how does he get away with it?

being old must be weird

imagine remembering when people could sit up straight and talk normal, and everyone around you is a pudgy vaping homosexual

some scando. i think he was finnish

And forever beyond my reach 🙁

Care to expand on that?

Japanese Insurance Adjuster?

I think that was swallowed into Vineland.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !

Gravitys Rainbow, his “””Masterpiece””” had something like 350 unique characters yet he couldn't bring me to be invested in a single one of them. Pynchon’s writing is not literary. Its just excessively verbose combination of genre fiction and hobbyist essays

Marginally, but he doesn't give you enough to make you care. With more expansion Slothrop couldve been a great character, instead that enrgy is devoted to 10 page essays on quirky hobbies that add nothing to the plot and are never mentioned again and by the time we get back to Slothrop he is almost an afterthought.

>...writing is not literary. Its just excessively verbose combination of genre fiction and hobbyist essays
But enough about DFW.

Dunning Kruger lol

>reddit
>popsci
>term
what do these even mean

to?

What does this mean? Are you brain damaged?

Brainfry confirmed. Take a break, buddy. =)

>Its just excessively verbose combination of genre fiction and hobbyist essays
Accidently based?

filtered, try reading the book, it might help you
=^/

nah, there is a crying of lot 49 thread up that someone effort posted in, and all the other anon could reply was “filtered” and “homosexual” but couldn’t offer any analysis of their own

[...]
>newguy is samegayging
delicious

no, but if you want to think i’m that guy who effort posted go ahead.

anyway, i’d like to see your analysis of lot 49. why don’t you post it? no, let’s just save time: you’re not going offer any critical analysis. because you can’t.

reply proving me right in 3, 2, 1…

>no analysis
another filtered redditor

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

filtered

nah, there is a crying of lot 49 thread up that someone effort posted in, and all the other anon could reply was “filtered” and “homosexual” but couldn’t offer any analysis of their own

>newguy is samegayging
delicious

Lol there is nothing “difficult” about Pynchon other than what's on the surface. He relies on fragmented (Ive heard them called fractal, lol) plots, archaic and scientific jargon for words, and weirdly named randum XD characters who’s most vivid personality traits generally consist of doing drugs and being paranoid. Underneath the surface glitz there is nothing complex. His actual substance is very simple and not as perplexing as Dostoyevsky’s most straightforward moral dilemmas.

His work is like looking at an Escher painting. On the surface its complex for the sake of being complex. The actual content, beneath the complexity, has little literary/artistic merit. Pynchon has never been anywhere close to the Russian greats or the likes of Hemingway and Melville or even McCarthy in terms of genuine talent.

>proving me this right
Lol you literally have nothing except one of the names that I dropped, & I chose Hemingway specifically as brainlet bait to see if this was what youd do and you did.
FYI, there is more literary merit in Old Man & The Sea than Pynchon’s entire bibliography.

Too long and simultaneously too densely packed, I should say
Pynchon has a little thing going for him called nuance

By the way, bibliography doesn't mean what you think it means. You want to use oeuvre. But you wouldn't know anything about proper terminology, would you, Pynchon hater?

You knob. I wasnt pretending to be moronic, I mean legitimately that Hemingway is much more talented than Pynchon. Brainlets who think complexity=quality get hopelessly filtered by Hem all the time which is why I included his name.
>too long
No. Not at all the issue

Hemingway's ineffectual, histrionic, and frankly conceitedly womanish outlook on the world as sustained by his books' themes tells me all I need to know about his worthlessness as a writer. If you want beauty in simplicity, you won't find it in Hemingway.

Waxing endlessly about muh masculinity as a form of coping for his mother forcing him to crossdress is not deep.

What? What is this? There’s no context.

Pynchon quote about him and Farina. Pynchon loved Hemingway.

