As an aspiring writer... how the hell am I supposed to top this? How do I write a novel after this bombshell? Nothing I'll ever produce will even come close to this linguistically or conceptually.Is this how Pynch/Beckett felt reading Ulysses?
I wish more writers were this circumspect t.b.h.For most, their best contribution to literature would be not to write at all.
>>25571785Iowa demands more mfaslop
once you worship something endlessly it starts to lose its luster and you can find some holes to poke in it. DFW figured that he could add a lot of emotional intelligence and general dostoyevskyisms on top of GR and we got IJ out of it for example. if you are legitimately interested in being a writer, and not just jerking off the book for a litcrit career, let yourself glaze GR for a while (dont get it twisted, i agree that it is a staggeringly fantastic novel, but constantly comparing yourself to it and asking "why do i even bother" wont make a novel come out of you) and keep rereading it until you find some kind of subjective thing youd like to add into its formula. do math problems, program a little, get into the stem side of things like Pynchon. read books on the occult. visit some psychics, some mediums, get some life experiences most people dont get. listen to all kinds of music from black metal to weird 20th century modernism and really try to describe what youre hearing to yourself. what i would like to see out of an aspiring writer who likes Pynchon would be for them to be "Pynchon and then some," if that makes sense. i think you could do it if you really try. but you have to REALLY try. and i would like you to, and i would like others to try as well
>>25571680Read American Pastoral to see what finishing literature actually looks like.
>>25571680You study study it and figure out how he did it. With Pynchon we get Slow Learner and V. to help in study, they provide a great insight into how he developed as an author and the development of his style. Few authors provide us with such a clear view of their development. You will also want to study AtD. >>25571865IJ draws little from GR and the way he dealt with his heroes in IJ was to confront them and their failings, the most blatant example being too much fun, which is pretty much calling Gaddis an asshole for manipulating the reader. Have you even read these books?
>>25571680Write from the heart :)
>>25571948>Few authors provide us with such a clear view of their development.This reminds me I need to study Typee, White-Jacket and Mardi too... such an incredible achievement.V. feels much less daunting. You can see the scaffolding (even Homer sometimes nods), but that's what makes it feel human.
>>25571680>how the hell am I supposed to top this?Well, you write one hell of a good post. Now just make it longer.
>>25571974Technique wise, GR is a just a slight refinement of V. In both he applies stream of consciousness to situations we normally do not see stream of consciousness used for and ties the technique directly into interpretation, which is the postmodern aspect of the novels. V. is fairly heavy handed in this, we get a very clear demarcation and he mostly uses it as a way to hide his rather heavy handed exposition. In GR he blurs the line between narrative and stream of consciousness; it is still used to hide his exposition but we can not understand the exposition until we have figured out what is real, which can never really do and he applies our not being able to know towards interpretation to keep theme from being so simply his view of the world as it was in V.
>>25571680Arguably Joyce inspired Beckett to create art in the complete opposite direction, ie. Minimal and highly abstract. Great books don’t have to influence your approach directly, if anything it can show you exactly what to avoid in order to find your own innovations.
>>25572042I don't think that is arguable, Beckett himself explained that he went to minimalism out of necessity as a way to prevent him from copying Joyce. Abstraction will always arise out of minimalism, it is just too limited without it.
>>25571680The only books worth reading are Gravity's Rainbow and Underworld by Don DeLillo. Everything else i've ever read was not worth it.
>>25571865Thanks for the advice. I'm going to make Gravity's Rainbow my favorite book for a while and glaze the shit out of it. I'll start calling it "my Bible" and nuke the pages with personal notes that glaze it from the inside out. Only then will I become the next DFW.
>>25571992
>>25572009>Technique wise, GR is a just a slight refinement of V.Technique wise, GR is an order of magnitude better than V.Pynch perfected his prose style in GR, and has never topped it since.
>>25572295It is an order of magnitude better, but that is mostly because it is free of the cruft, inconsistencies, holes, and everything is neatly tied together. Most of this is just the result of having a good editor to point out all this stuff. There is little if anything in GR which is not in V., GR is just cohesive and consistent. Small changes can have big effects.
>>25572295Personally, I think his essay on Luddites is his best writing, prose wise.
>>25571948>Have you even read these books?yes
>>25571785this can be said about all artforms at this point. many people have no business creating anything, but they have to create something to know this. thus, we get endless slop. most of the bodies would be better put to use picking fruit from fields.
