This is surprisingly easy to read despite how difficult /lit/ led on that it would be. Honestly the hardest part of this book are the first few pages (Pirates dream of evacuating London). The first few pages include a lot of metaphors that I've read over and over again and cant figure out. Google has also been no use. I was wondering if you guys could help me out with a few passages here.
>No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into--they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no trafflc came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero
What exactly does he mean by, "knotting into"? Does this refer to Nazi forces taking over Britain? And what about the part about blue shadows and absolute zero? I honestly dont have a clue what that's referring to.
Also, is the Hotel they wind up in (in the dream) supposed to be hell?
U sure r smrt.
>>7738477
Didn't claim to be. I know I'm not above average intelligence, so I dont really find that very insulting
>>7738453
Your task in these dreams is often to pens
>>7738627
kek
>>7738627
Holy shit, how bad are the typos in the penguin deluxe edition? Is that the only one like that, or should I just throw away my copy?
>>7738652
The whole book is like that.
>>7738652
>thinking pynchon didn't do it on purpose
>>7738453
Honestly, for me only really difficult parts came in the last part, though I'm not saying I 'got all'.
>>7738654
What's the best edition?
>>7738654
Thats a bummer. Its such a nice copy of the book, it makes me really upset they had to ruin it like that
>>7738654
Is there anything online that actually lists all the errors in this edition? Have you read another edition and are able to compare the two?
>>7738666
your tricks won't work here, satan.
the penguin one with blueprints onnit
>>7738670
They changed the entire text pretty much, grammar, punctuation, and word choice. Its awful. There are too many errors for anyone to even bother listing them all.
>>7738666
1995 Penguin
>>7738453
I'm currently reading The Crying of lot 49 and it's not that difficult, I even think it's rather a fun read.
>>7738661
Are you implying Pynchon formatted the deluxe edition himself? Are you retarded?
>>7738688
>being this unable to comprehend the greatness and mental agility of Pynchon
pleb harder.
>>7738654
This is fucking bullshit. Is there anywhere someone has compiled a list of the typos? This is the only copy I own, and I already threw 25$ away on it, so I'd like to continue reading it
>>7738453
/lit/ is usually clueless about writing. You ever visit a critique thread?
>>7738760
>/lit/ is usually clueless about writing
Yah I figured that out since no one is even attempting to discuss the original question
>>7738756
The missing line between pages 139 and 140 is the only concrete example I've been able to find. I read that edition the whole way through and never noticed a problem.
>>7738773
My copy of doesn't even have the error so might just be all set. I think it's just a dumb meme.
>>7738681
The ebook has the same errors.
>>7738453
I think he means the idea of evacuation and escape as a means of disentanglement is not accurate here, rather their [the dream figures] motion [presumably out of the city] is tying them deeper in [to the city, the war, the situation, the infrastructure?] as colored by the succeeding passage, where the motion of the train under archways, through trestles becomes like a knotting thread.
Then outside of the city, you begin to get the deep sense of decay and stagnation -- the coral overgrowth, the absence of "rolling-stock" freight cars, and of course the rust flourishing in the emptying [of the rail yard, or the country, or who knows?]
The fixation on the absolute zero, as an ancillary interest to GR's and Pynchon's general fixation on entropy, I always took to be a kind of looming ease/threat/inevitability, like an anti-teleology -- things are always winding down and burning out, or just dematerializing under their own exhaustion. Really though I don't have that solid of an idea; I def agree that this one of the more cryptic and confusing passages in the book, and along with maybe 1 or 2 dozen other passages scattered about.
>>7738887
Thanks for the response. Thats mostly what I believed as well. I was worried it wasn't actually that cryptic and I was just retarded, but it sounds like it means pretty much what I thought it meant. I'm glad to hear theres only a couple dozen passages in the entire book like this, because besides that passage, the book is pretty easy to be honest.
>>7738654
Source? I've been trying to find info on it, and it seems like the error mentioned above is the only major error in the book
>>7738453
knotting into. the death of modernism by implosion and decay both. the narrative of progress towards a modernist end point is finished and chaos isn't going to be reduced anymore
btw since GR is about the shift of modernism towards postmodernism, and the postmodernism being shaped by modernism, what does he think causes this shift? The rockets? dicks? masculinity? war? communication? confusingness? consumerism?
>>7738453
>knotting into
i just assumed it meant people rooting their way into secret fucking passageways
i think you can read too much into a thing
>>7739006
With the way the parts are titled, especially the last, most postmodern one being "The Counterforce", I'd say he probably (at least at the time) thought of postmodernism as the equal and opposite reaction to modernism in a process akin to Newton's third law of motion.
>>7739028
so dialectical materialism/conflict within modernism playing itself out? or something?
>>7738453
I want to give an interpretation but I need to check the context first and I don't want to get out of bed and grab my copy right now. It sounds like typical paranoid Pynchon reflecting on interlocking abstract systems and the invisible forces that establish them. Not necessarily Nazis but self-interested beings beyond popular perception who fund what we interpret as evil, whose hands we play into even as we think we're escaping. Pirate is trying to dodge the material consequences of war, but he's just diving deeper into the former mines that remind him of social decay and death.
The Absolute Zero I always took as meaning nuclear Armageddon or the end of consciousness. Having read to the end of the book, I think one could argue it to mean the termination of the narrative which is itself sort of an abstract form of death.
I don't think the Hotel symbolizes hell. I'm confused about the blue shadows also.
If this thread is still in the catalog in the morning I will try to elaborate. I'd also like to say that that this really isn't an easy book. There are easy sections with lots of humor and slapstick, but there are also fifty page interludes intended to mimic the total mental destruction of a highly educated and confused man, midsentence shifts in character POV that the reader isn't warned about, and extended diatribes that are mostly incomprehensible without a working knowledge of Western esotercism. The beginning is the easiest part. Yeah you can read it, but you can also read a physics textbook for eight hours without understanding or enjoying any of it.
I suggest flipping through a companion guide when it gets really tough. There are literally thousands of references and symbols in this book that I don't think it's possible to catch without extra help, especially in Part Four. There's no way anybody can be expected to understand them all
>>7739064
tfw late capitalism and simulacrum has already ended consciousness or, the autonomous subject, and we are already at absolute zero in this very moment. The nuclear Armageddon was some kind of decoy all along.
>>7739064
The book is not THAT hard to understand. Some sections are definitely a lot thicker and require a lot more in depth reading, and maybe even some research on Google, to understand, but your average college aged reader could manage it without much trouble
>>7739100
Can you give some examples of fiction that you find harder to read?
>>7739120
Ulysses
>>7739100
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake
The Recognitions
>>7739120
Shakespeare
>>7739132
Shakespeare isn't hard once you get used to the archaic language and the melodramatic expressions.
It's easy to read, but hard as fuck to understand.
>>7738453
The fucking people are in some bus type thing, moving with a bunch of other evacuess in other buses, which you cut out. And they aren't moving away from the city but are just relocating, or 'knotting into.' The blue shadows is the object of the subject 'archways,' which is referring to going under a bridge type thing, and probably it is all symbolic. None of these other crazy interpretations make sense
>>7739124
So if I've read Ulysses, I'm good to go for Gravity's Rainbow?
>>7739561
no all these interpretations make sense, he wouldn't write a book about people going under an archway, or describe being on a train, why waste his time with that?
>>7740026
>he wouldn't
>>7738453
You didn't even get to the part about the adenoid did you? Pathetic.
>>7738453
Read all of it and tell us how surprisingly easy it is then, anon. The book is very complex.
>>7740026
because it is symbolic, you dip
