Thomas Pynchon, famously private, sells his archive | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Pynchon, famously private, sells his archive

nytimes.com

123 pointsbookofjoe74 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20221216221543/https://www.nytime...

I'm reading Bleeding Edge right now. I seem to remember it not being too well received when it came out and it certainly didn't get the kind of attention that was given to Inherent Vice. Wondering if folks here paid any attention to it.

But my god, Pynchon has an astounding mind. The breadth of his cultural interests is vast. His wit is seemingly unending, almost to a fault. Bleeding Edge is good - I don't think tech folks are his primary audience, but it's great to read it with some software background because you can parse a little bit more of the BS, of which there is a lot. Pynchon is really interested in the line between reality and conspiracy and if you have a tech background and are interested in his work more broadly I think that reading Bleeding Edge could help make his more challenging works more approachable. At least that's what I'm hoping for myself.

Glad to hear you are enjoying. I read Bleeding Edge when it came out, but was underwhelmed. It is characteristically Pynchon, but did not enchant me in the same way as did Inherent Vice some years earlier.

Still, his best novels have got to be Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Those are the monsters. But you get out what you put in.

I'd give it to those first two, and V. I liked Against the Day but there's this long middle-to-end section of filth and depravity that I could do without, and it's weirdly more coherent than the rest. The other books have bits of that, but move on before long.

I would call a past version of myself an avid reader and I used to love the challenge of the big books. Loved Delilo’s Underworld, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, etc, but Gravity’s Rainbow is sitting on my shelf with a bookmark at around the 100 page mark because of how much it was asking of me every time I opened it.

I don’t have the headspace currently to give it a fair shake, but I hope I do at some point in the future, it’s my white whale for now.

Same thing happened to me. Then I decided to start reading ahead every 5 pages, scanning for something that engaged me. I finally found it in the chapter "Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering". I read a while more, and determined it was good enough to go back 80 pages and keep slogging. Pynchon's bricks sometimes require that cheat.

One of Yale’s open courses has a lecture that covers The Crying of Lot 49[1]. A good place to start for anyone reading Pynchon for the first time.

Gravity’s Rainbow is my personal favourite, but takes an enormous amount of work as a reader. His far-reaching and darkly conspiratorial view of the world is punctuated by hilarious moments of slapstick comedy, which can help keep you motivated through the more difficult sections.

By comparison I found Underworld and Infinite Jest to be much more straightforward. I haven’t read any Ellmann, so I'll have to check her out.

1. https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-12

The Crying of Lot 49 is my favorite of Pynchon's works; I've given many a copy to friends as gifts.

"The Crying of Lot 49" is the only Pynchon novel I was able to complete (bailed on "Gravity's Rainbow" and "V").

I think it was an easy enough introduction to Pynchon for this lightweight so I can certainly recommend it as well. Paranoia and conspiracy are on parade mixed in with perhaps an international secret society? But I don't want to give anything away....

Even from reading the one book, you will start to see references to Pynchon in other nooks of popular culture (W.A.S.T.E., Radiohead's fan club, comes to mind).

There's a popular edition of Gravity's Rainbow ("Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, white A4 rocket pointing down on the cover) that, for some pressings at least, is a pretty poor print. Missing lines, haphazard paragraph breaks, etc. Given the writing style, I'd recommend any other edition (Penguin 20th century is good, blue cover with rocket schematics) to make it less of a challenge to read.

A friend gave me the hint to ignore what happens in gravity rainbow and let the images pass by like a movie. Your brain will make the connections.

Most storyline and names are one time usage for the bigger picture

Yes! I dropped off there plenty of times. May I recommend the audio book version?

It is much easier to just keep going that way, it's how I've brought a whole pod of white whales to the tryworks.

Gravity’s Rainbow is an experience. I don’t think it’s written to be fully understood and I personally think it’s intentionally working on losing its reader. That’s the point. You just have to enjoy the ride and accept you won’t get everything, maybe most of it. You can always reread if you want to but you already get a lot just from immersing in its spirit.

> Mason & Dixon

Of all the books I've failed to read, Mason & Dixon is probably the most annoying. I made it to about the 80% point and then life intervened and I put it down 'temporarily'. That was a few years ago so could probably have another go. I liked the Neal Stephenson-like vibe.

Jules Siegel, Pynchon's college friend and roommate, once wrote that "...you have to accept the fact that Tom’s grasp of things that he glibly sets down as if he were a master of the material is usually quite superficial, based on reading anything from, say, Bible Comics to learned journals. This is not a criticism, but a description."

Of course, Siegel was maybe not the most reliable informant, given that Pynchon also famously slept with his wife.

