Sean

The Idle Book Club 6: The Crying of Lot 49

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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 is postmodern as fuck.

One of the reviews I read for this book claimed that Pynchon was the first person to compare a city to a circuit board. It's such a powerful metaphor that it's hard to believer there was a time when people weren't referring to cities in this way (although I guess logically no one would be comparing a city to a technology that didn't exist yet, so there had to be a 'before circuit board metaphor' time).

I really liked the interplay of entropy and communication break down in this book. Knowledge and communication are treated as their own closed systems that are slowly succumbing to entropic forces, despite, or maybe even because of, Oedpia's attempts to find an unfindable answer. Such a smart way to look at how we perceive and interact with information systems in the world.

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I love this book. But if you're looking to get into Pynchon, it's not really a good place to start as basically every other book he wrote is drastically different. He has pretty much disavowed Crying of Lot 49, saying that (and I paraphrase) "I forget everything about writing good books when I wrote it".

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I love this book. But if you're looking to get into Pynchon, it's not really a good place to start as basically every other book he wrote is drastically different. He has pretty much disavowed Crying of Lot 49, saying that (and I paraphrase) "I forget everything about writing good books when I wrote it".

Too late

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Too late

Have you read some of his other stuff? There really is a stark difference, I think, between Crying and something like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason and Dixon (both of which are supremely entertaining, in my opinion).

Also, I should state that I love Crying of Lot 49 and I think Pynchon is kind of off his rocker to call it bad in any way. It inspired my XBox Live handle! I think if Pynchon knew that he would immediately self-immolate from despair.

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I have started this book maybe a dozen times, never getting further than 25 pages in. I think Pynchon exists solely to mock those with ADD.

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I love this book. But if you're looking to get into Pynchon, it's not really a good place to start as basically every other book he wrote is drastically different. He has pretty much disavowed Crying of Lot 49, saying that (and I paraphrase) "I forget everything about writing good books when I wrote it".

In some of his letters Pynchon has suggested that at one point The Crying of Lot 49 was a part of his first novel V. and that he excised and came back to it after V. was published and decided to just get rid of the damn thing so he wouldn't feel overwhelmed since he was working on several other books at the same time. And from what I can remember vaguely, he referred to it as a nice little pulpy piece that he just wanted out of his lap.

I guess what I'm saying is, is that I love The Crying of Lot 49, but I have to admit that it is the most accessible of his works because it is one of his least ambitious.

And I know that sounds a bit insane, but it is likely because it is so quick and tightly constructed that it is likely to be the only book most people ever finish by him. That or Vineland.

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Have you read some of his other stuff? There really is a stark difference, I think, between Crying and something like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason and Dixon (both of which are supremely entertaining, in my opinion).

Also, I should state that I love Crying of Lot 49 and I think Pynchon is kind of off his rocker to call it bad in any way. It inspired my XBox Live handle! I think if Pynchon knew that he would immediately self-immolate from despair.

Could you explain how to derive entertainment from Gravity's Rainbow? It's very irritating having that thing on my shelves mocking me for hating it.

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Could you explain how to derive entertainment from Gravity's Rainbow? It's very irritating having that thing on my shelves mocking me for hating it.

I had to try a couple times. Then after reading it all the way through once, I went online and read a bunch of stuff about it. I'm not ashamed to say that I missed/didn't understand a solid quarter of the novel. Comparing what you figured out with what is actually going on is a big part of the fun. I don't love everything about GR, in fact there's some parts I'm not a huge fan of, but as a whole it's well worth the read, I think.

But this is sort of the post-modern conundrum, right? Is it worth spending all the time to understand these puzzle tomes? Is it even fun or worthwhile to do so? (Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest?)

For whatever it's worth, I think it is.

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(Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest?)

Yes. And Infinite Jest was definitely worth the struggle of reading because it was one of the smarter, more honest books I've ever read.

My enjoyment of Lot 49 means that I will probably attempt Gravity's Rainbow at some point, or at least another one of Pynchon's longer, more famous novels.

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Yes. And Infinite Jest was definitely worth the struggle of reading because it was one of the smarter, more honest books I've ever read.

Yeah, Infinite Jest is fantastic. I still haven't read Pale King, and I feel pretty bad about it.

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Yeah, Infinite Jest is fantastic. I still haven't read Pale King, and I feel pretty bad about it.

Reading Pale King was the strangest experience. Every time there was a reference to suicide (and there were a few), I cringed. The closer I got to the end of the book, the sadder I got. Even in it's incomplete form, The Pale King is such a good read. I think it had the potential to be better than Infinite Jest, or at least on the same level. The 100 page chapter on Chris Fogle was one of the best things I read last year.

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To bring this back around to Lot 49, what are everyone's general feelings towards post-modernism? It tends to have this reputation of being difficult just to be difficult, with no real merit beyond that. That's definitely the legacy author's like David Foster Wallace were trying to work against: writing these complicated, surreal narratives that served a purpose beyond just impressing the reader with the author's talent. The post-modern elements are so inchoate in Lot 49, but there still present and important. I enjoyed those elements and never once felt that Pynchon was merely just showing off, maybe my opinion would change if I read one of his longer novels, but I doubt that. It's a wonderful, innovative way to tell a story that gives the author a of room to experiment with writing styles. Completely worth the effort to read a novel like this.

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I think the difficulty most people have with postmodernism as a genre is understanding exactly what it is meant to be. Tristram Shandy is not Finnegan's Wake is not The Third Policeman is not Infinite Jest is not Against the Day is not Underworld and so on. But these all fall under the banner of postmodern writing. It is thus easy to see postmodernism as anything purposefully difficult when so much of it coheres to the being that is writing it.

