A good book is not constantly incomprehensible to 99% of readers. This is a bad book.
as america is niggerized, all books will become "bad books" by your definition. books that working class people used to read for fun in the 19th century are already incomprehensible to most at the current niggerization level.
Why isn't an incomprehensible book a good book?
>>24765640sentences are tools to convey meaning. when there is no meaning it has no purpose.
>>24765625It’s not at all (majority) incomprehensible, it’s just long and dense, nigger.Novels are a rarefied, higher-order pleasure, sometimes to have a long dense book with a lot you can chew on, with both beauty and complexity of style and thought in jt, is just what we want. There’s room in literature for all kinds of things, whether it’s a book like this or a more minimalist masterpiece like The Old Man and the Sea.
>>24765651Let's say Gravity's Rainbow does have no meaning or purpose. What about having no purpose makes it bad?
>>24765625I prefer dense books. You go through a simple tome once and that's it, you don't need to think about its meaning as much and you have no urge to reread. A dense book with a lot of subtext will challenge you, perplex you, make you think about its meaning and inspire internal soul-searching. The multiple rereads that follow will unravel new perspectives, new nuggets of wisdom to chew on. They're much more demanding but also much more rewarding.Or, to put it in terms more familiar to an average anon (Pynchon himself being fond of vidya gaems) - why the fuck should I play Chrono Nigger when I could reexperience cock & ball torture in Wizardry and Underrail for the Nth time? I like to have fun in my vidya, not fall asleep while mashing the same skill over and over again.
>>24765651GR is absolutely lush with meaning. Skill issue.
*walking around a bombed-out city, falling into exposed secret tunnels, clambering over toppled baroque statues, watching strangely uniformed figures scamper across your path on unknown conspiratorial missions* wtf, this sucks, so incomprehensible, what's even the point
>>24765718By Jove, what is this incomprehensible gibberish? I know 4/4=1 but what does ba (the result of baba-na) mean? I think this text is driving me- AAAAAAAAAAAAA SAVE ME NIGGERMANNNNNNN
>>24765640Because then no emotion can be conveyed
>>24765743Confusion is an emotion.
>>24765727>post modern slop>lyrics for no reason every 3 pagesthis is fucking reddit
>>24765747It's fun
>>24765747Regular intermission to song or poetry is a romantic remnant a la Wilhelm Meister and the sign of a novel growing beyond its base form. However that Pynchon understands this and mocks it with showtunes is why his book is reddit.
>>24765625UUUU
>>24765751>bullshit made up song>terre mauvais - foreign language phrase for no reason, gotta look that up mid sentence>perenthesis second guessing what was just said because le complex sentences>pard, gotta look that one up because you hear that word all the fucking timechrist post modernism is tiresome, throw it all in a fire
>>24765759Wrong, it descends from Menippean satire (GR could in fact be considered one). Petronius does this in his Satyricon.
>>24765625>google gravity's rainbow pdf >open >drag the slide bar to a random page >read it >it is coherent Maybe you just can't read good
>>24765767>follow reading guide>guide doesn't even know what's going on>this absolute bombardment of nonsenseI'd rather eat glass
What made the boomers get mentally stuck in the 1960s Woodstock moment like insects on fly paper? Were the drugs and the pussy simply that incredible? How could an entire generation just become completely unable to move on?
>>24765772This is harder to read than GR. I closed it after the first sentence
>>24765745Not one worthy of artistic merit
>>24765793Why not?
>>24765795Too vague and tedious in this case and induced by objectively bad art to equal effect
>>24765795no one wants to invest time and attention to a novel where the outcome is confusion pseudanon
>>24765810I enjoy Hollow Knight and Dark Souls 1 because I enjoy getting lost in hostile environments. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but that's okay.
>>24765819Those are toys
>>24765810Damn you're stupid
>>24765810objectively false.
>>24765849So is literary fiction. Read non-fiction or religious texts if you want something of substance.
>>247657274/4 is a time signature. Standard time signature in Western popular music for a long time. Hence also known as “common time”. It means four quarter notes per measure (unit of division of the song’s melody, basically), the fraction isn’t quite relevant here.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_signatureIn triplets = also a musical term for how the notes are played, you could guess what it means, basically just a description of the rhythm with which he’s stroking the banana. The song is just a bit of wartime comedy. Hope this helps.