>>25571680Lol
>>25571680Return to realism.
>>25571865Grok write me a 1500 page novel in the style of Pynchon but with emotional intelligence and dostoyevskyism
>>25571680You are a beta bitch writer. A sexual tyrannosaurus writer, like me, only cares about maxxing out his own writerly ability.
>>25571948yes i have read them. and i have also read Every Story Is A Ghost Story where DFW explicitly had obsessions over GR and Brothers Karamazov, both of which consciously or not are all over IJ. maybe you are missing the general style through getting stuck analyzing the characters. im talking about the former, from the perspective of actually hashing out the design decisions of making a novel, as in viewing certain kinds of sentences and devices and intelligences as tools to produce an effect in the audience
>>25573008Ah so you've read all the slop books. Now maybe try reading something that actually has information inside of it and not just stories some retard made up while he was drunk. Plenty of non-fiction books that could keep an ADHD zoomer like you stimulated. You know that guy who mailed those bombs back in the day? You know he had his work published in the new work times? Check it out, foo.
>>25573018you might not believe this but i also read those books. i have Kubrick An Odyssey by Kolker and Abrams im trying to get through rn. i also read genre novels and do textbook problems and im currently trying to learn french out of French Made Simple by Pamela Rose Haze. i am a fan of reading in general. please do not assume im only reading what everyone else is reading for the same's sake. i am simply organically interested in these books that make my brain feel like its going crazy. the meme trilogy is a unique experience and i cherish it
>>25571680BUY AN ADD THOMAS FFS
>>25573162Gee willikers, thanks for the bump, chump!
>>25573008>just trust me bro>appeal to an authority which does not even support the assertion>adhomGot the hat trick. Give us some examples and explain with more depth than "its obvious".IJ owes a great deal to GR but GR only provided the seed and is built off of what Pynchon did not develop in GR and obscures beneath conspiracy and technique; in Pynchonian terms IJ would be the Pavlovian conditioning inherent in society and family, but that would be highly reductive in Wallacian sense and he does not explore any of that, just establishes it as much as is required, it is besides the point. This is quite different than what you outline in you naive advice to OP and is not adding anything on top of GR, it is taking a hard right and driving until you are out of sight to start fresh. He does directly confront Pynchon/GR in IJ, can you explain it? It is maybe 3 pages worth of stuff scattered throughout the book's 1100 pages and provides for a Pynchonian interpretation of IJ highlighting the flaws in Pynchon's technique when compared to the book proper. It is quite impressive how he manages it with so little.Maybe after this we can go into the Dostoevsky side of things.
>>25571785This can be said for a lot, but the ones conscientious enough to realize this are the ones who should be making art. Something will fill the void whether you act or not.
>>25573984i have legitimately no idea what youre talking about. you brought out a bunch of terms and stuff and youre talking about confrontations. youre probably using them correctly but i have never cared about understanding books on that level and in my best estimate most readers dont either. the meme trilogy makes me laugh and smile when i read it because of how absurd it is and thats why i like it. maybe what is obvious to me isnt obvious to most but i just cant come up with the words for it
>>25573984also my advice to OP isnt "naive," starting to follow your heart is one of the best most freeing changes you can make in your life
Pynchon's oeuvre is a miasmic chaos of occasional sublimity punctuated by gluts of Looney Toons bullshit; not worth the slog. A failing transmitter relaying brief signals amidst cacophony. Music at best; irritating, embarassing at worst.I'd recommend Bely and Döblin for something altogether more succinct, should Modernist prose appeal to you (and they evidently do). They drew upon more profound inspirations.
>>25575405>gluts of Looney Toons bullshitif you can't enjoy Loony Tunes(*sp) bullshit then we can't be friends
>>25575409What can be said, I consider him midSomething about the Kenosha kid
>>25571865this is terrible advice
>>25571940American Pastoral is poorly executed maudlin pulp. You're not realizing that is extraordinarily telling.
>>25572240Why Underworld? I've read it btw
>>25572360What inconsistencies and holes are in V.?
>>25572385looking at each page =\= reading
>>25573008I read that too and those claims... aren't true. What are you talking about? DFW is explicit about what went into IJ. Not that you really need him to tell you. Damn anon.
