i don't get it
she's taken on the ruse cruise (i think?) by her ex-lover and there are a bunch of references to entropy, computers, stamps, and the history of the mail system, and everybody has cartoon names
but what does it mean
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Something something, paranoia, societal alienation?
I read it as a no-frills illustration of postmodern dissonance and the discomfort it causes, nothing more.
The cartoon naming is because Pynchon was influenced by Dickens who was influenced by Smollett.
OP again
I guess what I'm interested in hearing about to hone in on something specific is the significance of the Maxwell's Demon part in the house of that guy who has a fetish for chinese girls
Let's ask Max Lawton
>he's a pseud who uses buzzwords to compartmentalize and this fools midwits into thinking what he's saying is profound instead of generalizable/simplistic
I get why he's hated now.
I bought this for the title when I was 17 at a borders book store. 2003. I thought it sucked and didn't understand it got thrown in the trash eventually
>guys, my next book is going to be great just wait
Didn't the guy from Groundhog Day solve this a decade ago? Its an artistic madness, Torquato Tasso, Thurn & Taxis, the badger and the shield.
I’m curious, how many posters here are actually happy, satisfied, or existentially fulfilled in any way whatsoever? even if only fleetingly or for brief moments of time?
Do any of you actually get any actual pleasure from what you read, or ever have moments of contemplative, silent, solitary and alone, meditative thought on fundamental existential issues that have no direct immediate “pragmatic” or “practical” bearing on your immediate day-to-day life? (I.e. they don’t have any bearing on conventionally and societally important matters such as “how to make more money”, or to how to wisely save, spend, and/or invest the money one already has, how to pay the bills, find a job/career to work in, how to pursue sex or a romantic relationship, or, if one is already in one, how to maintain it happily, what one will eat for breakfast this morning, or lunch or dinner later, or how to keep up proper relationships with the family and friends (if one meaningfully has any of such relationships), or even how to keep up with the Joneses, and so on and so forth.)
Do any of you ever actually enjoy or find any significant meaning or value in anything you read? Why is almost everything here inevitably negative, criticizing, sarcastic, ironic, critical, joking, “meming” (it makes me want to fricking vomit), and/or hostile in tone, especially fricking OPs? “Here’s why Nietzsche was a moron.” “LMAOOOO, actually liking Dostoevsky, a Christfreak hack.” “Heraclitus, Thales, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the Greeks … they were actually fricking moronS because they didn’t have access to or the capability to build MICROSCOPES or even manufacture HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP on an industrial scale. They did not know about SCIENCE.”
I can already preemptively, telepathically predict your all-too-sad, pathetic, deranged, and twisted immediate responses to this post, such as to type with your grubby little fingers, “newbie KEK IQfy HAS ALWAYS BEEN SHIT” “REDDIT SPACING GTFO” and so forth. I’ve been here for 11 fricking years and you’re almost all such fricking pieces of worthless garbage and wastes of space.
You are almost all such goddamned fricking subhuman pieces of total talentless shit and wastes of space. Frick you! Go have a nice day! Go fricking get yourself executed! You are such a goddamned fricking subhuman inhuman fricking moron. Nobody fricking cares what you say, and you’ll be quickly forgotten after you’re dead — if not in years, then in decades.
You’re such a goddamned fricking … tell me, if I’m just “insane”, why are you still fricking reading this post? If you truly were an “objectively sane” person who determined that I was “objectively insane” (and/or hysterical or simply drunk or on drugs), then why are you still even reading or seriously considering this?
Why are you even on this fricking shithole of a Godforsaken anonymous imageboard on this Satanically controlled planet? The clock is ticking, and the span left of your mortal life on this earth is inevitably getting shorter and shorter.
You can’t literally and physically return to your youth, or “turn back the dial” on any of your wasted years. The clock is ticking, and, on a galactic, a cosmic timescale or calendar, your inevitable eventual death on this filthy Godforsaken accursed Goddamned planet Earth is coming incredibly soon — in the blink of an eye, on a cosmic timescale. You’ll relatively soon be a cold decaying hunk of meat and bones in a coffin. And you’re fricking here vacuum-sucking in this meaningless, soulless, Satanic, demonic, Luciferian, Ahrimanic bullshit through your corneas on the glowing screen about how “SCHOPENHAUER IS … LE MIDWIT LOL” “HEIDEGGER IS … LE MYSTICAL WAFFLING GERMAN OBSCURANTIST LOL” (analogous claims about other great German thinkers like Kant and Hegel, and so forth)
You’re such a fricking loser. All you deserve is a fricking slow, painful, common and utterly un-extraordinary death (as is all too common in the modern “ultra-enlightened, scientifically knowledgeable, industrial and post-industrial West”) from common causes of death in the Western hi-tech civilized industrialized world, such as from heart failure, some type of cancer, diabetes, and/or a stroke.