This is largely why I love it though. A postmodern novel is always waxing the surface of the Great Conversation in all writing. These books are always directly addressing the larger ongoing dialogue that is Making Shit Up, lending it this honesty and playfulness that can come across to many as showing off.

When Sterne's Tristram Shandy decides to leave a page blank in his life, literally, there is this glorious hand-wringing moment for him as a character that has actually been earned because we expect this of Sterne by the time we see it. I do not think Pynchon would have done such a thing though. He was more inspired by Oakley Hall than Tom Swift.

I don't know if your opinion would change reading a longer novel. You might have a harder time of it. I'm not ashamed to admit either that reading Gravity's Rainbow was not something I had been ready to do until I had made my way through Ulysses, and that I still spent a good portion of my time looking to outside resources for greater understanding of the text than I had ever before. I've even heard proponents of the book say in conversation, attempting a Wholehearted Recommendation of the thing, that you need to stick with it until page 400, because that is when it gets really good.

So I guess it's best to say that GR is a commitment. Nobody has to read it. People shouldn't complain about it unless they're willing to meet the book on its own terms. It isn't that the book isn't for them, but that Pynchon did not write it for every kind of reading. Obviously we all read for different reasons, and some read for many, depending on what they have in front of them.

I love postmodernist fiction. A lot of it isn't great. A lot of it does seem gimmicky. A lot of it is gimmicky. But there is an awful lot of it right now, and so much of it is worthwhile if you're looking for writing that is bluntly contributing to that eternal dialogue in writing that takes place across all tenses of time.

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pomo stuff

Is Cloud Atlas post-modern? I haven't read it and I wonder how it might fit into this discussion for thumbs people who read it for the podcast.

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And that's the whole damn problem, you know? People call Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello postmodernists sometimes, but when I read them they were post-war italian fabulists. Ugh, hahahah.

Cloud Atlas shares a lot of ideas with Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler in that they're both incredibly interested in celebrating and exploring the idea of storytelling as an art form. Cloud Atlas ties together disparate genres to show how they're all a smaller part of this larger history (And he throws confetti in the air and his brain explodes like a champagne bottle with his sheer enthusiasm for celebrating the art of the tradition.) while If on a winter's night a traveler wants to rip off your ear and have you scrambling into the book to find it just so it can tell you how important beginnings are to stories, letting you in on its celebration by talking to you more directly than you ever have been before in literature.

But is Cloud Atlas postmodern? I would like to say it is, if we're referring to how it plays with its story. Some might say that it can't be because it doesn't dive deep enough down any wormholes to be postmodern. It isn't difficult enough. It does not play within the time period. It's really just several books of differing genres. The only way to appease some of these people might be to call it Pop-Postmodern, and that makes me shiver.

I have problems with the idea of genre. Although it's necessary, it should never be absolute.

I don't know if I've answered your question at all.

Terribly sorry!

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CoL49 seems like great training wheels for GR. Wish I read it first. The style is similar. The seeming random occurrences and like dream logic. Bumping into random people who are deeply connected to the protagonists obsessions.

GR is tough. I'm about 2/3 done, and was 400 pages in, when I realized all the Pokler sections were flashbacks. whoops.

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I've read everything Pynchon published, with the exception of the short stories and Inherent Vice, and in some ways Lot 49 is my favorite, though as another poster noted, Pynchon himself is or was not fond of it. I think the "night city" section near the end, as Oedipa seems on the verge of dissolving into the shadow America she's projected and/or discovered, is one of his best passages of sustained writing and a great contribution to a strain of American literature that includes Whitman and Melville. (Tony Tanner's chapter on Pynchon in "The American Mystery" is very good.) People who listen to the audiobook version are in for a special "treat," as it's the only occasion I can ever remember in which the reader plows on with seemingly no grasp of how the sentences are constructed, where to place the emphases, and what they mean in the first place.

The idea of an "other America," the ambiguous promise and legacies of this country, is something he frequently returns to, and that uncertainty is that the center of the book's mysteries, I think.

Tangentially related, ever since I first heard about Bioshock Infinite I've really wanted to know whether Ken Levine was inspired by Against the Day (opens at Chicago World's Fair -- another great passage; prominently features an airship that seems to grow to the size of a city over the book's long course; includes a disgraced Pinkerton's agent among its sprawling cast; hinges on slips between different time periods/parallel universes, ETC.)

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Tangentially related, ever since I first heard about Bioshock Infinite I've really wanted to know whether Ken Levine was inspired by Against the Day (opens at Chicago World's Fair -- another great passage; prominently features an airship that seems to grow to the size of a city over the book's long course; includes a disgraced Pinkerton's agent among its sprawling cast; hinges on slips between different time periods/parallel universes, ETC.)

I don't think he was. When I was at Irrational I don't think I ever heard it mentioned internally, except in reference to it being mentioned by people who don't work at the studio.

Edit: Sorry this is Chris on Jake's account, my bad.

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!!! Confirmed: Chris has been Jake this whole time.

Yeah I've only had time to read books and play video games for one of us. (Or neither of us, some weeks.)

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OK finally got my book in the mail. So far I'm loving it! It's really reminding me of Illuminatus! in a lot of good ways; the humour, the surreality, the many levels of plot intertwining, the ridiculous names, the sex, drugs and music... Excellent. Much more readable than Gravity's Rainbow for sure. I'm glad I let you fellas talk me into this one.

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