>>25574932chickenshit
>>25575405IFL LOONEY TUNES BULLSHIT KYS SSRI FRIED NICOTINE DORK
>>25575466>DFW is explicit about what went into IJelaborate
>>25575475take it easy, man
>>25575478You's brain's buried in Pfizer pharmaceuticals: you're pfucked pforever™.
>>25575476IJ is shit, my nigga. Forget it. A failure that was mocked mercilessly before a decade passed. DFW is an ironic 4chan joke. Always has been.
>>25575524never got the jew chab, chill lil bro>>25575533nah it's great, you're just retarded
>>25575561We're talking about the pills developed by Pfizer that you use to adjust to your inability to get along nicely in your chosen environment.
>>25575599I don't take those, either
>>25575608There is no other explanation for you liking Infinite Jest. So you're lying about one or the other.
>>25571680Figure out what Pynch did and do it better. That means Gravity's Rainbow is the benchmark. You write something and you decide if it's as good or better. Could it pass as being in GR? And it's up to you and your taste ultimately. How clearly do you see how GR is operating? Match it and build off it.It's not that complicated, dude. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.
>>25575428why
>>25575466the viscount of vagueposting visits /lit/ for a vigorous effusion of flatulent bullshit
>>25575836Did you read the DT Max book? Sorry the idea of going to a source is vague to you. You can download it in seconds and start reading it or ctrl f pynchon. Hate to see it!
>>25575405You sound like a fag, monolingual bitch
>>25575939I dread knowing what other languages you think you "know" or which toilet bowl babble you're backwater fluent in
>>25571948Elaborate on Pincone's progression from Slow Learner to V to GR. I'm interested. V is pasted together and has connective wires making the disparate parts at all relevant to each other. GR doesn't have the wiry feeling because its topic is more organic
>I dread knowing what other languages you think you "know" or which toilet bowl babble you're backwater fluent in>just discovered Döblin >can’t read him in German and hasn’t read him in English>just discovered Bely >can’t read him in Russian and hasn’t read him in EnglishYeah, it’s reddit posting time.
>>25572365That can't be Pynchon. That's Andy Weir, isn't it? KEK
>>25575989You didn't type all that and select that image and solve a captcha lol nigger what r u doin
>>25574932Most readers don't care, but writers should and you must if you are going after the likes of Pynchon. Even if you did not understand my post you could give us some examples of how GR influence is all over IJ. >>25574947Yes, it was. >>25575451Just at the plot level we have some massive holes like Rachel's MG, Pynchon goes out of his way to establish her relation to it and its importance to her and then it is just gone, they need to get to the airport and have to find a car. How are we supposed to interpret this on the thematic level since Rachel and her MG are part of what Pynchon uses to establish the whole sick crew's relation to meaning, we can say she grew up and her speech to Profane sort of supports that but there was no growth or explanation or anything and we are left grasping for meaning. Stylistically voice is fairly erratic, we mostly don't notice this because of the weirdness of the Stencil chapters and he is mostly good or at least good enough at maintaining voice through a chapter.Its structure really works in Pynchon's favor and hides much of its failings.>>25575935Max is a terrible biographer. I threw away my copy when he used someone who knew someone who knew DFW as a source. >>25575971That is a massive question and I am finding it difficult to answer in a meaningful way within the constraints of 4chan, can you narrow it down to an aspect or two I can directly address. Explaining why you find GR's topic to be more organic would help and might be enough. V. is not pasted together, structure is the one thing he really has down well in V. and theme develops in a nice orderly and linear fashion, which would not happen if it were pasted together.
>>25576063why was it naive
>>25576188>try really really hard and do everything I think Pynchon did but lets just ignore all that stuff about learning and understanding the craft, you got to read books on the occult and listen to black metal>oh, and write from the heartPossible we are dealing with a second anon who really failed to follow the thread, but I doubt it.
>>25576063>not pasted togetherNigger, you do not know how Pynchon writes his novels? I'm curious, what do you think "structure" is? Also, interesting that you didn't like Max's attack on DFW. I get that a handful of ppl which doesn't include Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon and William fucking Gaddis don't realize he's a fraudulent shitheel and includes you—your literary takes are quite select.
>>25576255Can you form a question without burying it in rhetoric?
>>25576261sharp teeth.