> you have to accept the fact that Tom’s grasp of things that he glibly sets down as if he were a master of the material is usually quite superficial

$1 to whoever finds Pynchon’s HN account

Steps to finding Pynchon's HN account:

1. Create a new HN account and populate it with posts containing samples of Pynchon's writing style

2. Go to: stylometry.net and put in the username of the HN account you created

3. Report back if anything of interest comes up

4. Split Paul Cole's $1 reward

We can call it PynchonNotPynchon.ai After prefs and dilution, as founder you can probably expect end up with about 3-5%.

The spin-off of PynchonOrNot.io, where GPT ranks them on a scale of not-Pynchon to very Pynchon indeed - could do very well, given the precedents. I would even bet more people would want to know if the internet thought they were Pynchon or not than hot or not.

PynchonNotPynchonInPythonNotJython?

Does something like that site exist for Reddit?

I enjoyed all the Jewish tidbits sprinkled through the the book.

A lot more background:

http://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-siege...

This deserves its own post. I love the writing style.

That seems to track with some of the more critical reviews of Gravity’s Rainbow I read recently. I have never read one of his books and was considering that one, but I’m not a huge fan of sprawling novels.

Read Inherent Vice. Its an easy and amusing read.

Gravitys Rainbow is one hell of a trip. Had to read it twice. Something for self torture with some fun in it.

I would recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over Inherent Vice, if you're looking for a shorter novel.

I'm not saying his more recent novels are bad, per se, but I would only read them if you exhaust the earlier works and still want more.

I’ve been trying to read Bleeding Edge mostly for the tech startup scene and Y2K setting.

It reads a lot like a Douglas Coupland novel, especially JPod.

Deeply disagree.

Inherent Vice is extremely funny. It’s like a more successful Vineland, itself a good book. They are extremely good.

The Crying of Lot 49 is also good but it feels somewhat rushed. It was written to get some money while writing Gravity’s rainbow and it shows.

Pynchon hired post-docs to research the dotcom bubble and cultural ephemera of the time for BLeeding Edge. Many other writers employ researchers for their writing as well, James Ellroy comes to mind. It's a kind of open secret in the publishing industry. Of course, writers and their publishers alike would prefer if readers had no idea of this.

Novelists using researchers isn't a secret, and it's not shameful. Not sure where you picked up this idea.

I didn't say it was....

It's not more a secret or shameful than a Hollywood director paying consultants in various aspects (from slang, history and politics to fashion, interior design, and cars) to make his mafia movie more historically accurate

just so you know, he likely uses research assistants as many authors do. some elements will be from other individuals contributing them to him to use.

BS = bullshit?

Funny enough there was a moment when reading Bleeding Edge that I noticed that the writing had gotten much better and everything was really Pynchon at his best and within a few pages the characters start talking about Hitler's cologne. The V2 even came up.

It was like a little deleted scene from Gravity's Rainbow was snuck in there and I enjoyed that a lot.

I liked Bleeding Edge, and yes, it's (far?) more approachable than some of his more popular works.

So far I've read The Crying of Lot 49, Bleeding Edge, Inherent Vice, and Vineland. Vineland was difficult, but in a good way.

I've had Against The Day and Gravity's Rainbow sitting in my bookshelf laughing at me and intimidating me and daring me to start them for about ten years. Same with Stephenson's Reamde. I feel tired just contemplating the commitment.

I'd strongly recommend the Inherent Vice movie; a neo noir detective movie featuring a hippie detective nearly too stoned to keep track of a particularly LA conspiracy.

I rewatched this recently on HBO Max. It’s like a hippie Chinatown. I remember seeing it in theaters and being unable to follow the plot but a second viewing was a bit better. Great movie.

No joke, it helps if you toke anytime doc does.

I read the book after seeing the film which I loved. It’s insane how incredibly good at making you feel in the sort of haze you feel after smoking the book is. I could never thank PTA enough for making me discover Pynchon.

It’s an homage to film noirs where the plot was almost impossible to follow. I remember PTA mentioning that in an interview

I was genuinely surprised that he allowed it (I definitely enjoyed it, so this is not a dig at the movie.) Apparently Laurie Anderson wanted to do and opera of Gravity's Rainbow, and Pynchon replied that he would only give permission if it was done solely with Banjos--which I take as a roundabout way of saying no way.

I loved both it and the book. More than just being fun, I think that it really does a good job of capturing the feeling of what it was like to be a hippie in the early 70s, realizing that the world is moving on and your dreams aren't coming true. 50% conspiracy theories, but also 50% real acutal conspiracies because capital won't allow a utopia.

As a little push to watch the Inherent Vice movie, I feel like it's a spiritual successor the The Big Lebowski.

