Has anyone here read the whole meme trilogy?
What were your thoughts?
What did you learn?
Was it worth it?
Are you a better person for having done it?
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Has anyone here read the whole meme trilogy? What were your thoughts? What did you learn? Was it worth it?
I learned that Ulysees is great but big postmodern tomes which self consciously aim at being muh grand amexican naval suck
Name one example
NTA but IJ and GR? ":D"
I've only read IJ, I'd say it was definitely worth it and deserves its reputation, but I see where is coming from.
I'm tackling Ulysses next. Should be interesting.
IJ
GR
Underworld
4 3 2 1
Almost anything by Philip Roth
Meant for
Read IJ and GR, in that order.
Great reads, the more books I read the more I see what they were getting at.
Post-postmodernism is empty, amoral, and pessimistic beyond comprehension which leaves you in a position of denying reality through a lens of dopamine addiction and endless sarcasm and irony.
Shit is bleak.
Gravitys rainbow is a funny book just dont take it too seriously
Same with Ulysses.
Someone pointed out that time in Gravity's Rainbow has the structure of a torus, which fits in with the comparisons to the arc of the V2 rocket. Slothrop's precognition is one of the ways that toroidal time is depicted in the book. Once you are aware of that pattern, parts of the book make more sense.
Structuring a book about some math or symphony is probably the most cliched thing in 'experimental' fiction.
Yes and get a real edition of Ulysses
braindead reply
This is a brain dead thread that’s been made a thousand times
would i regret spending a weekend marathoning these
Almost, but I can't bring myself to finish IJ.
please read joyce for fricks sake anon .....ignore the other two morons ..... this is the one and only time you should really listen to a stranger on the internet
Joyce sucks, homosexual
Filtered
>infinite jest
Fantastic. One of the best books i’ve ever read.
>ulysses
I definitely got filtered
>gravity’s rainbow
This is the worst book i’ve ever read
agree
>infinite jest
Fantastic. One of the best books i’ve ever read.
>ulysses
Fantastic. One of the best books i’ve ever read.
>gravity's rainbow
Fantastic. One of the best books i’ve ever read.
Still need to read Ulysses. Really loved Gravity's Rainbow. Infinite Jest was ok.
Ulysses - goated, I read it every year
Infinite Jest - not bad, but not beautiful. well-wrought and a great way to get your feet wet with complicated literature while also having a good story to follow
Gravity's Rainbow - forgettable. I don't like Pynchon and I've read his whole body of work besides the minor ones (bleeding edge and inherent vice)
That's a LOT of Pynchon for an author you dislike. What kept you coming back?
Wanted to see what the hype was about and was sure "the next one will be the good one" Mason & Dixon + Against the Day + Vineland were the only appreciable ones for me, and I recognize that's not a popular opinion with most true Pynchon fans. alas
I respect it. Rare to find someone that thorough. You've probably read more pynchon than some professed pynchon *fans.*
To be sure, the shit eating dominatrix scene in Gravity's Rainbow is all time. And every page packed with a style so rich in verve, freighted with history and internal puzzles. Clearly the missing link between Rushdie of The Satanic Verses and Joyce, including everything from poop to film.
I just think there's a lot out there /better/ than Pynchon and he doesn't scratch any particular itch for me
NTA, but better like who ? list pls
WG Sebald
Percival Everett
Tom McCarthy
JM Coetzee
Helen DeWitt
Cynthia Ozick
Lynne Tillman
Kevin Barry
Albert Murray
Leon Forrest
to name a few
Sebald is nowhere near Pynchon's level.
>captcha: OV GOY
>Sebald is nowhere near Pynchon's level.
I agree, Sebald is far better
thx I'll check em out
like half of these authors are black wtf you on some bbc cuck fetish or something
nope, I didn't say anything about that, they're just authors whose work I appreciate. You, on the other hand, brought up black wiener. good luck to you and I hope when your prefrontal cortex fully matures you look back on your younger self and are chagrined by your feeble mind and repressed homosexuality
np. none of them are really in the maximalist vein of Pynchon so fair warning, it's not really a 1:1 comparison, but this is who I gravitate toward more than Pynchon
>american zoomer: the post
It’s a cliche on here but Mason & Dixon stands as my own (and many others’) favorite Pynchon work, better than Gravity’s Rainbow — which is honestly, as the Pulitzer jurors put it, “turgid” and “overwritten” much of the time. But when it’s good, it’s very good. Most of the rest is just extremely masturbatory. I suppose it overshadows the rest of his work because it became a semi-pop-culture fixation, known for its experimentality and more bombastic storyline and setting (of WW2 Europe and the pseudo-absurdist/surrealist comedy shtick of “this guy’s dick predicts where V-2 rockets launch”).
the meme trilogy should be updated to more accurately reflect IQfys current tastes. nobody on this board reads novels anymore, let alone these novels
Yes
Nothing
Nothing
Yes
No
Ulysses > Gravity's Rainbow >>> Infinite Jest
I'm reading IJ atm- overall good, it has redeeming parts but I just can't help but feel as if something is off- too many superfluous elements? I'm at ~ 600 pages in and occurrences of cringe have really started to take me out of it.
>Ulysses
The other two only demonstrate the decline in postwar lit 'encyclopedic novels'. The cargo cult fetish aeroplanes will not get you off the island.