>>25576251i didnt think i had to tell an aspiring author that he has to practice writing in order to write fluently. the post seemed aware enough that i could assume that. and if pynchon's whole schtick is that he is weird and off the wall (for the 60s and 70s) then you have to read/listen to weird and off the wall art to get a general idea of how to do that and how to do that in a modern context
>>25575636No, you're just retarded.
>>25571680Write something good.Only americans are impressed by that quirck chungus hack.
>>25576647>Pynchons my fav writer for sure because my fav thing in books is goofs, gags, jokes and rambunctious behavior, and his books are full to the brim of it. Every novel is like one of those novelty snake cans, you open the book & POP you get a face fulla snakes and you fall back cackling. The mad mind, the crack genius, to do it! and then you think hmmm whats he gonna do next, this trickster, and you pick the book back up and BZZZZZZZZZZ you get a shock and Hahahahahah you've been pranked again by the old pynchmeister, that card. "Did that Pynch?" he says, laughing yukyukyukyuk. Watch him as he shoves a pair of plastic buck teeth right up into his mouth and displays em for you- left, right, center- "you like dese? Do i look handsome???" Pulls out a mirror. "Ah!" Hand to naughty mouth. And you're on your ass again laughing as he snaps his suspenders, exits stage right, and appears again hauling a huge golden gong
>>25576762i agree with this. i dont take literature seriously
>>25576762Same.
>>25576712>only the rulers of the world and of space and time and literatureheh ok buddy seethe right over there
>>25576762Hell yeahMix in some ultra grim nightmare shit and you have pynchon
>>25571680Let's see some of your writing, kid
>>25576647How do you, as in you personally, practice writing?
>>25571680I know the consensus is the opposite, but I think GR has aged terribly. It baffles me when people put it up there with Ulysses. GR has, at moments, great prose, great moments, but it's very shallow.
>>25577860you treat the technical components of writing like any other skill, i.e. you internalize them through months and years of repetition so that you can then move on to internalizing more complex skills with those basics as building blocks. if you work out, there are a great set of analogues therein - you can treat plot, character, humor, allusion, metaphor, poetry etc. as muscle groups in the same way you'd work out core, arms, legs, or however you'd personally partition the body. from this high level division you can break it down into more discrete and particular questions. "what makes a pun work? what makes a pun fall flat?" "what makes a character compelling to me personally? what makes a character a chore to read about?" "when is an allusion pretentious? when does an allusion work even if i dont immediately understand it?" these are all questions that you can answer, and you can come up with systems and patterns for them. then, after all that, you stay aware of your inner state and keep track of when a wave of inspiration comes, and let this wave flow through the channels you've carved so to speak by having internalized those technical components. (if you've ever gotten a little buzzed reading someone's prose, that's evidence that they were inspired while writing.) this way you get to have both technical excellence available on a dime and the inspiration of writing for the first time when you sit down to work on something. (and if you keep your emotional life healthy you can get inspired much more often than if youre depressed.) hope that is clear. i have an unorthodox method but it makes me quite happy. its closer to automatic or spirit writing than consciously putting meaning everywhere though
>>25577930Oh. This is why you write like mere, complete shit.
>>25577930>t. Hal.
>>25577926If anything, GR aged like fine wine. Look at the world around us with its mass surveillance, weird preoccupation with sex, transvestites entering the mainstream, even further divide between symbols and reality, between the elect and the preterite. It's even more prophetic than Dostoevsky's Demons. And if you find GR's cliche and overused, that speaks even more for its genius. "I don't see why people admire Hamlet so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together".If your criteria for greatness is how it relates to the Human Condition, the universal experience we all share as a species from antiquity to the present day, how it will be received in 200 years or 2000 years, how it stacks up against the Iliad and Dante's Comedy - then sure, I can see a case being made for Ulysses. But I didn't find the gap between the two to be that large, at least on my first read. Looking forward to rereading the two, I'm sure I missed a ton from both books.
