Sean

The Idle Book Club 6: The Crying of Lot 49

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On this episode: Chris, Sean, and Jake start to fill a hole in their reading history as they dive into Pynchon for the first time. Enjoy their inexpert but enthusiastic flailing amidst the baffling waters of postmodernism. Join us next month for a discussion of Ellen Ullman's By Blood.

Buy the book from Amazon.

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Haha.. I have not read Gravity's Rainbow, so that was the only comparison I was able to make. I quite liked The Crying of Lot 49 actually.

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I'm going to assume that Pynchon was selected as a lead up to the eventual DFW bookcast selection, right?

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Is this one as difficult as Gravity's Rainbow? Because I bounced off that one so hard.

I've never read Gravity's Rainbow but I really didn't think Crying of Lot 49 was that hard to get through. Unless you're really hard up on cash to buy a copy I'd say it's worth giving this a shot. That being said it's been a few years since I've read it and not much of it has stuck with me so I'm glad for an opportunity to give it another go and see if I don't get more out of it this time.

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This is a phenomenal piece of work that can withstand dozens of readings. The language is incredible, the jokes are extremely funny, and the satire is biting. It's also the greatest 'postmodern' text I have ever read. I've read this book four times now but now you guys are tempting me to read it a fifth.

What strikes me most about the text is how it juxtaposes serious, sober revelations with an absurd plot to emphasise the significance of epiphanies and self revelations in Oedipa’s journey. A key moment in the text is when Oedipa arrives in San Narciso, and has an epiphany, understanding the ambiguity and tentativeness of her attempts to acquire knowledge. She sees San Narciso as an “ordered swirl of houses” that has the “astonishing clarity” of a “circuit card” (24). The circuitry imagery invokes the image of a radio, its pattern gives her “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate” (25), yet proves to further emphasise the futility of acquiring true knowledge. Yet, the fact that Oedipa’s revelation “trembled just past the threshold of her understanding” indicates that even though truth may be inexpressible, it still consumes Oedipa and, in turn, the reader . This epiphany, and others like it throughout the novel, expresses deep human truths about knowledge and existence between absurd scenarios such as mail conspiracy, characters with names such as Mike Fallopian and Genghis Coen, LSD obsessed psychiatrists and motels hosting an event for the American Deaf-Mute assembly. Pynchon clashes the deeply profound and the comical to show that no matter how absurd events and people may appear, both in fiction and in the real world, great truths are profound because they are sometimes the only thing that makes sense to an individual.

That's how I read some of the broader themes of the text, anyhow.

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Finished this a few days ago and am now attempting to parse out my thoughts on it.

Pynchon has this weird place in my reading history. I’ve read a lot of authors who were clearly influenced by him, but I’ve never actually read his work before. While I was reading Lot 49, I couldn’t shake this weird feeling of déjà vu, because I was recognizing a lot of the style or narrative choices that I’d seen other writers try to recreate.

I was really amazed by how readable this book was. Impenetrable is how most of Pynchon’s stuff is described, but I found this book really easy to get into. Sure there were aspects of it that I still don’t understand (I spent 30 minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on Maxwell’s Demon and I’m still not confident I know what it means, so if someone wants to try and explain that to me…), but the narrative was fairly straightforward. It was also absurdly funny. Every bit with Mike Fallopian was perfect and the Jacobian revenge play was this ridiculous, absurdist story that I absolutely loved.

I also love that the main character was a woman—it makes a perverse, Biblical sense that a woman is the one who is searching for some unobtainable or possibly nonexistent knowledge.

Post-modernist writing has this reputation of being purposefully meaningless and needlessly esoteric, and maybe Pynchon’s other books are like that, but Lot 49 I think does a good job of balancing an absurd, surrealist structure with an actual story that is clearly trying to convey a certain idea about life. I’m really curious to hear what people think of the ending. For me, it works perfectly, but then again I’m a sucker for open-ended narratives.

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Pynchon has this weird place in my reading history. I’ve read a lot of authors who were clearly influenced by him, but I’ve never actually read his work before.

This is pretty much why we chose this book.

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Loved it.

I really glommed onto a lot of the themes Pynchon touched on in the book: how do we see meaning out in the world? To what extent is it taken in, or constructed? Is this all narratives are too? If meaning is out there in the world, yet depends on us, can we really say the two are altogether separate?

