Hacker News Reader

Comment by Baxxter | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

A lot more background:

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

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

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.

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

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 enjoyed all the Jewish tidbits sprinkled through the the book.

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 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.

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 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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

BS = bullshit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com