#thomaspynchon — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #thomaspynchon, aggregated by home.social.
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Shadow Ticket https://library.hrmtc.com/2026/07/24/shadow-ticket-2/ #AnneEsTrenteVingtieMeSieCleRomansNouvellesEtc #book #DetectiveAndMysteryFiction #DeTectivesRomansNouvellesEtc #fiction #FictionLiterary #FictionNoir #FictionMysteryDetectivePrivateInvestigators #historicalFiction #literaryFiction #MilwaukeeWis #MilwaukeeWisFiction #MissingPersonsFiction #MissingPersonsInvestigationFiction #mystery #MysteryThriller #NineteenThirtiesFiction #NoirFiction #NoirNovels #Novels #PersonnesDisparuesEnqueTesRomansNouvellesEtc #PopularFiction #PrivateInvestigatorsFiction #review #romans #TPolyphilus #thomasPynchon #ThrillersFiction -
Gravity's Rainbow (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Thomas Pynchon (EPUB)
Author: Thomas Pynchon
File Type: EPUB
Download at https://sci-books.com/gravitys-rainbow-classic-20th-century-penguin-b005crq3ma/
#LiteraryFiction, #ThomasPynchon -
Gravity's Rainbow (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Thomas Pynchon (EPUB)
Author: Thomas Pynchon
File Type: EPUB
Download at https://sci-books.com/gravitys-rainbow-classic-20th-century-penguin-b005crq3ma/
#LiteraryFiction, #ThomasPynchon -
Análisis literario de El arco iris de gravedad y su visión de la guerra, la tecnología y la entropía
📰 Título original: Un recorrido por El arco iris de gravedad
🤖 IA: No es clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: No es clickbait ✅Ver resumen IA completo https://es.killbait.com/analisis-literario-de-el-arco-iris-de-gravedad-y-su-vision-de-la-guerra-la-tecnologia-y-la-entropia.html?utm_source=masto_es&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait.masto_es
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Análisis literario de El arco iris de gravedad y su visión de la guerra, la tecnología y la entropía
📰 Título original: Un recorrido por El arco iris de gravedad
🤖 IA: No es clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: No es clickbait ✅Ver resumen IA completo https://es.killbait.com/analisis-literario-de-el-arco-iris-de-gravedad-y-su-vision-de-la-guerra-la-tecnologia-y-la-entropia.html?utm_source=mastodon_social&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait_es.mastodon_social
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Análisis literario de El arco iris de gravedad y su visión de la guerra, la tecnología y la entropía
📰 Título original: Un recorrido por El arco iris de gravedad
🤖 IA: No es clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: No es clickbait ✅Ver resumen IA completo https://es.killbait.com/analisis-literario-de-el-arco-iris-de-gravedad-y-su-vision-de-la-guerra-la-tecnologia-y-la-entropia.html?utm_source=masto_es&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait.masto_es
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Análisis literario de El arco iris de gravedad y su visión de la guerra, la tecnología y la entropía
📰 Título original: Un recorrido por El arco iris de gravedad
🤖 IA: No es clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: No es clickbait ✅Ver resumen IA completo https://es.killbait.com/analisis-literario-de-el-arco-iris-de-gravedad-y-su-vision-de-la-guerra-la-tecnologia-y-la-entropia.html?utm_source=mastodon_social&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait_es.mastodon_social
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My first foray into the mind of Thomas Pynchon. Admittedly, the rambling, surrealism, and paranoia of Bleeding Edge was close to having the better of me (and probably did). I can see why people like his writing, but I feel I lack the necessary cultural sophistication to truly enjoy the story.
I don't know if you can call a 2013 novel 'prescient' as such, but one quote stayed with me after putting the book down. I'll add it below.
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My first foray into the mind of Thomas Pynchon. Admittedly, the rambling, surrealism, and paranoia of Bleeding Edge was close to having the better of me (and probably did). I can see why people like his writing, but I feel I lack the necessary cultural sophistication to truly enjoy the story.
I don't know if you can call a 2013 novel 'prescient' as such, but one quote stayed with me after putting the book down. I'll add it below.