I certainly didn't enjoy it this much in college, not knowing as much about the '60s as I do today, since a lot of Pynchon's achievement is really capturing the sense of the times—radical groups everywhere trying to change the world as they change themselves. But Pynchon also draws pretty heavily on physics (as many have remarked on), not just the name-dropping like Maxwell's Demon but also deeper concepts like that information is neither lost nor destroyed, merely transmuted beyond recognition (infamously in the case of one significant "paradox"). Granted, Pynchon deploys this more metaphorically than anything, but he carries along the sense of the world being underpinned by systems more universal than we can imagine, just outside of our understanding.

But even without those themes, I was still sold from the opening passage where Pynchon describes Mucho Maas's traumatic stint as a car salesman, writing the whole thing as sad and relatable, yet utterly absurd and hilarious. The prose is marvelous throughout, and it's really really hard to pick my favorite part of the novel since it's all so great. Like y'all, I now totally get how he influenced some of the other writers I love. Great pick, and I'm excited to read more of his stuff and listen to the bookcast at the end of the month

Bonus liner notes: the Yoyodyne song at one point in the novel was likely mocking IBM's own company songs, which are quite a trip to read. I worked at a winery for a year that produced a Lot 49 Riesling, and only a single visitor during that year admitted to knowing the reference. It was my favorite wine I've ever drank, and has a little Tristero symbol on the label.

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(I spent 30 minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on Maxwell’s Demon and I’m still not confident I know what it means, so if someone wants to try and explain that to me…)

Ooh! I can answer this, courtesy of The Information by James Gleick, which I just finished reading last week. Maxwell's Demon illustrates the role of probability in enforcing the laws of thermodynamics. A hypothetical being, the titular demon, could operate a valve between two chambers to sort a gas into its hot and cold elements, with no energy being exerted on the gas itself. In short, strictly speaking, there's nothing keeping a bucketful of water from reassembling itself from the ocean it has been poured into. It's just improbable to the extreme, the likelihood of a flung piece of chalk writing a line of Shakespeare on the wall it hits, to paraphrase Alan Turing. That's what Maxwell's Demon represents, the improbability (but fundamental possibility) of certain outcomes in physics.

Now I just need to read The Crying of Lot 49 to know the context it's used in.

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I certainly didn't enjoy it this much in college, not knowing as much about the '60s as I do today, since a lot of Pynchon's achievement is really capturing the sense of the times—radical groups everywhere trying to change the world as they change themselves.

Huh. Did you read the Illuminatus! trilogy? That's been my ultimate '60s book so far.

The glowing praise got me to order this btw.

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Huh. Did you read the Illuminatus! trilogy? That's been my ultimate '60s book so far.

Nope, but you have sold me on it! My earlier exposure to '60s culture was through Before the Storm and Nixonland, which covered the politics/culture/zeitgeist of the late '50s through to the early '70s.

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Haha, oh wow, you're in for a ride. On reflection it might actually be more early seventies though. Either way it's a hilarious series of books, which underlies one of my favourite multiplayer card games (in concept anyway, its execution is a bit unbalanced): Steve Jackson's Illuminati. It's even classified as postmodern so fits in a Pynchon thread!

My favourite character in Illuminatus! is called Markoff Chaney, and causes subtle chaos in his wake.

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I certainly didn't enjoy it this much in college, not knowing as much about the '60s as I do today, since a lot of Pynchon's achievement is really capturing the sense of the times—radical groups everywhere trying to change the world as they change themselves.

That was the one aspect of the novel (novella?) that rang a little false to me. I enjoyed the majority of the 60s political references, but I could have done without 'The Paranoids.' I understand culturally what they're supposed to represent and also the significance of their name, and even though the characters themselves were wildly funny, every time they showed up in the story it just felt a little off. Like, oh here's Pynchon making fun of the Beatles, that's amusing, now get back to the story. Minor quibble I suppose.

Ooh! I can answer this, courtesy of The Information by James Gleick, which I just finished reading last week. Maxwell's Demon illustrates the role of probability in enforcing the laws of thermodynamics. A hypothetical being, the titular demon, could operate a valve between two chambers to sort a gas into its hot and cold elements, with no energy being exerted on the gas itself. In short, strictly speaking, there's nothing keeping a bucketful of water from reassembling itself from the ocean it has been poured into. It's just improbable to the extreme, the likelihood of a flung piece of chalk writing a line of Shakespeare on the wall it hits, to paraphrase Alan Turing. That's what Maxwell's Demon represents, the improbability (but fundamental possibility) of certain outcomes in physics.

