What's the best companion book for this novel?
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Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
What's the best companion book for this novel?
What's the best companion book for this novel?
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
|
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Funny man. I guess it's a fair point though. There's just so many references in the novel I don't understand.
Read (or read the Wikipedia articles of) The Education of Henry Adams and Machiavelli's The Prince. You now understand Herbert Stencil's schtick and "She Hangs on the western wall." Realize that there is a wide array of writings and thought regarding chthonic civilizations from Hades and the underworld to Hell and Satan, to The Land of the Lost, and that Atlantis/Anti-terra/the underground has always been a rich sunless field for speculation. Know that the nexus of android/cyborg/robot has been a feverish dream since Karel Čapek's R.U.R. from 1920, and that there are a millions scurrilous bureaucrats plotting death and that all are either aware of, or cynically willingly blind to, it.
>The Education of Henry Adams
Forgot to mention, this is also where Pynchon gets the dichotomy of "the hot-house and the street" in that beautiful diatribe on the separation of our social- and intellectual-selves. If you caught on to those terms while feeling, without knowing, what they meant, know that you were right to intuit in their opposing trajectories, the hot-house of industry and the Street of the 20th Century: "I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Black's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night."
Ask your fellow book club members in the discord
XxC34gh$1
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It doesn't need a companion.
Just go to Pynchon wiki and look up vheissu and rosicrucianism. That's all that's needed. Maybe also take a look at uffezi's map.
If you want something semi-contemporaneous (published in 1955) that deals with more or less the same issues regarding the real, the counterfeit, and the running-down/degenerating quality of life and thought in the post-war years, Gaddis' Recognitions is pretty close, except he lacks the historical focus on the military-industrial-engineering complex and focuses solely on the spiritual degeneration of people despite the fact he makes the case for the continuing presence of grace and the sublime in the fifties. Moreover, the progression of concerns from TR/V. to JR/GR marks a strange trajectory for both authors and for their contrasting works: Pynchon has always been aware that there is a level of sublime transcendence that is partially man-made, and Gaddis was always watchful of what money could corrupt; but both writers strangely move closer to the other, Gaddis gathering insights from the politico-economic insides he had to disentangle and rethread as a corporate public relations agent, and Pynchon was able to channel Rilke (prominent in TR) and Emily Dickinson into a blasphemous hagiography ("The King of Cups, crowning his hopes. is the fair intellectual-king. If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low.") of western degeneration that happens to read like apocalyptic annihilating hurricanes and tectonic historical shifts that trickle into the fabric of our (at least in 70's America, although arguments could be made that the scales have only shifted even more since then) everyday lives.
good post
Is Thomas Pynchon too hard to read for a thoughtlet (I think my thinking is stunted or shallow)? I'm intimidated even of 49!!
Just relax and let the words flow over you. People get intimidated because of his academic reputation, but Pynch is just a Bugs Bunny fan who wants you to read his stories like cartoons and imagine all the wacky scenarios in your head.
V for Vendetta
Ulysses, the Odysse and Hamlet. They're all the same book.
I tried that second one but it was just about some green guy named Abe in a factory farting
Abe's Odyssey is fricking sick you fricking philistine if you can't deal with the scatological humor and industrial alienation of the setting why the frick are you trying to read Pynchon anyway
Pynched -- I've read GR twice and love saving mudokons.
I think the Pyncher would love Oddworld, it's even a bit slow which is good for an oldhead like him.
Do you think he finished MGS? I feel like he was intentionally namedropping Kojimbo because their works are so similar.
I don't think Pynch played MGS at all, his son probably told him about it.
I mean, sure, but in my headcannon he played it. Another question is who the frick introduced Sarcógayo to him, it was very nice seeing a band from my hometown being mentioned by die Pynchmeister himself
Sleep is for the week
Genuinely have a nice day.