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MIST0426/CT-THOMAS_PYNCHON-GRAVITY’S_RAINBOW
Mistigram: If you haven’t had the strange pleasure of reading #ThomasPynchon’s 1973 magnum opus #GravitysRainbow, “ostensibly about an American G.I. who seems to have a psychosexual connection to Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets”, no gloss will really suffice. But because a picture says a thousand words, we here post Cthulu’s adaptation of #MarcGetter’s cover art to the postmodern novel, included in last month’s books-themed MIST0426 artpack collection.
#ANSIArt #cthulu #GravitySRainbow #MarcGetter #MIST0426 #ThomasPynchon -
Mistodon: If you haven't had the strange pleasure of reading #ThomasPynchon's 1973 magnum opus #GravitysRainbow, 'ostensibly about an American G.I. who seems to have a psychosexual connection to Nazi Germany's V-2 rockets', no gloss will really suffice. But because a picture says a thousand words, we here post Cthulu's adaptation of #MarcGetter's cover art to the postmodern novel, included in last month's books-themed MIST0426 artpack collection.
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Mistodon: If you haven't had the strange pleasure of reading #ThomasPynchon's 1973 magnum opus #GravitysRainbow, 'ostensibly about an American G.I. who seems to have a psychosexual connection to Nazi Germany's V-2 rockets', no gloss will really suffice. But because a picture says a thousand words, we here post Cthulu's adaptation of #MarcGetter's cover art to the postmodern novel, included in last month's books-themed MIST0426 artpack collection.
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Mistigram: #ThomasPynchon's 1973 magnum opus #GravitysRainbow to describe concisely. But because a picture says a thousand words, we here post Cthulu's adaptation of #MarcGetter's cover art to the postmodern novel, included in last month's books-themed MIST0426 artpack.
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»How’s the amnesia, forgotten anything interesting lately?«
— #ThomasPynchon: »Shadow Ticket« (2025), S. 137.
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#ProsaWieLyrik. Zeilenumbruch von mir
VELOCITY LUNCH
lunch dramas passing
like storm frontspies in glass slowly
losing their a.m. alluregrill artists taking care
of various countryside choreswhile whatever they’re flippig is
in midair rotating end to end.»Shadow Ticket« (2025) von #ThomasPynchon, S. 39.
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«Pat si dimentica le password per poter parlare con i suoi ex-compagni della French 75, si sfonda di canne e alcol e passa la maggior parte del tempo sdraiato sul divano a riguardare film come “La battaglia di Algeri”. Ma non si tira indietro e mette a rischio la sua vita quando, coperto da una lebowskiana vestaglia che non si toglie più, si alza, fugge e corre per salvare sua figlia».
Non è una vera e propria recensione, semmai uno specchio deformante per i tanti Pat Calhoun che ancora esistono
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«Pat si dimentica le password per poter parlare con i suoi ex-compagni della French 75, si sfonda di canne e alcol e passa la maggior parte del tempo sdraiato sul divano a riguardare film come “La battaglia di Algeri”. Ma non si tira indietro e mette a rischio la sua vita quando, coperto da una lebowskiana vestaglia che non si toglie più, si alza, fugge e corre per salvare sua figlia».
Non è una vera e propria recensione, semmai uno specchio deformante per i tanti Pat Calhoun che ancora esistono
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Happy Pynchon In Public Day (Thomas Pynchon born 5/8/1937)!
"Fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch!"
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Happy Pynchon In Public Day (Thomas Pynchon born 5/8/1937)!
"Fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch!"
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For he is a jolly good fellow!
