New newsletter, no new #podcast, yes new #Pynchon, & more, so GO READ
https://buttondown.com/vmspod/archive/shadow-boxing/
Is that anything like the subject of the "English Candy Drill" chapter in "Gravity's Rainbow"?
Took a slight detour while reading #Pynchon 's V. to refresh my understanding of Benny Profane's schlemiel-ishness and wikipedia gifted me this gem:
Thomas #Pynchon called it the UBI, the Universal Binding Ingredient. You know it as cream of mushroom soup, the primordial, mass-produced colloid like bleached cranberry sauce, with the blandness of a thousand white suburbs.
Even JRR #Tolkien spun a verse marveling at its wonders.
One recipe to rule them all,
One mortar to grind them,
One ingredient to coat them all
And in a casserole bind them.
Tatzelwurm. Or mountain dragon of the southern European mountains. Aka cat dragon.
Referenced in Thomas Pynchons "Against The Day," when Reef Traverse is digging tunnels in Austria with an Albanian who is escaping a vendetta.
Ballard's Drowned World is 1962.
So far it gives me strong Bradbury, Pynchon, and Delaney feels.
Ray and JG were contemporary and I think it shows. In a good way!
It reminds me a lot of Dhalgren (1975), which I may rereread next because I kept losing interest carting around an enormous paperback that has since disappeared. No gay sex yet tho.
I won't reread Gravity's Rainbow (1973) again (I think), there's others I want to cover. Still have that kilo of a tome.
This is all probably somehow the fault of Paul Bowles.
@bookstodon #JGBallard #DrownedWorld #Pynchon #GravitysRainbow #Bradbury #PaulBowles
Today in Labor History October 19, 1944: A coup was launched against dictator Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, beginning the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution, which led to the rise of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and the only years that representative democracy existed in Guatemala from 1930 until the end of the civil war in 1996. Arbenz won the presidency in 1950, promising to transform the nation from a feudal economy into a modern, capitalist state. He led the implementation of social, political and agrarian reforms that were influential across Latin America. However, the reform that most angered the wealthy elite, and the leaders of United Fruit, were his agrarian reform policies, including the immediate transfer of all uncultivated land from large landowners to their poverty-stricken laborers.
United Fruit was the largest corporation operating in Guatemala. They controlled vast territories and transportation networks throughout Central America, Colombia, and the West Indies, and maintained a virtual monopoly in the so-called banana republics of Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. At the bequest of United Fruit, CIA-director Allan Dulles, who was also a board member of United Fruit, orchestrated a coup that overthrew Arbenz in 1954, leading to decades of genocide against the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala, as well as the torture and murder of thousands of Communists, Socialists, labor leaders, clergy and activists. In the 1980s, United Fruit officially became Chiquita. Their violence and corruption were described in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, O. Henry, and Pablo Neruda.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #guatemala #genocide #indigenous #communism #socialism #arbenz #torture #cia #Revolution #Pynchon #garciamarquez #pabloneruda #poetry #books #ficiton #historicalfiction #novels #author #writer @bookstadon
Gravity's Rainbow may be the most difficult book I've ever read. I'm about 150 pages in and really enjoying it, although I wouldn't say I'm having fun. And there are paragraphs 4 pages long!
Been re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow again after many years. In the meantime I have read all of #Pynchon ‘s other books. I must say I had forgotten how much work it is. While it has some of his best writing, it is also overall his most disjointed. #bookstodon #fiction
Visiting my partner in Greifswald, her uni work place, for a couple of days ...
And today, we're out and about, retracing Gravity's Rainbow hero Tyrone Slothrop's footsteps in the Greifswald - Peenemünde - Swinemünde area ... #Pynchon
cory doctorow's ( @pluralistic ) latest post is a review of Kelly Link's "Book of Love": apparently there is a character named Bogomil;
Bogomilism being a 10th century gnostic dualist movement, because #gnosticism is so hot right now (at least for me);
other literary references to Bogomilism in particular from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and #pynchon's Against the Day (2006)
anyway this one sounds like an intriguing read
The Kirghiz Light feat. Tchitcherine, by Reddit user /u/Easy_Albatross_3538
One of a long series of drawings by this artist based on scenes from Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. I love how his use of embedded geometric forms in the landscape and sky suggests latent ambiguous meaning in the image, as if the earth and sky are trying to tell the viewer something. That feeling is very evocative of this iconic scene from the novel.
Happy birthday to the great Thomas Pynchon!!
Nobody else manages to imbue such dark, thought-provoking satire with that amount of joyful absurdity. And without any bitterness or nihilism. His books can be pessimistic, but still life-affirming somehow. I dig the cognitive dissonance almost as much as the luscious prose.
Without wishing to get morbid though, the dude is 86 today... could he please get a move on with the next book?
@MostlyHarmless Books aimed at children aren’t necessarily simplistic. Astrid Lindgren? Erich Kästner (for the Germans)? They cover difficult themes like death and poverty in ways that let anyone empathize.
On closer inspection, the distinction between “children” and “adult” books becomes suspiciously slippery.
I’m currently taking a short break from a Thomas #Pynchon book by reading #Pratchett’s Wee Free Men. It’s wonderful
Gravity’s Rainbow is 50! Read this brilliant appreciation, even if you never read the novel. But go on, read the novel too. Thinking I might go in again… book club, anyone? https://theconversation.com/join-the-counterforce-thomas-pynchons-postmodern-epic-gravitys-rainbow-at-50-196657
I've been listening to a couple of podcasts on Thomas #Pynchon's work.
Strikingly, none of the ~five hosts I listened to had actually read more than three of his books, and none of them very thoroughly.
If the bar for competency is so low, I should probably review the material from both my introductory Python courses, and launch a programming podcast.
If you haven’t read #Pynchon:
He’s the kind of writer who will happily take you through three pages of build-up only to drop a joke that consists of rhyming “ejaculate” with “immaculate”.
I’ve begun re-(re- re-)reading Thomas #Pynchon’s “Against the Day”.
It’s nice to reacquaint myself with this monster of a book. With every pass I discover new things in the text.