands I will never like no matter how hard I try. And that's okay.

>>7403295
>Maybe offer some examples of his prose or point me to particular scenes or passages to better understand his supposed greatness?
To me, Pynchon is kinda hard to quote because much of what makes him great has to do with the context he sets up. The last hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow, for example, are fucking incredible, but they would be a bunch of nonsense if it weren't for the rest of the book.

But I'll try.

>Seaman Bodine looks up suddenly, canny, unshaven face stung by all the smoke and unawareness in the room. He’s looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept—”It’s just got too remote” ‘s what they usually say). Does Bodine now feel his own strength may someday soon not be enough either: that soon, like all the others, he’ll have to let go? But somebody’s got to hold on, it can’t happen to all of us—no, that’d be too much . . . Rocketman, Rocketman. You poor fucker.

cont.

>>7404025
>Understand what makes them popular or "good."

To lay the tracks, he writes giant cosmic conspiracies with a comic surrealist surface and a narrative voice that shifts from TS Eliot grim to a "Leave-it-to-Beaver" running commentary

He writes in the modernist-stream of consciousness style and his protagonists are heroes of the pop-culture world (especially Slothrop) constantly losing themselves in comical fantasy or romanticizing their situations through the lens of movie cliche's: WW2 desertion takes the appearance of a sardonic film noir in Gravity's Rainbow, Oedipa's isolation in Lot 49 is that of Rappunzel - etc.

He's a big mix of styles that coheres somehow perfectly.

>>7404043
>Tchitcherine doesn’t want to ask. He strains against it with the muscles of his heart-cage. The pain of cardiac neurosis goes throbbing down his left arm. But he asks, feeling his breath shift a little, “Was I supposed to die?”
>“When, Vaslav?”
>“In the War.”
>“Oh, Vaslav.”
>“You wanted to hear what was troubling me.”
>“But don’t you see how they’ll take that? Come, bring it all the way out. We lost twenty million souls, Vaslav. It’s not an accusation you can make lightly. They’d want documentation. Even your life might be in danger—”
>“I’m not accusing anyone . . . please don’t. . . I only want to know if I am supposed to die for them.”
>“No one wants you to die.” Soothing. “Why do you think that?”
>So it is coaxed out of him by the patient emissary, whining, desperate, too many words—paranoid suspicions, unappeasable fears, damning himself, growing the capsule around his person that will isolate him from the community forever. . . .
>“Yet that’s the very heart of History,” the gentle voice talking across twilight, neither man having risen to light a lamp. “The inmost heart. How could everything you know, all you’ve seen and touched of it, be fed by a lie?”
>“But life after death . . .”
>“There is no life after death.”
>Tchitcherine means he’s had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his body fought to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way into that bitterest of freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for comfort in the dialectical ballet of force, counterforce, collision, and new order—not till the War came and Death appeared across the ring, Tchitcherine’s first glimpse after the years
of training: taller, more beautifully muscled, less waste motion than he’d ever expected—only in the ring, feeling the terrible cold each blow brought with it, only then did he turn to a Theory of History—of all pathetic cold comforts—to try and make sense of it.

And then there's this:
>I’m the Pirate Queen of the Baltic Run, and nobody fucks with me—
>And those who’ve tried are bones and skulls, and lie beneath the sea.
>And the little fish like messengers swim in and out their eyes,
>Singing, “Fuck ye not with Gory Gnahb and her desperate enterprise!”

>I’ll tangle with a battleship, I’ll massacre a sloop,
>I’ve sent a hundred souls to hell in one relentless swoop—
>I’ve seen the Flying Dutchman, and each time we pass, he cries,
>“Oh, steer me clear of Gory Gnahb, and her desperate enterprise!”

>>7404049

So you'd say that you consider him among your favorites? Do you think he deserves to be in a discussion among the all time greats?

>>7404060
>So you'd say that you consider him among your favorites?
Without a doubt.

>Do you think he deserves to be in a discussion among the all time greats?
I don't think I'm in any position to speak on this, but probably not.

>>7404056
Also this:
>Klein-Rogge was carrying nubile actresses off to rooftops when King Kong was still on the tit with no motor skills to speak of. Well, one nubile actress anyway, Brigitte Helm in Metropolis. Great movie. Exactly the world Pökler and evidently quite a few others were dreaming about those days, a Corporate City-state where technology was the source of power, the engineer worked closely with the administrator, the masses labored unseen far underground, and ultimate power lay with a single leader at the top, fatherly and benevolent and just, who wore magnificent-looking suits and whose name Pökler couldn’t remember, being too taken with Klein-Rogge playing the mad inventor that Pökler and his codisciples under Jamf longed to be—indispensable to those who ran the Metropolis, yet, at the end, the untamable lion who could let it all crash, girl, State, masses, himself, asserting his reality against them all in one last roaring plunge from rooftop to street. . . .

And:
>She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as “pretty” . . . but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he’s losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to extend any further is more than he can make alone.

And this part, in context, explains a whole lot about human nature and ties in with a lot of movie references mentioned through the book:
>“Is the cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far away . . . the colonists have learned to do without air, it’s vacuum inside and out. . . it’s understood the men won’t ever return . . . they are all men. There are ways for getting back, but so complicated, so at the mercy of language, that presence back on Earth is only temporary, and never ‘real’. . . passages out there are dangerous, chances of falling so shining and deep. . . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling. Inside the colony, the handful of men have a frosty appearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories, nothing to touch . . . only their remote images, black and white film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the white latitudes, in empty colony, with only infrequent visits from the accidental, like me. . . .