Happy Birthday Mr. Thomas Pynchon! -
Thomas Pynchon on ‚Liberty‘
„Unfortunately, young people,“ recalls the Revd, „the word Liberty, unreflectively sacred to us today, was taken in those Times to encompass even the darkest of Men’s rights,— to injure whomever we might wish,— unto extermination, were it possible,— Free of Royal advice or Proclamation Lines and such. This being, indeed and alas, one of the Liberties our late War was fought to secure.“
Thomas Pynchon
Mason & Dixon, p. 307 -
Thomas Pynchon on ‚Liberty‘
„Unfortunately, young people,“ recalls the Revd, „the word Liberty, unreflectively sacred to us today, was taken in those Times to encompass even the darkest of Men’s rights,— to injure whomever we might wish,— unto extermination, were it possible,— Free of Royal advice or Proclamation Lines and such. This being, indeed and alas, one of the Liberties our late War was fought to secure.“
Thomas Pynchon
Mason & Dixon, p. 307 -
Zettel 2900
Thomas Pynchon: Der Anzug paßte ihm wie Gary Grant, und er schien sich vor nicht einmal einer Stunde rasiert zu haben und trug eine rosafarbene tropische Blume im Knopfloch. Allerdings roch er immer noch wie die hinteren Regale für Herrenkosmetik in einer Drogerie, und sein Haarschnitt stammte von einem Friseur, der offensichtlich gerade dabei war, sich das Rauchen abzugewöhnen. – Vineland
#Aussehen #Bücher #Humor #Mann #ThomasPynchon #Vineland #Zettel -
Gen Xfest and the Better Suit Industrial Complex
I’m still within the gravitational pull of CloudFest 2026 Gen Xfest 2026, which is always a dangerous thing—but not bad for the bavablog post count!
At the same time I’ve been reading [[Shadow Ticket]] by [[Thomas Pynchon]], and somewhere between the booths, the buzzwords, and the frank and beans, the two started bleeding into one another.
Because what I’m seeing at Gen XFest—and […]
https://bavatuesdays.com/gen-xfest-and-the-better-suit-industrial-complex/
[ap_hashtag] -
#vendredilecture en terrain incertain dans tous les sens du terme – vague, ambivalent, confus, trompeur. Trente ans après l’œuvre principale « One flew over the cuckoo’s nest » #KenKesey sortait son dernier roman : « Sailor Song », récit d’anticipation d’encore trente ans au futur – les années 20 du 21e siècle. Situé dans un port de pêche aux confins d’Alaska, il met en scène le conflit entre civilisation et nature à bord d’une véritable nef des fous : ancien écoterroriste se bat contre l’équipage d’un navire plein de cinéastes sous la direction d’un albino méchant – référence intertextuelle au Cpt. Weissmann dans « Gravity’s Rainbow » de #ThomasPynchon...
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#vendredilecture en terrain incertain dans tous les sens du terme – vague, ambivalent, confus, trompeur. Trente ans après l’œuvre principale « One flew over the cuckoo’s nest » #KenKesey sortait son dernier roman : « Sailor Song », récit d’anticipation d’encore trente ans au futur – les années 20 du 21e siècle. Situé dans un port de pêche aux confins d’Alaska, il met en scène le conflit entre civilisation et nature à bord d’une véritable nef des fous : ancien écoterroriste se bat contre l’équipage d’un navire plein de cinéastes sous la direction d’un albino méchant – référence intertextuelle au Cpt. Weissmann dans « Gravity’s Rainbow » de #ThomasPynchon...
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No lie, a small part of me almost expected an Oscar’s cameo by Thomas Pynchon last night.
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Filmy i seriale:
»Lista laureatów 98. gali wręczenia Oscarów«Amerykańska Akademia Sztuki i Wiedzy Filmowej ogłosiła listę filmów, aktorów i twórców nagrodzonych za swoją pracę w 2025 rok.
