version's Thomas Pynchon masterclass

version

Well-known member
Gravity's Rainbow works with this numerology and Kabbalah stuff largely because of how much material there is to make connections between. Its almost like these metaphysical techniques need a largely enough subject matter for their whole range of connections to play out. If the subject matter isn't extensive enough, you're just left with an arbitrary looking half-constellation.

Yeah, I think so. It's clearly designed to encourage that sort of pattern-finding; Dali's paranoiac-critical method comes to mind too.

The technique consists of the artist invoking a paranoid state (fear that the self is being manipulated, targeted or controlled by others). The result is a deconstruction of the psychological concept of identity, such that subjectivity becomes the primary aspect of the artwork.

The book frequently makes you aware that you're reading a book, but also makes you feel like it and its author are reading you as much as you're reading them, plus all the actual historical conspiracy stuff that still has its tentacles reaching into the world.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The book frequently makes you aware that you're reading a book, but also makes you feel like it and its author are reading you as much as you're reading them, plus all the actual historical conspiracy stuff that still has its tentacles reaching into the world.
This aspect is especially effective since you're never quite sure where the real historical conspiracies (Allied takeover of IG Farben after the war, for example) end, and where his invented ones begin.
 

version

Well-known member
He's just sold his archive to the Huntington Library. Wonder if he's on the way out.


The archive includes 48 boxes — 70 linear feet, in archivist-speak — of material dating from the late 1950s to the 2020s. There are typescripts and drafts of all his published books, from “V.” (1963) to “Bleeding Edge” (2013). And there are copious research notes on the many, many subjects (World War II rocketry, postal history, 18th-century surveying) touched on in his encyclopedic novels.

Interesting they say there's stuff from the 2020s as Bleeding Edge came out in 2013, so there's potentially up to nine years of material from after his last novel.
 

version

Well-known member
Bleeding Edge seems a good place for it to end tbh. His powers had waned and he's covered the entire 20th century with a little either side.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So who else didn't know that some joker - and to this day, nobody has even been named as a suspect, never mind convicted - spiked a seafood chowder that was eaten by almost the entire cast of Titanic with PCP? I've put it here just because it sounds like something that would happen in a Pynchon novel.


"...we saw James Cameron run by the door and this extra running behind him. He said, ‘There’s something in me! Get it out!’"

“People are moaning and crying, wailing, collapsed on tables and gurneys,” Cameron told Vanity Fair in 2009. “The DP, Caleb Deschanel, is leading a number of crew down the hall in a highly vocal conga line. You can’t make this stuff up.”
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
50 this month since GR was published. Found this slightly breathless Wired piece about it, saying we're now living in a world Pynchon predicted - hard not to agree with, really.

 

version

Well-known member
This new film Paul Thomas Anderson's shooting with DiCaprio's rumoured to be a Vineland adaptation.
 

version

Well-known member
used-set-say-baktin-cross-875822337.jpg
 

version

Well-known member
Even Pynchon thinks that one's shit, tbf. He called it a potboiler and "a short story with gland trouble,".
 
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