>>25571680im constantly shocked and jarred by the community of people who claim they like literature put this book on a pedestal. its really not that good or interesting. its just long, and babbys first big book has some kind of psychological impact on litfags. same category as infinite jest. its just not good
>>25577999>im constantly shocked and jarred that my ideal of "good literature" is not a universal truthbabbys first confrontation with his own autism
>>25578018im sure youre really impressed by one man bands where the guy plays a kazoo, drums, and the guitar at the same time
>>25577973>Look at the world around usThat's precisely where I think GR has aged the worst. Under the covers, Pynchon is still very puritanical, very new-leftist, and GR is soaked in that mindset, so all the things he gets right, which are on the surface plenty, are tainted by it. There's something very disingenuous about Pynchon, or perhaps is simply cowardice, but whenever he identifies a problem, he's unable to put the blame on the things he loves. It's always something else, a corrupting force, The Powers That Be that make us betray ourselves, which is funny, because by the title of Inherent Vice you would think he would finally write a book about self accountability, but no, it's still the same puritanical Pynchon, too in love with his idealism and sentimentalism. An awfully sentimental writer. I guess that's really the issue here. Pynchon is too romantic, too sentimental, a forever sensitive young man, and he won't let it go. He will masterfully dissemble the entire world but then he will put it back together in such a way there's still space in it for his sentimentalism. But that's just not the modern world. If he wanted to be prophetic, Pynchon needed to be at least three times as nihilistic as he was. And it's not like he didn't grasp it. There's a brilliant line in GR talking about anti-paranoia. I don't recall if that was the exact wording he used, but the definition of it was the belief that nothing is connected to anything. But sadly, he chose to focus his work on paranoia instead.>And if you find GR's cliche and overused, that speaks even more for its geniusIt does not. When you read Madame Bovary or A Hundred Years of Solitude or whatever you can easily recognize the cliches they started and still fully appreciate them without having to do mental gymnastics to imagine how you would have reacted to them if you had read them when they just came out. They haven't aged a day. On the contrary, all the things that would get cut nowadays by a modern editor make them feel even fresher. I don't think that can be said about GR. I'm sure the combination of high and low culture was quite funny at the time, but it's hard not to cringe now at "'What?' t. Richard Nixon.">"I don't see why people admire Hamlet so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together".It's extremely obvious what people see in Hamlet. Hamlet is still one of the most layered, three dimensional characters ever written, which is another problem I have with GR and why I don't get comparing it with Ulysses, when the genius of Ulysses, even above the style, are the characters, while GR's are much thinner in comparison.
>>25578049Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky. Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here. He isn’t sure that he wouldn’t, actually, rather have that reason. . . .
>>25577930There is nothing unorthodox about that, it what everyone who never learned how to practice and study does. Pretty much the standard.
If you are so desperate for a gimmick, write with your asshole. I'm sure that's never been done before
If you are so desperate for a gimmick, read Fosse, Bernhard, Kraz, Ducks, Newburyport, Lish
>>25578049I don't have an issue with his naivete, his romanticism or his sentimentality, however you may call it. I think it's a comforting silver lining in an otherwise bleak, bleak book. Sometimes he adds a bit too much of it, specifically in the counterforce section (and wayyy too much in Vineland), but the book is already depressing enough as is, darker than Berlin Alexanderplatz, which I held to be the most hopeless prior to reading GR. I don't think I could stand to reread if it weren't for the little words of consolation here and there. "There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you" Of course I disagree with his worldview on a personal level, but that's a bit like faulting Homer for being a pagan, Dante a Christian, and Milton for his weird heresies and angel sex. One of the joys of literature is learning how other people view the world, though we almost never fully, or even partly agree. Joyce himself held exceptionally odd worldview, but neither his pacifism nor his fart fetish diminishes what I think of his work in any way.>"What?" -Richard NixonOne of the funniest lines in the book, though I see what you mean. I found the Profane sections of V. painfully unfunny, and some of the humour in GR bears resemblance to it, even if it's much more polished.>the genius of Ulysses, even above the style, are the characters, while GR's are much thinner in comparison.I can agree with that, but that's a matter of priorities. I never valued well-written characters as much as seemingly many anons here, I was always content to play around in a world concepts and ideas, I value atmosphere and the writer's craft more than the writer's ability to write believable characters. Des Esseintes is as hollow as the trinkets he collects, but it is no way an impediment to me, I adore the book he comes from all the same.And even when I do fall in love with a character, it is with Prometheus, King Lear, Milton's Satan, Faust and Ahab, who are in a way the polar opposite to the realist novel's idea of a believable character. Bloom is remarkable, he feels even more real than even Tolstoy's and Eliot's subtle portraits, yet I feel more drawn to Diomedes and Odysseus.I think both books are exceptional, I think they both have plenty of things to love, and any kind of dick measuring contest feels more like a problem of personal taste. And as they say, de gustibus non est disputandum.