https://www.fahrenheit.net.pl/film/lista-laureatow-98-gali-wreczenia-oscarow/
#Fahrenheit_zin #Vineland #MrNobodyagainstPutin #AudreyNuna #EricSaindon #Avatar #ThomasPynchon #DavidBorenstein #ReiAmi #DanielBarrett #MichaelBJordan #Hamnet #PavelTalankin #GwendolynYatesWhittle #RyanCoogler #SeanPenn #Wszystkiepustepokoje #JuanPeralta #LudwigGoransson #Wartośćsentymentalna #AlltheEmptyRooms #AlNelson #JessieBuckley #SentimentalValue #JoshuaSeftel #GarethJohn #Frankenstein #JoachimTrier #ŚpiewacyTheSingers #GaryARizzo #Grzesznicy #Kpopowełowczyniedemonów #JackPiatt #F1Film #Sinners #KPopDemonHunters #SamADavis #F1 #AutumnDuraldArkapaw #ChrisAppelhans #Dwieosobywymieniającesięśliną #KateHawley #Weapons #MaggieKang #TwoPeopleExchangingSaliva #MikeHill #AvatarOgieńipopiół #MichelleWong #AlexandreSingh #JordanSamueliClionaFurey #AvatarFireandAsh #TheGirlWhoCriedPearls #NatalieMusteata #TamaraDeverell #Jednabitwapodrugiej #ChrisLavis #AndyJurgensen #ShaneVieau #OneBattleafterAnother #MaciekSzczerbowski #Golden #JoeLetteri #PaulThomasAnderson #PanNiktkontraPutin #EJAE #RichardBaneham
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Filmy i seriale:
»Lista laureatów 98. gali wręczenia Oscarów«Amerykańska Akademia Sztuki i Wiedzy Filmowej ogłosiła listę filmów, aktorów i twórców nagrodzonych za swoją pracę w 2025 rok.
https://www.fahrenheit.net.pl/film/lista-laureatow-98-gali-wreczenia-oscarow/
#Fahrenheit_zin #Vineland #MrNobodyagainstPutin #AudreyNuna #EricSaindon #Avatar #ThomasPynchon #DavidBorenstein #ReiAmi #DanielBarrett #MichaelBJordan #Hamnet #PavelTalankin #GwendolynYatesWhittle #RyanCoogler #SeanPenn #Wszystkiepustepokoje #JuanPeralta #LudwigGoransson #Wartośćsentymentalna #AlltheEmptyRooms #AlNelson #JessieBuckley #SentimentalValue #JoshuaSeftel #GarethJohn #Frankenstein #JoachimTrier #ŚpiewacyTheSingers #GaryARizzo #Grzesznicy #Kpopowełowczyniedemonów #JackPiatt #F1Film #Sinners #KPopDemonHunters #SamADavis #F1 #AutumnDuraldArkapaw #ChrisAppelhans #Dwieosobywymieniającesięśliną #KateHawley #Weapons #MaggieKang #TwoPeopleExchangingSaliva #MikeHill #AvatarOgieńipopiół #MichelleWong #AlexandreSingh #JordanSamueliClionaFurey #AvatarFireandAsh #TheGirlWhoCriedPearls #NatalieMusteata #TamaraDeverell #Jednabitwapodrugiej #ChrisLavis #AndyJurgensen #ShaneVieau #OneBattleafterAnother #MaciekSzczerbowski #Golden #JoeLetteri #PaulThomasAnderson #PanNiktkontraPutin #EJAE #RichardBaneham
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Thomas Pynchon, „Gravity’s Rainbow“, 1973
„Vergiss nicht, dass das eigentliche Geschäft des Krieges das Kaufen und Verkaufen ist. Das Töten und die Gewalt regeln sich von selbst und können Laien anvertraut werden.“
https://www.cocosse.com/2026/03/days-entrust-thomas-pynchon-1973/
#Gewalt #GravitySRainbow #Krieg #Politik #Töten #ThomasPynchon #Zettel -
Lesart: Hörbuchkritik – Thomas Pynchons Roman „Schattennummer“ – Von Tobias Wenzel
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/hoerbuchkritik-thomas-pynchons-roman-schattennummer-100.html
#Autor #DLFKultur #Hörbuchkritik #Hören #Lesart #Literatur #Roman #Schattennummer #ThomasPynchon #TobiasWenzel #Wissen
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Fun romp of an essay from Pynchon!
No real surprise that he was kinda down with the Luddites 40 years ago. Thanks for sharing. I'd never read this before."As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd! " -
Fun romp of an essay from Pynchon!
No real surprise that he was kinda down with the Luddites 40 years ago. Thanks for sharing. I'd never read this before."As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd! " -
About a third of the way into #ShadowTicket by #ThomasPynchon, and it's really galloping.
I'm kind of floored I love it so very much. It's very funny, and sly and oblique about reminding us of the violence, messiness, and tangled ironies of American history that they don't teach about in high school.
