|
|
View previous topic :: View next topic
|
| Author |
Message |
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
 Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 2:23 am |
  |
|
| Vikram Ray wrote: |
| I read the first 150 or so pages of Gravity's Rainbow (I think up until around where Slothrop starts eating the shit out of the asshole of some dominatrix), then had to take it back to the library, and I confess that a whole lot of it went over my head. But what DFW and Joyce have, I think, that Pynchon does not (quite) have is an incredible empathy for people, humans in general--a kind of sentimentality towards everyday human shit (no pun intended) that makes it somehow comforting to read, while at the same time also being difficult and erudite and postmodern and a mental workout yet eminently readable and funny and unbearably sad all at once. Pynchon just seems so cold and clinical in comparison. |
I'd actually tell you to read GR. He seems cold and clinical towards Slothrop to start, but as the novel goes on, he starts feeling for Slothrop. One of the main sorta ideas in GR is that you have a main character who slowly comes to realize how little control over his own life he has ever had, and while Pynchon laughs at this, he also does a really good job of expressing the terror of those moments, the terror of paranoia not just being paranoia, but maybe being something more than that. Of course, then Pynchon likes to expand that out, and nobody has any control over the War at all, and there are some characters in the novel that give such a human aspect to that lack of control (Enzian) that it's hard not to find sympathy.
The Roger Mexico/Jessica Swanlake (really, nobody does names quite like TRP) plot has a lot of this, as well as my favorite closing for a chapter ever ("They are in love. Fuck the war.").
Actually the shit eating scene you mention (probably the most disgusting thing in the book) isn't Slothrop, but Colonel Pudding, and it too is loaded with the kind of sympathetic symbolism that permeates Pynchon. Earlier on the book, when Pudding is introduced as head of the White Visitation, the weird lab where all sorts of strange research goes on in England, it is revealed that what he is is an old WWI colonel who was commended becasue only 60 percent (I think that is the number, might be higher) of his troops died in the war. There is a brief mention of how he saw them dying in the trenches, eating and breathing mud and filth, pure degredation. The chambers Pudding goes through that culminate in the eating of shit our of the asshole of the dom (shit, I can't think of her name) is a tool set up by Pointsman to control Pudding (and thus the agency). Pudding feels he deserves to be degraded, deserves to be punished for all those men dying. Pointsman only knows about this because Pirate Prentice (as revealed right away in the book) can see people's dreams. Prentice saw Pudding's nightmares (as I recall, it has been a bit) and Pointsman uses this.
Basically, Pynchon is (in his weird way) exploring the shame of WWI, and exploring how even such shame is exploited by the people behind WWII. Pynchon has the sentimentality for the people in his books, just in weird ways. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
 |
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:07 pm |
|
|
| Because McCarthy wusses out hard on the ending? |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:24 pm |
|
|
| The Modernist period has some good stuff, dogg. Enjoy it. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Mon May 03, 2010 4:56 pm |
|
|
I only like Austen if I think she hates her characters. I kinda think she does.
Overall though, I am not so much a fan of 19th Century British novels though. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Mon May 03, 2010 5:31 pm |
|
|
| it's ok, dog. I'm not talking them down or nothing, just acknowledging they aren't my thing, from my limited experience. Reading Emma while looking for clues as to how much Austen hated Emma herself was fun though. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Mon May 03, 2010 7:08 pm |
|
|
| Adilegian wrote: |
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| it's ok, dog. I'm not talking them down or nothing, just acknowledging they aren't my thing, from my limited experience. Reading Emma while looking for clues as to how much Austen hated Emma herself was fun though. |
Eliot works for me better than Austen, as indicated in my response to Cuba, because she seems to struggle more with moral problems that expand beyond the conflicts of a particular class in a particular society. Austen remains relevant, but less so than Eliot I think. |
I've only read one Eliot book, and it was awhile back, so I have nothing much to say about it other than not particularly enjoying it, which is obviously a personal opinion more than any statement on worth. Austen amused me a lot in Emma, though more because I found the loathing of all of her characters pretty amusing. Like you said, though, she aims her work VERY SPECIFICALLY, so her ideas tend to be useless outside of that society. However, I sometimes enjoy books that get very specific like that (part of the reason I enjoy Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, though obviously not all of it by a long shot).
Yeah, I can't really read the guy at all. My brain shuts down when I have to read one of his 15,000-clauses-saying-nothing sentences.
EDIT:
| FUCK YEAH EXTREME CRITICISM wrote: |
| What separates Henry James apart from the rest of 19th century writers is that Henry James wrote crap, and crap transcends its temporal circumstances. It is terrible etiquette to belabor a reader with a sentence three-fourths a page long, especially when the majority of the clauses denoted by the semicolons are merely experiments in abstract expression. |
YES! |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Mon May 10, 2010 11:51 am |
|
|
| Adilegian wrote: |
| Tempest 1610 wrote: |
| Actual Literature and commentary on literature |
idk man eliot does a pretty good job of blurring those distinctions |
Yeah he does.
Eliot was pretty wonderful for his literary criticism articles, which were all ostensibly about something else (like Ulysses, for example), but which all in the end, end up being at least partially just about Eliot. This is pretty spectacular, really.
If you are going to buy the Wasteland, either yeah, just buy an Eliot poetry collection, because other poems of his are certainly worth a read, or pick up the version of the Wasteland that is a facsimile of all the manuscripts and such, which includes Pound's editorial notations, a bunch of tossed away stuff that never made it into the final version (seriously, the whole thing started with a passage about drunkenly carousing around London and includes one of the funniest single lines of Eliot ever, "And then we lost Tom"), and one incredibly damning note from Vivienne, which does a good job of illuminating where his marriage was at the time. Really, this edition is worth reading in its entirety.
Also, Cuba, I will consider that literary advisement once I get in the mood to read some more, and have finished what I am currently working on. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2010 3:25 pm |
|
|
| Just keep in mind how much the dude needs a good editor. Which is to say BADLY. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2010 12:35 pm |
|
|
I really need to sit down and read AtD. I should pick up a paperback copy of it, because lugging the hardback around is really a pain in the ass. But, at the same time, I want to reread GR, which is the only longer Pynchon I have finished. We should have a GR book club thing here or something.
| elvis.shrugged wrote: |
| Started reading Gravity's Rainbow yesterday. 25 pages in. Already one of the most fucked-up books I've ever read. Digging it. |
Shiren is right. Shit only gets more wonderfully fucked up from there. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 3:20 pm |
|
|
| I need to read Suttree. But after Blood Meridian, I just don't know that I can read more Cormac. Least not for another few years. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
|
| Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:19 pm |
|
|
| You will be happy with the book fo Solaris a lot more than the movies, I think, internisus. |
|
| Unfilter / Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2002 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
