This week in pointless trivia.

[David Robsom]

What gave it away?

Still A n00b when it comes to Pynchon. I've only tackled 49, IV, SL and BE so far. Listened to maybe 15% of GR on audiobook while reading on kindle. Started V now that I'm done with the latest. 

My point was basically that Britney Spears, Barenaked Ladies, and DragonBall Z are representative of our cultural interests, which is ehh not good. They represent our interests as consumers of pop culture, participants in the machinery of late capitalism. 

My question would be how realistic do you find the book, and how much does this affect your opinion?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 6, 2013, at 20:50, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm barely 1/3 into BE, but your question begs me to ask you if you have read Gravity's Rainbow.
> 
>> On Sunday, October 6, 2013, David Robsom wrote:
>> For those who didn't enjoy BE, is your dissatisfaction perhaps linked to the temporal setting? Treatment of 11 September aside (objectionable to some maybe for obvious reasons), do you feel that the time period doesn't lend itself to being a great P. novel?
>> 
>> Pynchon is great at capturing cultural trends, but American culture wasn't exactly thriving in the early 00s. Did the banality of the moment bleed into the book? Did 9/11 expose us as vapid? If BE is a cultural critique, it's a pretty harsh criticism. If that's P.'s goal, maybe he wants to generate these feeling of distaste. 
>> 
>> I dunno too much. 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>>> On Oct 6, 2013, at 20:17, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> why even read this new drivel when u have GR? oh how i pine for another margherita erdmann. who u gonna compare? yashmeen? frenesi? the new mom? plz
>>> gonna take awhile to forgive him
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 6:46 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> What a long thoughtful post. Thanks.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>> 
>>> On Oct 6, 2013, at 4:33 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> > Mark Kohut sez:Some of us are waiting for the Group Read to try to show aesthetic value. Stating it without pointing to the text is just more opinionizing.
>>> > Some of us have even been told by some others that not much could be said or pointed to that could change a negative first reading. So it goes.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Ouch, Mark. I take your point. The fact that I said that nothing can change the fact that I didn't enjoy the book, certainly doesn't mean that I'm not interested in learning what others here have to say about it, or to learn about connections others have made that I've missed.
>>> >
>>> > I was opining to my husband last night, after we'd just finished watching the movie Gravity 3D (2013) (which we both hated), that it's often much easier to explain why you hate a movie (in this case: cornball dialogue, poorly-crafted characters, miniscule plot, cheesy theme, visual effects that didn’t draw you in, questionable physics), than why you love it. The latter tend to hit one on a personal, visceral level that's hard to delineate, while over-analyzing and ripping to shreds a bad movie is one of the great modern pastimes.
>>> >
>>> > But I'd have to say that the opposite holds true with Pynchon. I could go on for hours obsessing over every bit that I loved from his earlier works, but what I dislike most about Bleeding Edge fell into two categories: things that I felt were lacking (so that I could hardly point to them), and things that hit me on a visceral level.
>>> >
>>> > Of what was lacking, well, there wasn’t a single passage that made me want to read it aloud to my long-suffering family members, or that sent me on an emotional/intellectual reverie, or made me marvel at an amazing connection that I’d never considered (such as ionic bonds and fascism!), or that even made me want to rush to my computer to do a google search. Not one. That’s pretty bad for a Pynchon book. Of course, others here may have had a different experience, and I’m very open to hearing about what others considered the best passages in the book.Laura
>>> >
>>> > SPOILERS FOLLOW:
>>> >
>>> > Of the things that hit my guts in a negative way, that’s, of course, an entirely personal reaction, that I don’t expect others to share with me. But here are some:
>>> >
>>> > I mentioned in a previous post that Chapter 29 offended me, in its haphazard depiction of the events of 9-11. Well, it really did. If Pynchon felt it was too emotionally charged to write about, and decided to give it a perfunctory treatment (“And there it all is. Bad turns to worse.”), then why did he bother to set this novel in NYC in 2001? As a matter of fact, I thought his more surreal treatment of it in ATD (the city under attack sequence – don’t have the book nigh) captured the whole thing much more eloquently, and was one of my favorite sequences in the book.
>>> > I’m also offended by the idea that some reviewers have put forth, that this is some sort of novel of manners about present-day NYC, when in reality, it’s a description of a microcosm (the techie culture) that’s known only to the people who inhabit it. No one can write a novel about NYC without appending the famous Naked City disclaimer. On a personal note, my family has lived in this city for just over a hundred years, when my grandparents emigrated here from Russia (more or less). I am a New Yorker, no, I’m a fucking New Yorker, and I spring from the microcosm that consists of NY lefty Jews. I’m not saying this makes my view of the book more valid, but it explains why so much of it pisses me off.
>>> >
>>> > I’ve grown up in this community, and I can tell you that Maxine and her sister are not remotely the typical outcome. I’m not saying that no Jewish lefty family has ever spawned a gun-toter, or a corporate wife, but I’ve never heard of this, even anecdotally (friend of a friend kind of thing). I’ve known the Long Island variety of Jew that’s strayed more f
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