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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
http://web.archive.org/web/20221216221543/https://www.nytime...