luka
Well-known member
Version have you read this one about yoyodyne http://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-four-machines-of-yoyodyne.html?m=1
Thomas Pynchon
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version
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Yeah, loved it. The section on Sputnik is amazing.
We are still trapped in this moment. It has only become more complex, more hardwired, more ambiguous. Nothing has been resolved. The energy generated by the conjunction of these opposites -- reducible from one perspective to Ear and Eye -- fuels all activity in the world today. And this same energy drives The Crying of Lot 49 and all of Pynchon's subsequent novels. Everything cries out for resolution, but there is no guarantee that this unstable instant won't loop on forever. There may be no final sorting.
We are still trapped in this moment. It has only become more complex, more hardwired, more ambiguous. Nothing has been resolved. The energy generated by the conjunction of these opposites -- reducible from one perspective to Ear and Eye -- fuels all activity in the world today. And this same energy drives The Crying of Lot 49 and all of Pynchon's subsequent novels. Everything cries out for resolution, but there is no guarantee that this unstable instant won't loop on forever. There may be no final sorting.
version
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“Not quite how it sorts out. Differences among the world religions are in fact rather trivial when compared to the common enemy, the ancient and abiding darkness which all hate, fear, and struggle against without cease”— he made a broad gesture to indicate the limitless taiga all around them— “Shamanism. There isn’t a primitive people anywhere on Earth that can’t be found practicing some form of it. Every state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, and has taken steps to eradicate it.”
“What? there’s no ‘state religion’ in the U.S.A., pardner, we’ve got freedom of worship, it’s guaranteed in the Constitution—keeps church and state separate, just so’s we don’t turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o’ course.”
“The Cherokee,” replied Prance, “the Apache, the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native Red Indian you’ve found, you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you’ve simply killed.”
“I suggest it was about the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you’ve ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened.”
“The Civil War? That was economics. Politics.”
“That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just believe everything you’re taught, don’t you?”
“What? there’s no ‘state religion’ in the U.S.A., pardner, we’ve got freedom of worship, it’s guaranteed in the Constitution—keeps church and state separate, just so’s we don’t turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o’ course.”
“The Cherokee,” replied Prance, “the Apache, the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native Red Indian you’ve found, you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you’ve simply killed.”
“I suggest it was about the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you’ve ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened.”
“The Civil War? That was economics. Politics.”
“That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just believe everything you’re taught, don’t you?”
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They did. Reza was arsing about and tried to pretend he'd read them all.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Speaking of Reza, did anyone read about this graphic novel thing he was supposed to be doing? I'd totally forgotten about it until the other day when I received this email from Amazon.
Now, is it just me or does that feel like a bit of a piss-take? I know there was supposed to be some kind of delay cos it was like a kickstarter or something, but as I understood it the situation was simply that a few quid in advance were necessary to nudge it over the line so the publisher could bosh them all out and wing them on their way to us the happy readers. In my mind, even with that complication I thought that I could reasonably expect to be happily reading it in six months or so... I really don't think that the wait was supposed to be for more than two years. How can it possibly take that long? For argument's sake, let's play a little game and say that at the time of my order, he had had nothing more than a title, there would still have been plenty of time for him to come up with an actual book to go along with it, then to write it out long-hand, get it printed in his local newsagent and deliver it to me personally, travelling only under his own steam and using only methods of transport that have been available for at least a thousand years.Delivery estimate update for your Amazon.com order #112-1560217-9458655
Amazon.com
Shipment Delay
Hello,
We're encountering a delay in shipping your order. The new delivery date is indicated below. We'll send a confirmation when your items ship. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Details
Order #112-1560217-9458655
Placed on Thursday, April 11, 2019
New estimated delivery date:
Friday, April 16, 2021 - Thursday, May 6, 2021
Chronosis 1 (Urbanomic / K-Pulp)
Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC
If your shipment arrives too late, you may refuse delivery or return it for a refund.
We hope to see you again soon.
Amazon.com
But seeing as how the book was supposed to have already been written, and as far as I know there is nothing to stop him using modern methods of printing, posting and such-like, I really don't understand why I am still waiting.
