What Pynchon novel would you recommend to someone who’s immersed in modernist works where meaning is approached in a sincere tone and myth is heightened or even used as a scaffold for narrative? My favorite novels are The Recognitions, Under the Volcano, Berlin Alexanderplatz, A Glastonbury Romance, On the Marble Cliffs, The Magic Mountain, and The Sound and the Fury (the only Faulkner novel I’ve enjoyed)

It doesn't take much to tell that he has a unique style of narration. Having read only two of his works (GR and Lot 49), this 'voice' is definitely more unique in Lot 49, which I could only describe as complexly layered. The sentence structure which he employs is oftentimes interlooping, for example the first sentence of Lot 49, which in itself is 66 words without a period in between:

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million collars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

Now beyond his structural complexity there is also often a shadow of a social commentary intertwined with the themes in his works. There is oftentimes a vivid reflection of the historic background of whatever period of history its set in, and the 'human' element of that period, as in the suffocating human detritus of San Narciso.

Critics often say his works are satirical, but I would say they (specifically Lot 49, I don't remember GR that well) are rather an absurdist reflection of humanity in the gritty bits of society.

I haven't found a way to articulate in a single sentence this voice/style of narration other then "complex". How would you describe Pynchon to someone's who've never read him?

Hi all! In between some work today I got the idea to have chatGPT pull a timeline from Gravity's Rainbow using the French scene. For each "scene" I had it pull the page number of the edition (1969 Bantam), the approximate date in-universe (where possible), time of day, the characters involved, the location, and a scene summary

It compiled this into a multi-column .dat file that I slurped up into a python notebook and started playing with. After some messing around, I decided to try and animate the trajectories of a handful of characters over a map of Europe, resulting in this MP4

I can't confirm that what it extracted from the novel is correct, and wouldn't be surprised if it got some details totally wrong. But it's pretty good at scraping text and it seems to have gotten the majority of the details right, from what I can tell. Feel free to point out any inaccuracies if you spot them

The selection was meant to cover the novel’s main narrative networks and geographic regions while keeping the animation readable. Characters appearing mostly in flashbacks, dreams, historical digressions, or only one or two mappable scenes were excluded. The resulting cast was Slothrop, Mexico, Pointsman, Katje, Pirate, Jessica, Enzian, and Tchitcherine

Anyway, hope you get a kick out of it! Happy to send my materials to anyone, just shoot me a DM

Just got this in the mail after almost a month of waiting. I read V. Last autumn (in the Italian translation, my native language) and TCOL49 this spring, in the original English. Loved both, getting through the English version was a bit tough at the beginning but after the first 30 pages or so it started flowing and became incredibly rewarding: I decided to jump to GR next given how much I enjoyed it.

I'm thinking of keeping a sheet of paper in the book to write down the various characters' names as they appear to avoid getting completely lost midway through (which to some extent happened to me with V.).

Any further tips on how to approach this beast are welcome! Wish me luck, I'm super excited to dive in :)

on my second read of AtD I’m noticing that the initials “CC” come up a lot. I’ve got Chums of chance, Chunxton Crescent, Clive Crouchmas, Candlebrow Convention, Chick Counterfly thus far.

does anyone have an interpretation of this or am I committing one of my classic signal/noise blunders.

Something about “carbon copy” relating to the idea of doubling??

Hello all! I’m affiliated with a research organization that studies the esoteric properties of Iceland spar and its intersection with art. Of course we had to check out Shadow Ticket for our latest dispatch, what with its Lew Basnight-led connection to Against the Day, which obviously was chock full of spar. We also talk asporting and apporting.

You can read it here: https://sparricinstitute.substack.com/p/bulletin-from-the-refractory-801

I’m curious as to what knowledge (if any) Pynchon had of the MK ULTRA experiments conducted by the CIA in the 50s. I just finished Gravity’s Rainbow and am now reading a book on the CIAs experiments with LSD and couldn’t help notice lots of similarities between the White Visitation as well as the usage of Sodium Amytal. I’m pretty sure that the MK ULTRA experiments weren’t publicly disclosed until 1975 and GR was released two years prior. Does anyone have any information or thoughts on these similarities?