Pynchon in Public Day (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Pynchon in Public Day (2017)

atlasobscura.com

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>Every known picture of Thomas Pynchon (2019; 2014; 2012; 2009)

https://www.bookofjoe.com/2019/11/every-known-picture-of-tho...

There are more: https://davidvmatthews.com/2019/02/07/never-ever-vote/

Thank you!!!

Pynchon comes up on here a lot. Like Infinite Jest used to at some point.

So I read Crying of Lot 49. It was good – not mind blowing, but totally something that could be read for fun.

Some fun word choice, some memorable scenes and a bit of a silly vibe.

I know people get teased for admitting this, but DFW is the best stuff I've ever read. If anyone has suggestions along the same line I'd love to hear it.

Without getting into the personal history of DFW, I think it's OK to love the art but not the artist. I certainly like lots of music like that. Clearly, from the noise arising before and after the movie-depiction of "Although of course you end up becoming yourself", the life of the artist will be dissected in modern society no matter the consensus. I've read right on into Byung Chul Han a decade later which I find resplendent for exactly the opposite reasons: minimalist vs. maximalist expression. To me, DFW was fun reading since he used a sideways default mode in writing to demonstrate that the future held this sideways aspect at its core. He'd tease us with "are you going with me" as if that sideways writing was the tunnels at Shangri-La and DFW were Bill Moyers. Except the hard part is cookie crumbing your way back from that leaf node mentally. In other words, breadth-first-search is fine in brain-space but comes with high cognitive cost of losing yourself (in cognitive psychology function) or others (in social psychology function) or maybe that was the point of the art? I find the same effect in reading Byung Chul Han because his aphoristic style leaves my brain puzzling to remember the Greeks and assimilate that knowledge with the mental wormhole he's shoved me down - which is, perhaps ironically, exactly the same reason I love conversing with AI: I can't see it coming... giving the reading an epiphanous spiritual effect.

Thank you. Oddly, I don't think the thing I get from his writing is the thing I'm _supposed_ to get. That is, the kind of tonal urgency he conveys, the sense that it is really important to get at the thing he is trying to drive at (sideways, as you put it), comes across more as an entertaining exhilaration for me, rather than something seriously important. I suspect DFW would disdain this take away from his writings and consider his books a failure for me.

Same here. The Master and Margarita kind of has a similar feel to infinite jest IMO. I love Borges for the mathematical-esque concepts and explorations, but it feels nothing like DFW.

It all depends on what you like about Infinite Jest. The reason it is often mentioned in relation to Pynchon’s work is that they are books which pull in _everything_, or at least they do to a first approximation. If that’s what you like then I think books like The Pope’s Rhinoceros by Lawrence Norfolk might be right up your street,l.

You might like William Gaddis. The Recognitions and JR are dense and very complex novels with brilliant formal invention and prescient looks at finance, art, and skepticism bleeding into a postmodern mindset. The sheer amount of cultural references on even a single page in The Recognitions is astounding. He was a direct influence on DFW, Pynchon, and DeLillo.

I think Gary Shteyngart (a Soviet emigre to America who has the perspective on both countries and can find eerie echoes to the dying days of the Soviet Union in his experiences in the modern US) has a similar style to DFW in many ways. I particularly recommend his Super Sad True Love Story set in the near future, as Infinite Jest was.

I think one of the reasons he is popular here is because he references a lot of mathematical and engineering concepts and terms that if you understand (as I assume a good deal of the population here does) you’ll get even more out of his books.

He said that he considers Lot 49 a "'story' marketed as a 'novel' [...] in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." It doesn't compare to his later works IMO (Mason & Dixon still being my fav.)

Mason & Dixon might be his most underrated.

Against the Day was too gratuitous and filthy. I liked V and GR best, the latter also being kind of disgusting but in more limited fashion.

Greetings, fellow Mason & Dixon devotee. It's just so damned clever and hilarious.