File: url.jpg (3 KB, 198x186) Image search: [Google]

3 KB, 198x186

>>7404110
Surely I wasn't the only one who thought of ...

was Lucas a pynchon fan?

You need to catch all his references and it's not easy to follow which characters are which or what they're doing.

Just read it slowly. There is no cheat code.

>>7403295
drop acid, then read it. you certainly dont need to but i feel ike it certainly helped me understand the schizophrenic structure and intensive paranoia

>>7404127
pynchon was probably taking a lot of acid and was definitely smoking a lot of weed
captcha asked me to pick all the images with grass lol

File: url.jpg (549 KB, 1600x1222) Image search: [Google]

549 KB, 1600x1222

>>7404115
Makes me want to know what Pynchon would do with Star Wars.

If understood like I think it should be, his whole reference to King Kong is nothing short of genius.

File: PYNCHONe.jpg (28 KB, 160x160) Image search: [Google]

28 KB, 160x160

thomas pynchon's books are insane, but you need to be high af to get em. he was high when he wrote em, so you gotta be high too too get into his mindspace. it's a wild ride, when you finally "get" it. its like: woah. the sixties were a turbulent time. was there some funny stuff going on? maybe. what about war? is the military-indaustrial complex maybe .. you know ... a little Fricked up? possibly. pynchon bitch.

>>7404170
>>7404141
fuck off with this shit
drugs dont write books

>>7404170
DONT READ PYNCHON EVERBODY

LOOK AWAY

>>7404183
agreed, but it's hard to imagine pynchon being so damn paranoid without having some weed filling his lungs.

>>7404208
Sure he probably messed around with some drugs but it's completely besides the point

PLUS, who says Pynchon's the paranoid one? These are characters he's written

File: pynchon1.jpg (1 MB, 2200x3037) Image search: [Google]

1 MB, 2200x3037

I don't even know why I'm posting this here because none of you morons would know a true story if it happened to you personally, but whatever. You can choose to believe me or not, but this is true: my dad actually met into pynchon in california in the late 80s at mcdonalds. The mcdonalds was insanely crowded and my dad and pynchon were both standing away from the line reading the menu for like five minutes in silence when pynchon took a step over to my dad and said casually, "What are you gonna get?" My dad was like Who's this weirdo, and said: "I don't know, you?" And Pynchon said "Excuse me? Sorry?" "What are you gonna get?" "I-i-i-i-i..." he couldn't speak and he said "You want me to geti t for you?" "Let me give you a hand here, I'm Thomas Pynchon." "Oh, the books?" he said and he said "you got that write." "You write em?" " " " " I stay li f ted, with this..." Pulls out a lit joint and starts smoking it with moist lips and making these sucking sounds, "Mmmm" "mmmm" "with this" "with this i get it" "What, in the mcdonalds?" my dad said. "In deesesus here mcdonald's, we, me you, we do it." "Oh yeah, here we go," and my dad took the joint and took a huge ass drag as Pynchon started going for all the ketchup packets. "You take em in run," he said and he dropped em all over the floor. "A distraction," he said. "Clean up!" my dad said. "No, we're good," said Pynchon and he swept em behind the trash with his foot. "We're on elf time," he said. "No..." (my dad). "Everything's good?" "We'll take the check," he said. "Where's the ketchup packets oyu spilled over the floor?" Shrug (Pynchon). "OK, well if you cant buy anything you have to leave." "OK, we'll take it outside then, miss." She go. "That was close" "Thank you," my dad said. "They're trying to control us..........................................."

>>7404275
I believe you

File: 1446916464651.jpg (159 KB, 746x982) Image search: [Google]

159 KB, 746x982

>>7404275
>ywn blaze it with Tommy

>>7404275
why would someone not belive this?

>>7404216
yeah, the notoriously reclusive author who writes 1000 page long books about menacingly intricate and evil conspiracies that control people's sex lives, the world economy, and geopolitical affairs isn't paranoid.

>>7404345
He's not reclusive, he lives in NYC for god's sake.

>>7404275
Is this meant to be funny? I hate [most of the people on] this fucking board.

>>7403295
Pynchon is to DFW what Proust is to Chomsky

>>7404466
I can't tell if I really like this analogy or really hate this analogy

>>7404490
That's funny because I chose those names at random you dumbfuck

>>7404637
WOW

>>7404637
SO THEY HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON AYE

>>7404466
Pynchon is to DFW what Proust is to a chimpanzee at a typewriter.

>>7406193
IDK IF I REALY LOVE OR REALY HATE THID ANALAGY

>>7404170
lol

>>7406193
But Proust probably WAS inspired by Shakespeare?

>>7403891
the last two are some of the most memorable sections for me as well, along with the scene with the mestizo in the pentothal dream, and also a discussion about research (I believe being done at The White Visitation? haven't read in a long time) concerning the origin of colonialism (vaguely) through discussion of genes/melatonin.

I always kinda though the benzene-kekule-circle/mandala(as city) was loosely related to the fact that modified forms of benzene are in neurotransmitters (like serotonin - i.e. the mentions of witch hunting frenzy) along with plastics. I.e. the structural aspects (of cities, plastics, neurotransmitters) reappear in different forms as more phylogenic/less formal phenomena (eternal recurrence, etc.) but are not essentially different other than presentation and context.

That we should at least in some sense be seeing a thread between the "natural" (cities-as-social organizations, brain/mind) and the "synthetic" (plastic, industry, cities as technical achievements) is strengthened a bit by the functions and development of imipolex G.