Filtered hard lmao. Go back to your russlop

Cry more

The fact that you revere surface-level, basic, milquetoast writing techniques and are repulsed by the slightest bit of rejection of chronology and conventional sentence structure and word choice betrays your inability to truly appreciate literature--I'd even go so far as to say your inability to appreciate the experience of living and learning and acknowledging the human condition and the fruits it bears. Literature is not meant to be a frivolous venture in some conversationalist style that invites a streamlined and easily accessible knowledge base. Learning something fundamentally requires an attempt to understand it, and it is the artist's duty to ensure they represent the profundity of the subject in question accurately while not veering into pretension. You criticize Pynchon for using archaic words. Would Mason & Dixon not have been completely worthless if it was written in the style he used for, say, Vineland or Bleeding Edge? You criticize him for using jargon. How, pray tell, would Pynchon be able to synthesize thorough yet succinct conceptions of complex ideas without employing specialized language? Say all we had of Pynchon was his experimental side, and none of his silly, "lowbrow" content. Everybody would be hemming and hawing about how execrably pretentious he is (which they already do!) to absolutely no end. Say the inverse happened, he'd be a complete joke and a two-bit hack. His funnily named characters are meant to be a punchline, and memorable enough for you to be able to recall them to a greater degree than if they had been named something conventional. 350 unique characters in Gravity's Rainbow, and you want them all to be named something along the lines of "Joseph Greene" and "Fredrick Cooper"? Him naming his characters the way he does lets the reader know what they're about without having to dedicate all that many words to doing it. Pierce Inverarity, Darryl-Louise Chastain, Weed Atman, Isaiah Two-Four, Scott Oof, Mucho Maas--you get the gist. You're introduced to these characters through the impression you get through their names alone. It's no easy task expressing considerable characterization solely through a character's name, so to be able to have a sense of humor about it is a nifty bonus and is a testament to Pynchon's abilities. Also, consider the eras within which these stories take place. 3 of them at least partly during the 60s psychedelic craze, one of them at the turn of the 21st century in New York (9/11, hello?), another in the midst of WW2, and another being about American frontiersmen. Like it or not, it's not out of question to have these characters either do drugs or be wary about the things going on around them. This is like criticizing Joyce for writing about Ireland, or McCarthy for writing about death and morose, violent macho shit. Even in Pynchon's simplest ventures, the amount and depth of motifs subtly running through the story is staggering. His theses are not as obvious as you may think.

>surface level nonsense
go back

>Murnane
>bitching about grammar
Fricking lol. What a joke. I suppose Shakespeare isn't worth our time now because he doesn't fit the English language's conventions?

I was looking through, if not reading, a review in the London Review of Books dated 8 February 1990. The book under review was Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, and the reviewer was Frank Kermode. His long piece included the following:
>Pynchon loves very long sentences, of which this, though not the longest available, is a sample:

>By the time she began to see that she might, nonetheless, have gone through with it, Brock Vond had reentered the picture, at the head of a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and frisking her himself, and before she knew it they were in another motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and when she made them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen—couldn’t Sasha smell what was going on?—and his erect penis had become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by year to stand before, once again out long after curfew…
The passage quoted here is about half the passage quoted by Kermode. I have cut it short to save space. What I’ve quoted is more than enough to illustrate the point that I made in a letter to the editors of the London Review.
>Frank Kermode quotes what he calls a very long sentence from Thomas Pynchon (LRB, 8 Feb, 90). The passage quoted is not a sentence. The passage consists of a sentence of sixty-six words followed by a comma and then a sequence of clauses and phrases that is neither a part of the sentence preceding it nor a sentence in itself.

I feel sure that I would have written the letter on the same day when I first read Pynchon’s muddled writing and Kermode’s mistaken comment, and that that was the day when I did what I had been thinking of doing for some time—when I dropped out of the race mentioned above. It would have been dispiriting enough to have discovered that a writer of such renown as Pynchon was a mere pretender, but to have discovered that a critic of such renown as Kermode seemed not to know what constituted a sentence would surely have persuaded me that the race I had for so long supposed myself to be contesting was not worth my trouble.

If I had not wanted to keep my letter short and forceful, I might have gone on to ask by what right Kermode could assert that Pynchon loved long sentences or any other stylistic effect. I had worked out my own theory of fiction by then, and it was largely derived from the writings of Wayne C. Booth. Kermode, in his careless attribution of a love of long sentences to an entity that he named ‘Pynchon’, betrayed his ignorance of Booth’s common-sense distinction between the flesh-and-blood Thomas Pynchon and the implied author of the texts that he put his name to. Kermode, like any other reader of Vineland, was free to guess what a man named Thomas Pynchon might love or not love, but any fondnesses inferred from any text had to be attributed to a being known only from his having composed it: a being not necessarily identical with a man known to his friends as Thomas Pynchon.