Great point. And, imho, funnier :^)

As a spiritual predecessor I would recommend the movie The Long Goodbye (1973)

I've always found his work to be unreadable (for my tastes) but extremely fascinating. Sort of like listening to a song that I can appreciate for the genius-level composition, but is just not-- for me-- all that enjoyable to listen to. I am happy that the work is out there and that other people enjoy it and appreciate it much more than I do, and at the same time relieved that I'm not enrolled in a literature course that requires me to plow through the material myself.

I feel like there should be a word for this. (Maybe one of those obscure German words?) A word for the complete intellectual appreciation of an accomplishment or creation that I myself want nothing to do with beyond the gratification of knowing it exists.

There really should be a word for this.

Respect?

This is a perfect description for most of Jacob Collier's music for me.

People do not understand that some of the books Pynchon wrote are supposed to represent different conic sections.

For more information, go to http://www.math.columbia.edu/~harris/website/mathematics-wit... under "Bonus Chapter 5: An automorphic reading of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day".

Bleeding Edge is a cool snapshot of the pre-9/11, cooling off period for tech and what ny was like at that time. Strange how small a window that was.

At some point, I will get through whatever journey Gravity’s Rainbow is taking me on.

You might enjoy Turn of the Century [0], which, at the time (2000), felt like a science-fiction novel set exactly one year in the future.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/250757.Turn_of_the_Ce...

ty!

  My father worked at the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.  He told me that Pynchon did research at library, and that the librarians knew who he was but respected his privacy.  Similarly, I was also told by an employee of the Either-Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach that Pynchon used to visit.

> Pynchon (pronounced pin-CHON)

Hmm—who knew?

He took Nabokov's course at Cornell btw.

You can hear Pynchon pronounce it himself in his Simpsons cameo. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcYXWfGt7DY

I was just watching it and didn't catch that!

However. Assuming (rather safely) that he pronounces his own name correctly, NYT transcribed it badly. He doesn't stress the second syllable, as in "Lebron". He stresses the two syllables equally. That is, he says it as "pinch on", the way you might say it in "something to pinch on".

that's how i learned it (equally stressed syllables) from my history of science professor, who (sadistically) assigned gravity's rainbow for the meticulously researched, and fanciful, historical digressions strewn throughout the book. glad to know he wasn't wrong about the pronunciation.

that was my intro to pynchon, being thrown head-first into the deep end. i did actually read the book, but it was... challenging. i appreciate the experience in hindsight, but rued every minute of it at the time.

As a Brit, that way seems most natural. Do Americans assume it to be pine-chon?

I assumed it was pin-chin, but "Thomas Pinecone" is too much fun to not to slip in every once in a while.

Many incorrectly stress the first syllable, and mispronounce the second

"PIN-chin" is common

No, definitely not - it's that, as plusminusplus pointed out, most of us mistakenly put the stress on the first syllable. That is, we use the same stress pattern as the word 'luncheon', when it ought to be the same stress pattern as the phrase 'lunch on'.

>The Huntington is likely to draw a flood of requests to access the Pynchon archive, which it says will be open to qualified researchers after processing, which it estimates will take a year. “The kind of research this archive is going to support is advanced scholarship, literary scholarship,” Brooke said. And the archive, she added, “is not for the casual observer.” The published novels themselves take a lot of time to grapple with,” she said. “The drafts are even more complicated.” As for whether biographers and journalists would be granted access, Brooke said, “We evaluate all requests on a case-by-case basis.”

How delightful. I certainly wouldn't want to read something too complicated.

These people really are a wannabe priestly class

I read his book Mason & Dixon and knew just enough of the history to recognize that there were tons of references going over my head. Maybe the smartest person I know loves his books and gets a lot more out of them then I do. Pynchon has got a remarkable mind.

I love this.

But then, I went to the Dublin Writer's Museum (https://www.dublin.info/writers-museum/) so there you go. Not the place for the average jumpy 7-year-old.

"Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif."

was my first visit to any botanical garden some 30 years ago. I still remember and still highly recommend it. It's gorgeous.

Gravitys rainbow was one of the books with the most fucking I read. And the book with the most diverce fucking

How do you think he ensures his privacy? NO book tours, no speaking engagements. No signings.

I think you just described it. Haha. There have been a couple of pictures pop up of him in NYC by dedicated paparazzi hounders, and if I recall correctly, they were roughly in the same neighborhood years apart and he was rather upset about them.

How does HN think about Pynchon as an anarchist author / as anarchist literature?

I was friends with his son back in college. Interesting times

Well don't leave us hanging. What inherent vices did y'all indulge in?

All I’ll say is that he and the Pynchon family do actually exist. And he had a mixtape or two he put together that I think I still have a copy of on cd somewhere

Does it contain his stamp collection?

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