According to a spokesperson from Viking/Penguin in the Los Angeles Times Book section, Thomas Pynchon has a NOIR style novel, about 400 pages, due out sometime in 2009. Read about it HERE and .HERE. I suspect it will be as nasty as James Ellroy but oh so much better with Pynchon's mind-for-everything enveloping it.
The excitement starts.
- A Labyrinth Nomad. I listen and the map continually... -
Yeah! I have to ask, which one is the best? To me Inherent Vice sounds better... It just might be because I'm a pessimist and tend to go for the bleaker version. Just check my charts and you'll understand!
By the way, I looked at your tunes...we listen to quite similar music.
I don't know, There is something strong and wrong about both titles. One implies that people can move from evil to good (probably hollow) and one is explicit in its statement of nature.
Hmm...?
- A Labyrinth Nomad. I listen and the map continually... -
Spoilsport - yes. But how about discussing titles of other books by Pynchon. How about some alternative titles for existing books? Now, that would be cool :)
Name for the all-encompassing forces that guide us through our lives. The trajectory of the rocket as trajectory of the story and the trajectory of life lived. Trajectory of beauty.
I think that Pynchon maybe wasn't conscious of the plan, but there was one.
Anyway, about death. The description about V2 strike and the point that when it hit you couldn't hear it because it was faster than sound. Those not caught by its destructive halo could only hear it. Death is like that. Like Maurice Blanchot said, I cannot die, only people die. It is always the other. Death is an impossible experience, it is beyond all experience. It always happens to someone else.
Dying cannot be experienced. Le pas au-delà, the step not beyond.
But I would have to disagree that there was no plan. Does Pynchon not endlessly discuss the nature of death and the control that Western civilization tries over nature, family, etc. I think of the Slothrop family who represents a long line of Slothrops but whose family gets involved in the paper industry (stinky business) and the re-imagining of worth of nature as that family actually tears down trees (phallic as is the V-2) and then sells them as paper (thrown away) and money (literally valuable according to the banking system that it must accompany).
Is not that very act of control also an act of murder and death carried around like baggage - even in our wallets?
And Tyrone Slothrop trumps around Europe as this story flashes back looking for a missile - a machine that kills.
- A Labyrinth Nomad. I listen and the map continually... -
We can only speculate on that but I think that at some point, during work, he just got lucky and book lead him to the final page. Sure GR it's not pure chaos, but it doesn't seem to be a structure under control. To me it seems that the book controlled the author. But, it's like, my private theory. Don't get me wrong - lack of full control, lack of detailed plan it's not a flaw. In this case it's more than a merit. It's decorum, after all this book is about chaos, right?
Bumped into this on The Guardian website concerning Gravity's Rainbow. Hard to say if it's true or not:
Pynchon reportedly admitted to a friend that "I was so fucked up while I was writing it... that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can't figure out what I could have meant."
Funny. The era is right for him to have been "under the influence," but that does not mean that there is not a plan built into it.
But if there are moments of free running, then that is life and that too fits into the book's philosophical vision of the world. We are talking about a life so powerful that it is only felt before and as an effect. It is never quite comprehended in the NOW (even though this is the goal of most pop self-improvers these days).
- A Labyrinth Nomad. I listen and the map continually... -
Thomas Pynchon
New Pynchon Novel for 2009