Goalpost shifting and appeals to authority. Sad. If you want historical accuracy, don't fricking read postmodern literature. That's like trying to understand post-Renaissance Europe by reading through Foucault, or trying to define schizophrenia in medical terms by consulting fricking Deleuze. Yes, Pynchon is going to "bend" shit, if even for a cheap joke. It's very clear that Pynchon isn't trying to be complex for the sake of being complex. Emotion brims from each of his books. Underneath all that goofiness and at times craziness, they are profoundly human. It boggles me to think that something like Notes and Devils can speak to you (I think Dostoevsky is brilliant, too) but Inherent Vice and Vineland can just so easily be disregarded.

[...]
(Contd)
>350 unique characters in Gravity's Rainbow, and you want them all to be named something along the lines of "Joseph Greene" and "Fredrick Cooper"? Him naming his characters the way he does lets the reader know what they're about without having to dedicate all that many words to doing it. Pierce Inverarity, Darryl-Louise Chastain, Weed Atman, Isaiah Two-Four, Scott Oof, Mucho Maas--you get the gist.
350 unique charcters and as I said above I didnt find myself invested in a single one of them. The kooky names are literally the most interesting thing about all of these characters.
> Like it or not, it's not out of question to have these characters either do drugs or be wary about the things going on around them. This is like criticizing Joyce for writing about Ireland, or McCarthy for writing about death and morose, violent macho shit. Even in Pynchon's simplest ventures, the amount and depth of motifs subtly running through the story is staggering. His theses are not as obvious as you may think.
Not at all, lol. Joyce tries to get to the depth of Irish identity and what it means for the soul. McCarthy you dont understand because he doesnt write primarily about death as Tolstoy or Dellilo did but rather as a function of the brutality inherent on man.
What does Pynch say about drug use beyond Dude Weed Lmao? At least Kerouc, Burroughs, and Thompson- and especially DFW tried to get below the surface of why users do drugs, what societal and emotional factors lead to an addict. Doc Sportello is just a duuuude weed LMAO character and his constant use of weed is shallow.
If Pynch used his talent beyond showing how complex his style can be and how many things he knows his work could be great. Its vastly overrated as it stands

Because drugs are not necessarily the main fricking focus of his stories. Some of his characters, yes, you are going to find people in real life who base their entire identities around the drugs they take. But to whittle everything he says about the 60s down to "what's his attitude on drugs?" instead of taking the fact that people in 60s did drugs as a peripheral subject to the greater and more prevailing subjects of his works is ignorant.
As for what you said about Joyce and McCarthy (I admit I slipped up saying "death" when I meant to say "violence"), that's very true. But Pynchon also tries to get to the bottom of what his characters (and more importantly the eras within which they live and the circumstances they are faced with) represent and propagate, what they entail and how things happen the way they happen. Pynchon tries to encapsulate everything in some big sprawl (Oedipa crying at the painting showcasing a tapestry blanketing the world), and I frankly think he does it beautifully, and humorously too. There is passion, and there is technical skill, and there is substance to what Pynch says. You'll have to actually live and experience things first in order to appreciate what he writes about. You'll actually have to care about what's going on around you, instead of caring about *you*.

There is no objective metric here. Murnane's opinions are his own. But he makes a good point. So many of these long sentences in GR are literally just right branching list of clauses or straight up lists. What's the beauty in that? It doesn't even read well in oration.

Mental image vignettes. Imagery. If your metric for a piece of literature's quality is how well it rolls off the tongue, look into poetry.