>>25578072so what does practicing and studying look like. my method has worked well in my life for more than just writing. it is quite general>>25577960you havent even read my stuff
>>25577930Are you the anon who made the incomprehensible literature thread?
>>25578999no. why
>>25578218I just read a load of your writing. It's bad on the most basic level.
You might never amount to anything if this is your benchmark for a great novel. I have strong doubts if it even clears the bar of a good novel. The difficulty of the book has really muffled the blow of the realization just how aesthetically pedestrian his writing is. Most of the book reads as if a very well read, college sophomore is writing the novel.
>>25579176okay explain why its bad. explain also why the voice i use on the internet is somehow indicative of the voice i use to write prose, because to me thats an intellectual leap only a psychic could make
Read SOLENOID
>>25579218No. Get getter taste, Max et buttbuddy Andrei
>>25579191>just how aesthetically pedestrian his writing isWhat would make it less pedestrian in your opinion?
>>25578218To continue your metaphor, isolating muscle groups does not teach you to use them all together, does not teach you how they all relate to each other, just teaches you how to isolate them and build pretty looking muscles you can stare at in the mirror. Asking why something does not work is a mostly pointless question, either you immediately see the problem and the solution or the answer is always the same, there is something about it you don't understand and trying to fix it by finding the fault with a single example and finding systems and patterns to follow does not help in understanding, just reduces writing to doing mad libs. The question you should ask is what do I not understand, what am I missing? Once you have identified that you devise an exercise to practice and that exercise will also guide you in study to see how other writers have handled it. Develop understanding and you won't need to memorize all those patterns and systems and your work won't be formulaic and you can put the meaning where it should be instead of where it falls or everywhere.When you saw something you did not understand you just wrote it off as something most readers don't care about, did not even try to understand and continually ignore any question about the books being discussed, why? You keep going on about having all the answer but will only talk about yourself.
>>25577999>same category as infinite jest.lol
>>25578049Oh a bircher lmao
>>25579233If it stopped sounding as if an annoying college student wrote it.
>>25573984IJ surpassed gravity rainbow in prose. Wallace exposed how autistic pynchon was and you don't need to write a extremely confusing jarring plot just to explain post modern condition. I forever thank Wallace for ending the literary obsession with writting incoherent confusing prose in the name of performing post modernist literature
>>25580639>incoherent confusing proseGR is unique in this, Pynchon's other fiction is way more coherent. And it serves an important role in GR; if you work as any kind of engineer, you're constantly exposed to incoherent jargon, confusing concepts from other fields, unintuitive behaviour. Plus journal articles often seemingly deliberately avoid any kind of clarity (often it's caused by chinks having a poor grasp on English, but not always). And that's not even getting into modern mathematics and theoretical physics, which are totally abstract.
>>25580672So was the Rocket’s terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control: preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis the whole way to Brennschluss. If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised—none of them made the connection, at least not while alive: it took death to show it to Roland Feldspath, death with its very good chances for being Too Late, and a host of other souls feeling themselves, even now, Rocketlike, driving out toward the stone-blue lights of the Vacuum under a Control they cannot quite name . . . the illumination out here is surprisingly mild, mild as heavenly robes, a feeling of population and invisible force, fragments of “voices,” glimpses into another order of being. . . .
>>25580676good shit
>>25580676>>25580693Prose for the grant morrison audience
>>25580639Post modernist prose is not confusing, it just elevates literary device to being a first class citizen and you need a very good understanding of the device or devices which are being employed or you will be lost. In the case of GR it is stream of consciousness and the closely related indirect free speech and we have to identify what the purpose of stream of consciousness plays in the novel and how it develops (which is the same as we generally see character develop in more traditional novels) to understand. There is a purposeful aspect of confusion in GR in that we can not actually know what is real, it is easy to identify what is unreal and we can be fairly certain about a fair amount being real but there is a large chunk which is rather gray; do we believe in the conspiracy? We are in the same position as Slothrop but we get the luxury of not having to live with the consequences like he does, we can draw a line and see what results. The reason GR is celebrated is because Pynchon managed to tie everything together so perfectly that where ever we draw the line will yield a complete view of the whole, a well developed perspective on theme which progresses through the entire novel. This is a very difficult thing to pull off.
