Remark on Pynchon abstruseness

[pynchonoid]

> 
> From the blog "The Monkey's Typewriter"
> 
> http://threemonkeysonline.com/blogs/shane_barry/
> 
> "What has changed since the release of Gravity's
> Rainbow over thirty years 
> ago is the Internet, specifically Google and
> Wikipedia. Will Pychon's taste 
> for esoterica, technical, linguistic or demotic,
> seem quite so intriguing 
> when prosaic explanations are just a few keystrokes
> away? Will Against The 
> Day ever require something like this [link to the GR
> guide]?"
> 

No doubt Internet resources have vastly expanded in
the past decade, but there's still nobody else but
Pynchon, as far as I know, who can find the kind of
material he finds and deal with it the way he can deal
with it. 

In web terms, Pynchon's a unique, trusted authority, a
filter - the way he's pulled together bits and pieces
from all over the place and used them in his fiction.
Other authors try to do this, too, it could be argued
that Pynchon has made possible lots of novels in the
encyclopedic, conspiracy-minded, science-meets-art
vein, but the tenacity of Pynchon's readers, and their
loyalty, are notable - lots of "Pynch-alikes" or to
use the title of a new blog,
UnderThePynfluence.blogspot.com, but nobody does it
like Pynchon. Hence the excitement for Against the
Day.

I might argue that his books  in some ways already
constitute a "wiki" and it's taken web technology this
many years to catch up with Pynchon, with the
functionality to express the web of annotations that
necessarily grow out of reading his books. 

I know at least one super-useful web site that got
created because the web developer realized only a web
of hyperlinks could provide any sort of map, guide,
index, concordance, etc to Gravity's Rainbow, so he
learned how to build a web site to do that.   Wiki
just provides, out of a box more or less, a quicker,
more efficient way to do this, as far as I can tell,
plus it takes things several steps further by it
enabling a community of researcher/editors/copyeditors
- including the kind of folks who look up stuff and
type it out and share it in Pynchon-l, for example -
to put it in a more accessible database form. Post it
here on Pynchon-l, argue about as necessary and
appropriate, then put it in the wiki. It can grow into
a significant resource quite quickly with a few dozen
or more expert Pynchon readers contributing.



>http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"

>http://OnlineJournalist.org


 
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