Out of context, obviously it's going to sound like shit. But in the book, that character is basing the order in her life off of her lust for authority figures, and Brock himself is the suave hotshot lady's man who is secretly terrified of being alone. It's indicative of how flimsy this "order" is, that she's essentially being guided by something as vulgar, crass, and irrational as her FBI boyfriend's genitalia (his machismo, his assertiveness, his authority and "mission"). Frenesi's living in a delusion, maneuvering through the problems in her life by relying on this sense of order, dispelling any problems away by falling back into the power inherent in figures of authority like Brock, almost as if it's a game, and a game that she engages in simply for the thrill of doing it, justifying it with the mere fact that she did it and that that should count for something (the quoted passage then goes on to talk about how Frenesi would work as some sort of undercover agent for the FBI in seedy corners of the underground, among others just like her, stuck in an "arcade" where her life is being simulated for her, where everything she does starts and ends in her own underground corner, playing on). Frenesi acquires meaning for her life and her actions by her relation to authority, whether that's on the abstract or tangible (sensual) level. Not to mention her father is literally a WW2 veteran and her mother had similar struggles, so you can see why she'd be so averse to a prim and proper family life. It might be vulgar, sure, but it gets the point across, and it's not there without a reason.

I guess I subscribe to sentimentality a bit too much. I believe that even something as inconsequential as that scene in Vineland about the motel filled with talkative and boisterous residents yammering so loud their voices drift onto the freeway and make drivers think the road's haunted or the motel Brock and Frenesi were staying at at the seafront being lacerated by white graffiti on its water-foam-corroded walls is truly beautiful and resplendent in its own right (and a marvelously charming piece of world-building)--sort of like "the great in the small". It's really poignant to me in a very weird way, and that might be the sentimentality speaking. I tend to view Pynchon's writing as the opposite, generally exceptional with brief bursts of intrusive pop-culture idiocy. Sorry for being antagonistic, I've got little sleep and its easy to get hostile on places like IQfy lol

M&D on the whole is written in an archaic style. Mason's letters, composed of a character's voice, is not entirely in line with the historical context. Therein lies the joke. It's a juxtaposition of the eloquence of (most of) the rest of the novel and the vulgarity of a character's voice in this circumstance. Vollmann tried doing the same thing Pynch did in M&D, and came off as a total dweeb. Pynch struck a balance (at least for me) in how he devised M&D in each of its stylistic facets. Have you never heard of the concept of subversion before? M&D was never meant to be a historical document of the actual Mason and Dixon, just like how Gravity's Rainbow was never meant to be a historical document of WW2. I mean, there's a fricking talking dog in it.
>But I think his incessant inclusion of pop culture
I'd have to agree. It's my chief complaint with his works. They just feel too hamfisted a lot of the times. Sometimes they work in context, but a lot of the times they just detract from the experience, unfortunately. Though maybe it could be a sly poke at how difficult it is to experience truly revelatory and enlightening things in an age of lowbrow drivel like Gilligan's Island, or Hideo Kojima (or as he's known in my crib, God), but that's hardly an excuse.
>and hobbyist essays
I'm a sucker for digressions and hyper-autistic gushing about inconsequential things, so I suppose it's just up to your personal dispositions.
Let's just agree to disagree.

Forgot to mention: when I brought up goalpost shifting, I was referring to you bringing up your favorite authors, when I was vaguely talking about writing style in general instead.

>I'm not filtered pynchon is just needlessly complex!!!!!!

This is why nobody engages worth your

I actually will respond to this effortpost since you did a lot more than just write “filtered”, even tho the writing is very sub 25 yo
>The fact that you revere surface-level, basic, milquetoast writing techniques and are repulsed by the slightest bit of rejection of chronology and conventional sentence structure and word choice betrays your inability to truly appreciate literature--I'd even go so far as to say your inability to appreciate the experience of living and learning and acknowledging the human condition and the fruits it bears
Not at all, are any of the writers I mentioned surface level or milquetoast. Dostoy posed some of the greatest man-god and man-society conundrums ever written and his writing style is clunky and bad. Its not conventianal or lyrical at all, yet as Hem said “he makes you feel like almost no one else does.”
Hemingway himself, I think back in OM&S on the passage of Santiago’s dreams only being of the lions on the beaches - that single paragraph alone held more than 80 pages of Pynchon. And thats the talent of great writing, in my opinion, which bringa me to —
> Literature is not meant to be a frivolous venture in some conversationalist style that invites a streamlined and easily accessible knowledge base. Learning something fundamentally requires an attempt to understand it, and it is the artist's duty to ensure they represent the profundity of the subject in question accurately while not veering into pretension.
This is just an asinine statement. You are subtly worshipping complexity. Dont get me wrong, I dont discredit complexity at all. I think Ulysses is one of the 3 or 4 greatest works of the 20th century.
But it should never be the main ends to literature, and thats the fault that Pynchon and Gaddis and somewhat DFW fall into.
> You criticize Pynchon for using archaic words. Would Mason & Dixon not have been completely worthless if it was written in the style he used for, say, Vineland or Bleeding Edge?
No it would not be worthless at all. Trying to reproduce a semi historical work using period appropriate jargon elvery easily falls into naval gazing. McCarthy did it very believably and effectively in BM, Pynchon on M&D fell apart because he was using words that were not at all used in the period in the way he presents them. I went back to read Mason’s letters and they were more or less plain and straightforward but written as expected in the period style. There was no mention of “wiener ale” or “spotted dick” or the other fricking gay and pointless anecdotes Pynchon adds because they are so koooky XD. He just adds it to show off he discovered it and how ironic and hip he can write about it.