The jokes, pacing and so on, the writing in the small -- the dude still Has It. It may not be TRP's best novel, but dang, it's an instant classic and one of the Great American Novels, even so.
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About a third of the way into #ShadowTicket by #ThomasPynchon, and it's really galloping.
I'm kind of floored I love it so very much. It's very funny, and sly and oblique about reminding us of the violence, messiness, and tangled ironies of American history that they don't teach about in high school.
The jokes, pacing and so on, the writing in the small -- the dude still Has It. It may not be TRP's best novel, but dang, it's an instant classic and one of the Great American Novels, even so.
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Best movies of 2025 in the US: No 1 – One Battle After Another https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/19/best-movies-of-2025-in-the-us-no-1-one-battle-after-another #PaulThomasAnderson #LeonardoDiCaprio #BeniciodelToro #JonnyGreenwood #ThomasPynchon #SeanPenn #Culture #Film
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2025 book seventy-nine: Thomas Pynchon: Shadow Ticket ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #books #bookstodon #bookstagram #fiction #thomaspynchon
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Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (EPUB)
Author: Thomas Pynchon
File Type: EPUB
Download at https://sci-books.com/inherent-vice-b005crq3h0/
#Action, #ThomasPynchon -
“Down with all kings but King Ludd!”*…
Thomas Pynchon as a high school senior, age 16, at Oyster Bay High School. The image is cropped from a group photo of the staff of the school’s yearbook, The Oysterette, of which Pynchon was the editor. (source)Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post…
Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. On the heels of the success of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (loosely based in Pynchon’s novel, Vineland), he has released his first novel in 12 years, Shadow Ticket, a sufficiently big deal to merit not just a featured focus in The New York Times Book Review, but also a combo review-profile in The New York Times Magazine (both links to gift articles). Your correspondent is about half-way through Shadow Ticket and having a blast…
But here, I offer a much older piece from Pynchon, and non-fiction at that: an essay he wrote for The New York Times in 1984… one resonant with themes that run through his novels; one that speaks to that moment– the mid-Eighties– even as it speaks to ours…
As if being 1984 weren’t enough, it’s also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture, ”The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ”literary” and ”scientific” factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. [See almanac entry here.] The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people’s attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.
Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever ”beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.
What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow’s immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, ”If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Such ”intellectuals,” for the most part ”literary,” were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be ”natural Luddites.”
Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ”people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?…
[Pynchon explains, and puts the “movement” into both socio-political and literary context…]
… The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, ”But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label ”escapist fare.”
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.
By 1945, the factory system – which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution – had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become – among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies – conventional wisdom.
To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns – exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/ time, wild philosophical questions – most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of ”human” as particularly distinguished from ”machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age – curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.
But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the ”future in their bones.” It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk – realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.
The word ”Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!Thomas Pynchon considers: “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?” from @nytimes.com.
Pair with: “Is This the New ‘Scariest Chart in the World’?”
* Lord Byron
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As we hang onto our humanity, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that review copies of Against the Day were distributed; it published later that year. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon’s novels to date (note that there is a rumor that Pynchon, who is now 88, completed another book alongside Shadow Ticket (only 304 pages long)… so who knows if Against the Day will hold its “title”…)
Pynchon has “teased” the novel with a synopsis:
Pynchon’s synopsis states that the novel’s action takes place “between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the years just after World War I”. “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.” Pynchon promises “cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx”, as well as “stupid songs” and “strange sexual practices”.
The novel’s setting “moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York City, to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.”
Like several of Pynchon’s earlier works, Against the Day includes both mathematicians and drug users. “As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.”
The synopsis concludes: “If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck…”
– source
It is probably Pynchon’s most debated novel. Some readers and critics find it too scattered; others believe it to be his masterpiece (a title more commonly awarded to Gravity’s Rainbow). FWIW, Against the Day is your correspondent’s favorite, which, given how much I’ve admired and enjoyed and learned from all of Pynchon’s work, is saying something…
First edition cover (source)#AgainstTheDay #CPSnow #culture #history #literature #Luddite #Luddites #politics #Pynchon #Science #ShadowTicket #society #Technology #ThomasPynchon