I think the entry Pynchon for people on here is Bleeding Edge. Set during the dot com boom with plenty of references to late 90s tech.

I loved the passage where two guys in a club argue - and nearly fight - over HTML tables vs CSS for page layout.

And in other passages he brings up issues in Java programming when Java was a newish technology. It is pretty amusing to find references to this sort of thing in a book written by somebody who could be the father or even grandfather of dot-com employees, but then Pynchon always liked to include technical tidbits in his books as he initially studied engineering.

A bit anachronistic for the novel’s setting of 2001 though. Tables still unequivocally reigned supreme then, since many commonly used browsers didn’t even fully support CSS for layout (e.g. Netscape 4).

I’m a huge Pynchon fan, but this is arguably one of his biggest weaknesses: his books are alluring because of their incredible depth of seemingly meticulously researched trivia, but it’s often just subtly wrong enough that it makes the depth seem superficial.

My memory of 2001 was that CSS1 was a real contender, and CSS2 was beginning to take shape. CSS2-style class and type selectors were already strongly supported; see https://web.archive.org/web/20030803081721/http://devedge.ne...

CSS was still a short time away from any one browser fully supporting it, but already the table purists were trying to chase developers away to <div>.

CSS1 was insufficient to do layout (just element-level formatting), and wasn't even fully supported by any browser until mid-2000. Netscape still had ~15% marketshare in early 2001, when Bleeding Edge takes place, and neither it nor Internet Explorer (version 5 at the time) robustly supported CSS2 layout features.

CSS2 was capable of supplanting tables for many layout tasks, but its implementation (especially with respect to layout) was so haphazardly inconsistent across different browsers that most devs did not utilize its new features until browsers consistently supported them, which wasn't until Internet Explorer 6 achieved >95% marketshare in 2002 and devs "standardized" on its CSS2 implementation. The earliest I remember hearing debates on tables vs. CSS was circa 2003/2004.

In 2001, a more plausible argument would be over whether it's a good idea to implement a site completely in Macromedia Flash, and whether that was the future of web development. There were some pretty astounding Flash websites back then, e.g.

https://www.malandarras.com/2advanced

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/2advanced-studio...

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkNkQoQY_8

Indeed, 2advanced was notorious for throwing huge warehouse raves, during which the CEO would DJ. Sounds like something ripped straight from the pages of Bleeding Edge.

I think "fully supported" is a red herring; by 2001 most browsers had sufficient CSS1 support to make it workable. The sticking point then was IE5 not supporting pseudoclasses and attributes, but CSS was otherwise very much in competition.

By 2001 Flash had Actionscript, and the Actionscript wizards were in their own world, not arguing about HTML elements. All they wanted was enough HTML to serve the Flash files.

Disagree completely. You don't really get the Pynchon experience. If it has to be a single book, make it Gravity's Rainbow.

I think that would be a bad choice for a first Pynchon, much like reading Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake would be for James Joyce. People who start with these challenging books generally give them up 50 pages in -- starting with more accessible books like Lot 49 for Pynchon and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Joyce makes their denser books more accessible.

If they're readers, they've read more accessible books. I don't think the lesser known works for those authors in any way prepare you for the more challenging ones. You either go for it as an experienced reader, or you don't. You won't really understand the appeal of Pynchon or Joyce without diving into them.

I would concede if there were a particularly outstanding accessible book, it would be a good starting point - I don't think there is.

Bleeding edge was like the third or fourth Pynchon book I read and it isn't the most Pynchony of his books but its my favorite. The setting, the protagonist, the general vibe of late 90s tech is so good. Though some of the hackerspeak has aged a little cringy. Its a very fun read that I'll go back to when I need a pick me up.

Reading Gravity's Rainbow right now. A lot of people say its "postmodern" and more about vibes than anything else, but I'm definitely enjoying it from an intellectual perspective as well.