(Contd)
>350 unique characters in Gravity's Rainbow, and you want them all to be named something along the lines of "Joseph Greene" and "Fredrick Cooper"? Him naming his characters the way he does lets the reader know what they're about without having to dedicate all that many words to doing it. Pierce Inverarity, Darryl-Louise Chastain, Weed Atman, Isaiah Two-Four, Scott Oof, Mucho Maas--you get the gist.
350 unique charcters and as I said above I didnt find myself invested in a single one of them. The kooky names are literally the most interesting thing about all of these characters.
> Like it or not, it's not out of question to have these characters either do drugs or be wary about the things going on around them. This is like criticizing Joyce for writing about Ireland, or McCarthy for writing about death and morose, violent macho shit. Even in Pynchon's simplest ventures, the amount and depth of motifs subtly running through the story is staggering. His theses are not as obvious as you may think.
Not at all, lol. Joyce tries to get to the depth of Irish identity and what it means for the soul. McCarthy you dont understand because he doesnt write primarily about death as Tolstoy or Dellilo did but rather as a function of the brutality inherent on man.
What does Pynch say about drug use beyond Dude Weed Lmao? At least Kerouc, Burroughs, and Thompson- and especially DFW tried to get below the surface of why users do drugs, what societal and emotional factors lead to an addict. Doc Sportello is just a duuuude weed LMAO character and his constant use of weed is shallow.
If Pynch used his talent beyond showing how complex his style can be and how many things he knows his work could be great. Its vastly overrated as it stands

Not to mention how you bemoan Pynchon's use of obscure language and jargon while championing the likes of fricking Melville and McCarthy, two authors whose work is infamously REPLETE with those very things. Their prose is unlike anything you'll ever come across, and Pynchon is no different. If all you took away from Pynchon's work is some grand conspiratorial idea or some loaded message or commentary about war, or television culture, or technology, or airships, you've missed the forest for the trees. Pynchon encapsulates and speaks to the individual, and the prospects that we, as humans, will invariably have to be faced with. Not everybody is going to be a Raskolnikov. Not everybody is going to be Santiago. But it would be beyond moronic to claim there aren't women feeling trapped in their marriages like Oedipa (however merited or not their capriciousness may be), or aloof bums suddenly forced into a position of responsibility like Zoyd (in fact, this is practically a rite of passage and, in Vineland's case, a social phenomenon that completely changed the trajectory of American society), or being shoved into the midst of something that is greater than them on a palpable scale like Slothrop. These, among numerous others, are all complex, variegated, and intriguing issues and circumstances. Calling Pynchon's novels complex merely on the surface tells me nothing but the fact that you haven't plumbed anything beyond what's there on the surface (hurr Gravity's Rainbow is about rockets hurr Vineland is about television culture hurr Bleeding Edge is about technology), either because of some staunch ignorance on your part, laziness, or an active hatred of learning and literature.

From one pynchon fan to another: can you please leave? or at the very least stop typing like a female redditor? it gives us a bad name. you can easily defend pynchon (2bh he doesn't need it against pseuds thought) without sounding like you frequent r/books...and if you do just go back

>from one Pynchon fan to another
You wish. Detached cool irony and insincerity is morally evil and destructive. Try being passionate about something for once.

You're right, I should be saying "based" "cringe" "troony" and "zoomer" instead. Of course.

Wow, it's clear you've never read his books.
Absolutely [spoiler]filtered[/spoiler]