>>25579996no no no, i dont memorize patterns and systems, i internalize them. memorizing them would be to constantly refer to certain constructs and to consciously think about them while writing. when you internalize patterns and systems you develop a sixth sense for them, quite literally, and you can start to feel where they should go rather than consciously think about where they go. think about how when you drive a car, after a few years of practice behind the wheel, you just turn on some tunes or the radio, you zone out, and then even if other people are being roadretards you can swerve around them or avoid their nonsense without consciously thinking about it. any skill can be internalized to this level - from my understanding this is how jazz improv works. you master your instrument ("tool" in another definition, not coincidental) and then let your soul flow through these technical channels you carved out through practice when its time to record or perform. i absolutely do not reduce writing to madlibs but in order to grow i have to do some gruntwork like practicing the effect that verb aspects might have or how to make gnomic statements funny or something technical like that. i think we are using different words ("understanding" vs "internalization") for the same hard-to-describe thing. in my metaphor musclegroups are not meant for showing off in the mirror but rather making me a more versatile person in any situation, with more power available to mei dont think readers really care about most of what writers care about from watching numerous interviews over the years, and me personally, i always take the reader's side. to be very frank i think people have better shit to do than read what Some Guy has to say about Some Nonsense. i care about not wasting peoples time. nor do i think i have all the answers. i have the answers for me, my life and my process, but not someone elses. some people might interpret my phrasing to mean that im arrogant but all im doing from my perspective is offering ideas that others can take wholly or partially or not at all. as long as im stirring discussion and thought and feeling in some way i know im contributing, even if the reaction is largely negative. a negative reaction is better than no reaction at all
>>25580835>i dont memorize patterns and systems, i internalize them.That is what memorization is, repeat until committed to memory and you don't have to actively think about it.
>>25580843then we are talking about the same thing, no
>>25580872We are not talking about anything, I just pointed out that you don't seem to know what the words you use mean.
>>25581029no in my experience memorization is a public school thing. you learn how to repeat certain things when the teacher prompts you to, but the things you learn have no referents. in this case they dont hook up with reality in any way and exist only in the context of a test or social environment. i do know what memorization means in a dictionary definition sense, i.e. committed to memory, but written english does its most interesting work when it is processed as if its actually spoken, and this includes connotation and how some people have their own idiosyncratic and nuanced ideas of what words mean
>>25580624Wow, really nigga? That's the best you've got?Fraud confirmed.
>>25580750who
>>25577999Highly disagree. Pynchon has captured the post-war zeitgeist better than anyone
>>25580835>no no no, i dont memorize patterns and systemsYes, you do. And you still avoid discussing literature, you just want to talk about yourself, still avoiding answering the question which started all of this.Do you know what dilettante means?>>25581139You are really getting to the crux of the issue here; writing is narcissistic for you, it is not about communicating the idea in the best and most concise way. You don't care about anyone other than average reader and don't care about readers who move past being average. Pynchon and DFW both cared about this and made certain their writing would be of interest to both the average reader and those who expect literature to not be just a pile of holes for those that look deeper.
>>25582179>Pynchon has captured the post-war zeitgeist better than anyonePynchon is obviously a much better writer than her, but Pynchon is unironically the Margaret Atwood of leftist men.
>>25582179He did in V., but not really in GR, he got caught up in trying to explain the world and people too much in GR. >>25582559Retarded? Not judging. Also not passing judgement on Atwood.
I see Pynchon as a critical writer in the post-Foucault world. The System in Pynchon consistently manifests in his works as a mechanistic, death-driven force that seeks to categorize, commodify, control, shape all human desire, reducing the individual to a mere data point in a calculus of power and death. Pure Foucault. We are there. The 21st century is a world where our desires are generated by algorithms and our movements constantly tracked, we are trapped in an inescapable, endless grid of surveillance woven by interconnected public and private entities that collect personal data and masquerade as having concern of any sort of protection, we convince ourselves of the necessity of these technologies and our humanity transforms into a mere calculation of profit and control.
>>25582577>foucaultrefuted by baudrillardhttps://archive.org/stream/SemiotexteForeignAgentsJeanBaudrillard
Is there a bigger tell of being a retard than using the word "refuted?"