Go frick yourself and die painfully and slowly.
wake up babe new pasta just dropped
11 years on chudcel website
>almost every author mentioned is a philosopher
These posts are a cautionary tale. Clearly this man's madness was caused by the demonic influence of European philosophy.
>Heraclitus, Thales, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the Greeks … they were actually fricking moronS because they didn’t have access to or the capability to build MICROSCOPES or even manufacture HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP on an industrial scale. They did not know about SCIENCE.
This is actually true though
Those are the sort of people attracted by this site, are you really surprised?
>what does it mean
There's your error, bud
It would be overstatement to say "The point is that there is no point," but it captures a bit of the truth
As you read Pynchon, you have a sense that Something is Going On--it feels thematically rich, it feels referential, and there's enough symbol-play that you assume something is going on beneath the surface--BUT, a core part of the postmodern aesthetic and style really does lay in the contrast between this "sense that Something's Going On" and the fact that what's actually happening at that level of deep meaning is utterly obscure
Postmodernism generally is a """genre""" built around recognition of the brokenness of meta-narratives, whether they be political, sexual, social, whatever--within the majority of postmodern work there is no 'Big Picture'--but, we have brains that relentlessly look for the Big Picture
Pynchon creates literary worlds that combine two elements:
1) the maximization of symbolic content that you feel must mean something and must point to a Big Picture
2) the intentional neglect or erasure of any stable Big Picture
The fact that your mind is looking for some foothold and failing, and that you are frustrated at your failing because the work is so intentionally and carefully crafted, is in large part the actual point
Just enjoy the chaos, and then if you feel like going deeper, you can pick up the threads of conceptual exploration, but don't get your hopes up about figuring it out--there may be no bit It to figure
Postmodern lit is just modernism+naturalism, the literary devices of the modernist with naturalist narrator, the narrator stays out of the readers way but the author doesn't. Not that difficult.
>His writing has zero heart and soul.
Read Against the Day.
His big novels (GR, M&D and AtD) are a history of the people of his country told through a rather effective and unique perspective which captures the American spirit and its evolution better than most anything. These three are quite different from the rest of his works and other than V. I don't see a great deal of worth in his other works, enjoyable and fun but thematically thin.
JJ Abrams before his time. Pynchon has no payoffs just setups left open ended. His writing has zero heart and soul. His only talent is in pure prose construction which, as we know from the cautionary tale of Nobokov, is worthless.
Haha, wrong.
Literary beauty is a goal into itself if that's your bag. Sure, you can write a tight little unit of a story if you want to, jam-packed full of your favorite heckin' aphorismos from the bibble or whatever moral authority. Someone will probably like it (if they're gullible or already heckin' love the old Jesurino) even if it's just your average everyman art style. But beauty in prose is also a viable goal. The fact that you heckin' hate Nabokov (probably for not giving you an easy avenue into moralizing Humbert as reflected by any Moral Authority) and his city-slickin' prose voodoo doesn't make his writing itself any less beautiful — it only implies your inability to appreciate it.
What's the point of Pynchon? Not his plots nor his style. Just the references?
He's a fun read
that's like asking an indian "what's the point of producing huge rotten stinking shits in the middle of the street"
does it even matter? I mean it would probably matter if you asked Pynchon, his editor, or his financiers in order to decide if you should shoot them on the spot or send them to a camp... but otherwise why do you even care? it's like asking an epileptic "why are you frickin dancing like that?" it's not even nonsensical, it's cruel. it's what Pynchon and his crew would do.
Pynchon writes experiences, not messages. He's a disheveled little stoned oracle crying Cassiopeia into the void. Don't bother trying to catch every single reference like you're writing a college essay. The (wretched; vile) world of academia is full of people trying to bring him into the fold, to reduce his work to a series of informational nodes descending from a central Point, Meaningful. It just kind of is; it's just art. Sometimes meaning just gets in your way. Pinecone invites you to ease away from that whole, like, modality, man.
great post
Thanks, Tom. Love your work.
>i don't get it
because he's a shit writer
>but what does it mean
that he's a shit writer
and some disgusting financiers in some smelly board room are laughing their assess of because people are paying money to gobbling such vile shit, literally shoveling it down without even giving a second thought to breathing
simple as
You can’t understand Pynchon without a deep understanding of parapolitics.