>>24765625It's not bad. It's just a bit cringe now. It has some bits that are still pretty funny, like Slothrop eating disgusting british candies, but most of the idiosyncratic Pynchon humor has aged terribly. The book is sprinkled with SNL-tier gags.
>>24765858Fiction has made me more aware of the human condition than any non-fiction work ever could.
>>24765625muy filtrado
>>24765625It's a mostly comprehensible book, there's just a lot going on that doesn't cohere into an easily summarized narrative or thesis. Still, if you can't get some idea of what he's trying to communicate, read better.
>>24765764>ree I have low general knowledge and reading literature forces me to learn new things reeWhat a sophmoric complaint
>>24765625Is your name Phil Turd?
>>24765698This. I’ve read this book 4 times already
>>24766219And what have you taken away from it
>>24765672art must conform to my narrow minded view or its LE BAD!
art must conform to my narrow minded view or its LE BAD
>>24765625Most modern readers have no experience of the Cold War. As such, they can never understand Gravity's Rainbow.
>>24766345You don't need to have lived through the cold war to understand GR, what an odd thing to say
>>24766222It’s hard to distill all of it into a single post due to the density of the work but essentially I think Pynchon’s core point in GR is to give a view of what true escape from the systems of control imposed on us from above looks like. Pynchon understands that the greatest tool which They (or Them as he uses it in the book) have against us is their ability to craft illusionary narratives about the world. Think Baudrillard with the map vs the territory and their eventual confusion into one self-replicating mass. It’s the inability of the narrative to let pure difference express itself without being consumed by the overarching theme that in a way narrows the range of possibility of thought. I love Faulkner for instance but when you read Faulkner there’s a really clear point he’s trying to get across to you and in a way this is violence against the reader who is being manipulated into a certain viewpoint or pathos on the world. You can see this really clearly with BAPoids for instance. They get an orientation on life from reading BAP which influences their beliefs and sets a precedent for their thought. Pynchon tries extremely hard to avoid this and that’s why there’s so many different views of GR. There’s plenty of events in the story that are later revealed to have never actually happened, like when Slothrop ate those candies at the grandmother’s house and when the bomb fell it was revealed that the woman never existed, and places that don’t exist and the whole cruise ship segment which suggests that the passengers are actually ghosts. But, he doesn’t see this as just fucking with the reader. He’s trying to express himself in a way which is more correspondent with real life with all of its fuck ups and unanswered questions. In the end the whole S gerat thing is a macguffin. That’s why Slothrop fades out of the story into obscurity. The only way to escape the power of narrative and truly experience life as it is in itself you have to abandon your picture of yourself as dictated by it. Slothrop walks off into the woods with his harmonica and out of his own story right before the ending because it was never really about him at all. All of the mentions of his supposed powers comes from the mouths of the men researching him, his memories of the past are interspersed with manic insanity like that’s a good sign of their reliability, he’s constantly alternating between different costumes and disguises to hide his identity. I love the last little wink to Slothrop in the chapter on Byron the bulb where during the haircut the sergent’s hear someone playing the harmonica walking by in the woods. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that very same chapter is a retelling of a conspiracy that actually did happen. He’s saying that we have to be aware of what’s really going on and understand it in a narrative fashion but we need to be weary that we don’t kill our souls in the process.
>>24765891>The book is sprinkled with SNL-tier gags.bro, you didn't have to do the Pynecone dirty like that, but this is so true
>>24765625I liked it and that’s all that matters.
Just got a copy of Mason & Dixon from the library, it's the oldest book I've seen there in a while. It was added to the collection in 1997, the pages are pretty beat up, the plastic covering they put on it looks like a shopping bag left out in the rain for 6 months.
I honestly prefer Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge and Against the Day to Mason&Dixon and GR. I think his later stuff just "works" better
Gravity's Rainbow is not a good book. It's enjoyable, but it's not a good book.To be great you must risk being terrible. The same arm which extends to catch the ball can also drop it. Also, it's just obscure, not incomprehensible.
>>24766603I appreciate these little "could be real" asides that tie the absurd to reality and vice versa in the novel. Reading GR does feel like experiencing the mind fuck world as it exists in a hyper real sense. In all its nonsense, decorum, slapstick, truth and falsehood, reading what you just wrote made it take a different shape in my head. We're supposed to be nauseous and confused because its some funhouse mirror of post-ww2 paranoia and power struggle
>>24765727is he having a wank or
>>24767498
>>24766603great post