Now I just need to read The Crying of Lot 49 to know the context it's used in.

Thanks! That makes a little bit more sense. I guess I understand what the principle of the theory is, but I still don't understand why anyone would dream up this scenario in the first place if it's supposedly impossible to create in real life.

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It's sort of a reduction ad absurdum - even if you were able to imagine such a weird thing it would still be impossible for it to exist without spontaneously combusting.

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(I spent 30 minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on Maxwell’s Demon and I’m still not confident I know what it means, so if someone wants to try and explain that to me…)

I also spent alot of time reading Wikipedia on this, and I have even taken a class in thermodynamics at the university (I wasn't very good at it, so take everything I say with a grain of salt), and I still don't fully understand it. But let me try to give an example based on my understanding of it.

Say you have a glass of water, and you put an ice cube in it. The water molecules will automatcally try to reach a thermodynamic equilibrium i.e. the ice cube will melt and you will end up with a glass of water with a homogenous temperature a little colder than before you put the ice cube in. If take any number of molecules arbitrarily selected out of this water, you will always get the same avereage temeprature no matter where you look. But if you look at a individual molecule level you will find that some of them are actually slightly-slightly-slightly warmer than average and others slightly-slightly-slightly colder than average. Maxwell's demon is something that can somehow spot the difference between these molecules and sort them, all the warmer than average on one side and all the colder than average on the other, thus reversing the process of thermodynamic equilibrium.

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Oh, I should also say that I just finished the book yesterday and I liked it alot. My favorite part was probably the story within a story of The Couriers' Tragedy. I became completely wrapped up in that narrative as well, to the point that when it was over I had almost forgotten that I was actually reading the story of Oedipa Maas.

The only Pynchon book I had read previously was his latest Inherent Vice. And while I found that a very enjoyable read as well, I felt that this book had more substance somehow, despite its shorter length. Or... that it deals with larger and more important ideas? Sorry, I'm not very good at explaining myself.

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One of the ways the book was really great for me—and I'm interested in seeing if anyone else had this experience too—was in how I felt I went through the same sort of mindset as Oedipa in terms of becoming oversensitized to certain symbols and more apt to see connections there than is probably warranted.

For example, after The Courtiers' Tragedy play, there's a few more times where bones are mentioned incidentally over the course of the book. Each time, I was like "Oh, that must be related" even though the book never calls it out, and any possible connection would be either nonsensical or impossible. The book took this ordinary word and infused it with a hidden meaning, to the point where I started thinking the same way as our protagonist.

It's that evocative mindset, and the way Pynchon seemingly got there without deploying any fancy formal devices, that really made my experience amazing, and the book a fantastic choice for this month.

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I read the book some two or three years ago. Oddly enough, the part that I remember the best - in a hazy sort of way, not in detail - is the one where Oedipa Maas suddenly realizes that the alcoholic or homeless person will surely get himself killed by smoking in the bed, and panics.* I'm not sure if it was she or just me that temporarily woke up at that point, but I found the scene incredibly well executed.

* My memories of the whole book are a bit hazy, but I think that was more or less how it went.

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One of the ways the book was really great for me—and I'm interested in seeing if anyone else had this experience too—was in how I felt I went through the same sort of mindset as Oedipa in terms of becoming oversensitized to certain symbols and more apt to see connections there than is probably warranted.

Talking about reading to much into something, if I was a more paranoid person, I'd probably be suspicious of the fact that so many of book cast selections have been books set in or near San Francisco. What could it mean?

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I also like how the books turn the notion of 'epiphanies' on its head. In most texts, epiphanies are employed to show character growth, as characters o realise some hidden facet of their world that is uncovered through the experiences of the novel. Through their epiphanies, the characters ascertain a particular truth, that helps them understand themselves and how their relation to their surroundings.

This book does the opposite. Every major epiphany the protagonist has just confuses her more. The first notable example of this is when she pulls over on the highway and sees the city as circuit-board like nervous system that at once overwhelms and confuses her. While she slowly uncovers the Trystero conspiracy, she just becomes more confused than ever, until she finally doubts her own surroundings and her own sensory perceptions. Ultimately, the major truth that she uncovers is that there are no major truths, making this book postmodern as fuck.

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