I felt after reading Gravity's Rainbow that it was not postmodern at all, and not particularly intellectual. I wouldn't say it was about "vibes" either. It was a ride.

FYI we are extremely lucky to have good audiobook versions of all three of Pynchon's big novels:

Gravity's Rainbow (George Guidal) Against The Day (Dick Hill) Mason & Dixon (Steven Crossley).

I highly recommend Pynchon, you have to relearn how read when reading one of his more dense works. It is a demanding experience in letting go of your expectations, need to understand and general framework for reading normal books you have probably relied on most of your adult life. The work of unlearning and relearning how to read is a reward in itself but additionally Pynchon is just so much smarter, more well rounded, and politically conscious than similar Big Dense Novel writers.

Take for example how Pynchon focuses so much on the Herero people and the genocide Germany inflicted on them (in 1904-1908) in a novel about WW2 (Gravity's Rainbow). It feels anachronistic and unrelated until you step back and see Pynchon's argument about war, colonialism and whiteness venting off the brutal inhumanity of Europe until one day it inevitably came home. This has become a much more popular way of framing WW1 and WW2 as time has gone by (because it is the right one) but Gravity's Rainbow was written in the 70s long before people were really talking about things this way.

Pynchon in my opinion diagnoses the sickness and violence at the heart of western society and tracks how it evolved into a globalist structure of business in the 20th century better than almost any other writer.

tbh, Pynchon is overrated, pretentious and tedious. If he were an engineer, he’d be the kind that implements event driven microservices architecture just to recommend new items for users.

Sure, he so smart - but if he so smart, why he so stupid?

I've only started reading Pynchon lately. I'd seen too many comparisons to James Joyce, and I struggled and gave up on Ulysses at least 4 times.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of V at a second-hand bookshop recently and, so far, I'm enjoying it. It's definitely densely packed and not a quick read, but I think he's just carrying on the post-modernist tradition of Proust and Joyce.

You can fault Pynchon for many many things (though I love him) but "carrying on a post-modernist tradition" is probably the last thing you could possibly fault him for.

Pynchon is one of the most esoteric artists I have ever encountered in any medium. He did take a lot of inspiration from how Henry James writes in a sentence/paragraph level (see Pugnax the talking dog who reads Henry James all day in ATD) but his work ends up being something entirely different.

But he was an engineer.

He was a technical writer at Boeing, IIRC

A common response.

> According to the standard kvetch about his work, his prose is overly dense [1]

Neil Stephenson gets the same criticism a lot, but I still enjoy a lot of his work.

> [Pynchon] can write some truly poignant scenes of longing, love, and loss

Don't get too caught up in the details, and don't hope for endings.

https://pleasekillme.com/thomas-pynchon/

I don't understand pretentious as a critique, it's only ever a projection. Either something works or it doesn't, works don't "pretend" anything.

Sure they do; they pretend to be more sophisticated than they actual are.

Pynchon doesn't pretend to be anything. His material mostly consists of low culture, obscenity, and engineering nerd stuff he finds interesting. He lived through the beat and hippie countercultures and draws from them for his characters and settings.

I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can.

People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.

It's either sophisticated (in the eye of the beholder) or it isn't. Art doesn't "pretend". You can only take it at face value.

All I can think of is a quote from the McSweeney's article elsewhere on the front page right now.

"we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency."

For me at least, postmodern literature isn't just about conveying a message or an idea. It's about conveying a vibe, a state of mind. And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at.

"And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at."

Absolutely, postmodern literature is an extension of modernism (i.e. To The Lighthouse or Ulysses) in that it is focused on describing the moment to moment experience of consciousness, except postmodern literature like Pynchon's work dials everything up until the replicated experience of consciousness is the experience of a psychedelic state.

This results in confounding literature where it is difficult to deduce what is real, what the point is, and to orient oneself. This is unavoidably a necessary part of inducing such an intense mental state in the reader.

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