Salient difference here for me is that Joyce was actually educated in the classical humanities whereas the other two seem to be trying to assemble themselves from only the pieces available in their immediate postwar cultural world, like they’re trying do some sort of pop art. I’m sure they’re very clever and precocious boys but I don’t think that method can ever result in anything more than an experimental curiosity. Not that I’ve read either of them or Ulysses (I think I made it 100ish pages into GR many years ago but I remember nothing about it) but based on what I’ve absorbed about them that’s my judgment.
>credentialism
I truly hope you are trying to trigger me with this one anon, I truly truly do. If not, may god have mercy on your confused little soul.
So you never read the books but you have opinions on their quality somehow? Frick off man
My opinion is about method and theoretical foundation. If those authors had a different method than the one I am presuming them to have had, then you may safely disregard my opinion as being irrelevant to them.
>Not that I’ve read either of them or Ulysses (I think I made it 100ish pages into GR many years ago but I remember nothing about it) but based on what I’ve absorbed about them that’s my judgment.
And they say old IQfy is dead
GR is incredible and hating it makes you look like a pseud
Other way around. Praising it without elaborating why it's incredible makes you look like a pseud
It's pretty self evident if you're not a pseud. What's your pseud reasons for disliking it?
I never said I disliked it. If you can't elaborate, you're a pseud.
Ulysses (a certified masterwork)
—-power gap—-
IJ and GR (material for the rubbish bin)
IJ at least has appeal for a certain type of person and has a poignant message/theme. GR is pure pseud bait. Very few love it sincerely without trying to belittle those who don’t
Ulysses remains one of the worst things I've read. What utter shite.
I've not read, nor plan on reading any of them.
will I continue to criticise them on this board, though?
Absolutely
infinite jest is a dogshit book
I've read Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Just one more to go...
I've read Ulysses and IJ and I´ve just finished the first part of GR. So far, GR is the worst. This is the 4th Pynchon novel I´m reading and I don't understand the hype. It sucks.
i only read 300 pages of IJ when i was 16, ulysses is overrated, gr is lit as far as i remember
We all carry about us our personal catalog of the experiences that matters most -- our own versions of what they used to call the Sublime. So far as aesthetic experience in 20th century America is concerned, I myself have a short list for the American Sublime: the war that concludes the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup; Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of the Autumn"; nearly all of Hart Crane; Charlie Parker playing "Paker's Mood" and "I Remember You"; Bud Powell performing "Un Poco Loco"; Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts; and most recently, the story of Byron the light bulb in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
I am not suggesting that there is not much more of the Sublime in Gravity's Rainbow than the not quite eight pages make up the story of Byron the Bulb. Pynchon is the greatest writer of the negative Sublime at least since Faulkner and West, and if nothing besides Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow seems to me quite as perfect as all of The Crying of Lot 49, that may be because no one could hope to write the first authentic post-Holocaust novel, and achieve a total vision without fearful cost. Yet the story of Byron the Bulb, for me, touches one of the limits of art.
This would mean more had Bloom not been a friend of the recluse.
""Every square is just as likely to get hit again. The hits aren't clustering. Mean density is constant."
Nothing on the map to the contrary. Only a classical Poisson distribution, quietly neatly sifting among the squares exactly as it should . . . growing to its predicted shape. . . .
"But squares that have already had several hits, I mean—"
"I'm sorry. That's the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning."
Nice thing to tell a Pavlovian. Is it Mexico's usual priggish insensi-tivity, or does he know what he's saying? If there is nothing to link the rocket strikes—no reflex arc, no Law of Negative Induction . . . then . . . He goes in to Mexico each morning as to painful surgery. Spooked more and more by the choirboy look, the college pleasantries. But it's a visit he must make. How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware—perhaps—that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico's whole generation have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?
"The Romans," Roger and the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit were drunk together one night, or the vicar was, "the ancient Roman priests laid a sieve in the road, and then waited to see which stalks of grass would come up through the holes."
Roger saw the connection immediately. "I wonder," reaching for pocket after pocket, why are there never any damned—ah here, "if it would follow a Poisson . . . let's see ...""
One example, we are here, completely disconnected, miles apart, each post never necessitating any response in reading or writing. Our disconnection mirrored by the pace of time - no longer flowing, but bit-wise, bit-unwise. And yet it seems ever so subtly to be a great sieve for who is going to grow through it, despite all.
https://pastebin.com/P3rVFrue
i was gonna praise you for this post but you posted a link to your d*scord
If I liked IJ, and I didn't like U, would I like GR?
>unironically getting Gabler'd
I'm sorry you got swindled, op.
>Has anyone here read the whole meme trilogy?
Yes, but nothing particularly distinctive in having done so. It would seem to be a basic rite of passage for any literary ephebes endeavoring to commence study of more serious literature.
>What were your thoughts?
Ulysses -- Joyce is inimitable when it comes to mastery over language.
GR -- One aspect of Pynchon's writing that is often overlooked is his ability to write well across a variety of tones. His humorous passages, more poetic passages, darker passages -- no other author comes to mind who can write so well so disparately in the same book.
IJ -- Wallace was a very smart man. However his writing talent seems more limited than the aforementioned authors. Having read The Pale King though, one cannot help but think he had grown/ was growing as an author.
>What did you learn?
Honestly, I wasn't much of what one would call a serious reader at the time. Nearly everybook I'd ever read could be deemed either children's or genre fiction. Seeing the narrative capabilities (temporal, symbolic, tonal, phonic, etc.) possible in the written language was a near revelation for me.
>Was it worth it?
Unequivocally yes.
>Are you a better person for having done it?
If the enrichment one obtains from all art can be esteemed as bettering oneself: then yes.