I liked whenever a character would die, they’d start speaking in advertisements, the overwhelming horror of teflon
I liked that it is a story about being an immigrant in america transfigured through fantasyland
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I looked up my original reaction to IDD and apparently I was ‘put off’ and ‘disappointed’ by it so I think it is the kind of book that grows like a fungus in the back of your mind and its qualities becomes comprehensible
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i like its ideas but i feel like its execution falls way short of its ideas level
also i have a very low tolerance for the kind of … idk, avuncular 80s-90s paperback fantasy book horniness that the book is shot through with
its definitely less stupid than a lot of other fantasy books but thats a low bar to clear
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Yeah for some reason after a certain point a switch flipped in my head and the constant explicit sex felt like it is meant to be offputting rather than avuncular horniness as you put it. The whole book feels like a visitor q approach to the state of fantasy in 1993
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i get that it’s being done on purpose but i really don’t have a lot of energy for a dude writing a lot of that shit and then turning to the camera and saying, “See? See how bad this is? It’s … So Bad!!!” like ok guy you’re … condemning a thing by doing it in such a way that it’s virtually indistinguishable from someone playing it straight
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the thing is I think it is very distinguishable from someone playing it straight, that’s why my feelings on those parts of the book flipped. It is not that sex is horrible in the books, but that sex mediated through extreme capitalist-puritanical culture is horrible. Everyone is sex-obsessed but any human sexual expression is proscribed, so what’s left is cumming while moaning “five dollar footlong”
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The Dispossessed always makes me think of this fascinating article by Trotsky about how much better than anyone America would be at establishing communism.
You are prepared to do this as is no other country. Nowhere else has the study of the internal market reached such intensity as in the United States. It has been done by your banks, trusts, individual businessmen, merchants, traveling salesmen and farmers as part of their stock-in-trade. Your soviet government will simply abolish all trade secrets, will combine all the findings of these researches for individual profit and will transform them into a scientific system of economic planning. In this your government will be helped by the existence of a large class of cultured and critical consumers. By combining the nationalized key industries, your private businesses and democratic consumer cooperation, you will quickly develop a highly flexible system for serving the needs of your population.
Rich Soviet America can set aside vast funds for research and invention, discoveries and experiments in every field. You won’t neglect your bold architects and sculptors, your unconventional poets and audacious philosophers.
In fact, the Soviet Yankees of the future will give a lead to Europe in those very fields where Europe has hitherto been your master. Europeans have little conception of the power of technology to influence human destiny and have adopted an attitude of sneering superiority toward “Americanism,” particularly since the crisis. Yet Americanism marks the true dividing line between the Middle Ages and the modern world.
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Good band name
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i guess he was wrong
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It’s honestly another great tragedy of the 20th century how thoroughly the US labour movement failed. Maybe in another hundred years!
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Just finished up Legacy of Ashes. CIA really just fucked up over and over for decades huh.
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Reading Thomas Pynchon’s V. now. I really like TCoL49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Bleeding Edge but so far (only the first chapter tbf) this book is exuding the immature braniac prep-school ass-grabber vibes of Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long Looks Like Up to Me which I hated. Curious to continue and see if it took a whole book for Pynchon to mature into something more or not. All in all I’ll admit it’s at least fun. I heard this book goes to Egypt eventually so I expect it will develop.
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i think V is by far his worst and wouldn’t really recommend it
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yeah I would read mason and dixon after those four unless you want something kind of needlessly difficult
he was biting gaddis’ jr and not really succeeding imo
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I’d love to read those. I expect that I’ll stick through this out of curiosity. But I want to read Vineland and Mason and Dixon and Against the Day, for sure.
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im just getting to the end of ATD now. first pynchon i’ve read since bleeding edge released.
will probably try and read mason & dixon this year and then will be complete.
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v is the one pynchon i never got thru… i feel like vineland has the highest proportion of stuff that just doesn’t work but the 80s copworld blowback parts feel like some of the most raw of anything he’s written which gives it a place in my heart. it’s also very funny that return of the jedi keeps popping up in it as like an emblem of spiritual decay
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Vineland is why I still refer to Cream of Mushroom soup as the Universal Binding Ingredient.
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It’s crazy how all my childhood I received this idea of Pynchon as the epitome of a Serious Novelist without ever knowing anything about him, and only in adulthood realized he’s basically just the inventor of shitposting. Which is even better
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