The only thing that he did gain from the huge delay was the fact that I had completely forgotten it existed and so when I got this message the other day it felt as though I had gained something totally free and completely out of the blue. I guess that's a trick to make me forgive him and I suppose it's sort of worked.... it's just a little bit galling to know that if he has invested the money I paid him for that book in an account that accrues compound interest, then by now he will actually be richer than Elon Musk.
any interest?
thewastedworld.wordpress.com
“Falling Away from What Is Human:” Thomas Pynchon and the Posthuman Gothic (PhD Thesis)
Long recognised as one of the preeminent writers of literary postmodernism, Thomas Pynchon’s reputation appears set in stone. Yet, I argue, beneath the postmodern appearance of Pynchon’s writing li…
thewastedworld.wordpress.com
version
Well-known member
Yeah, I think I've read everything on that guy's blog. I've posted it here before. This one's my favourite,
thewastedworld.wordpress.com
It's got the stuff about the need to tunnel once property lines start appearing on the surface,
As the line, this “conduit for Evil,” extends across the American landscape it takes on an inhuman power of control over the lives of those propelled along its trajectory (Pynchon 1997, 700). Although an instrument for rationalising the earth, and driving from the world all that has been decreed unfit for an enlightened age, it also delineates and thus defines the borders of a vast and boundless universe which persists outside. The party constantly encounters sublime images of a nature “transgressing all Metes and Bounds” (485) which, in typical Gothic fashion, are never experienced as “the subject’s capacity to feel and think beyond reason, but the invasion of reason from elsewhere” (Colebrook 2018, 93). Whether beholding the majesty of the colonial line or the impenetrable murk of the lands beyond, the surveyors realise that what they see is but the surface of a vast and unknown war for control of the earth. In these moments of realisation, the novel descends below the outer scars of battle to speculate on the subterranean spaces which may yet reveal the secrets of this occulted conflict.
“A Knowledge of Tunneling became more and more negotiable, as more of the Surface succumb’d to Enclosure, Sub-Division, and the simple Exhaustion of Space,— Down Below, where no property Lines existed, lay a World as yet untravers’d” (Pynchon 1997, 233).
Unearthly Utopias: Ecogothic Scenes in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
If the anxieties surrounding humanity and machines are already well-acknowledged in Pynchon’s fiction, comparatively less examined is the role which nature plays in his novels as an additiona…
thewastedworld.wordpress.com
It's got the stuff about the need to tunnel once property lines start appearing on the surface,
As the line, this “conduit for Evil,” extends across the American landscape it takes on an inhuman power of control over the lives of those propelled along its trajectory (Pynchon 1997, 700). Although an instrument for rationalising the earth, and driving from the world all that has been decreed unfit for an enlightened age, it also delineates and thus defines the borders of a vast and boundless universe which persists outside. The party constantly encounters sublime images of a nature “transgressing all Metes and Bounds” (485) which, in typical Gothic fashion, are never experienced as “the subject’s capacity to feel and think beyond reason, but the invasion of reason from elsewhere” (Colebrook 2018, 93). Whether beholding the majesty of the colonial line or the impenetrable murk of the lands beyond, the surveyors realise that what they see is but the surface of a vast and unknown war for control of the earth. In these moments of realisation, the novel descends below the outer scars of battle to speculate on the subterranean spaces which may yet reveal the secrets of this occulted conflict.
“A Knowledge of Tunneling became more and more negotiable, as more of the Surface succumb’d to Enclosure, Sub-Division, and the simple Exhaustion of Space,— Down Below, where no property Lines existed, lay a World as yet untravers’d” (Pynchon 1997, 233).
version
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I thought that was his worst for a long time then reread it recently and loved it. The structure's nuts; stories nested in stories nested in stories.
'Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane—to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference.'
and most importantly, funny as fuck
iirc that was a very throwaway 2 lines in the latter half of the book which makes sense insofar as DL typifying a 2nd wave feminist "superhero" device throughout the story. the whole scene plays out as a zorro-type fantasy. the pynch probably got a bit horny too but can't blame him - dl chastain is a babe. he's written far more "gratuitous" treatments of his female characters in other books, which don't bother me either tbf, they're mostly not as gratuitous as they initially seem........saying this as a woman
version
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Yeah, that's why I thought it was gratuitous. It just felt like him chucking in a horny scene.
probably a bigger picture, like the series of vignettes at the end of GR that was metaphor for slothrop cranking out a massive roper or whatever the fuck. cant be arsed pontificating pynchon these days, i get horrible de ja vu of the ceiling damp at my 1st yr uni accommodation
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version
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I really liked it when I first saw it then rewatched it fairly recently and couldn't get into it at all. I still like the book though.