review BE

[Otto]

So far, so good...

Review of Bleeding Edge — by Albert Rolls, Orbit: Writing Around
Pynchon Vol 2, No 1 (2013)

The Crying of West 79th Street — by Ed Park, Bookforum, Sept/Oct/Nov 2013

Thomas Pynchon’s '9/11 Novel' Bleeding Edge: Let the Wild
Prognosticating Begin — by Alex Pappademas, Grantland, February 26,
2013

Read the First Page of Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel, Bleeding Edge — by
Josh Jones, Open Culture, April 21, 2013

Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He’s Always Been — by J.K.
Trotter, The Atlantic Wire, June 17, 2013

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon — by Rebecca Glenn, The Book Frog,
Sunday, July 21, 2013

Bleeding Edge — by David Kipen, Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2013

On the Edge with Thomas Pynchon — by Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal,
August 19, 2013

On the Thomas Pynchon Trail: From the Long Island of His Boyhood to
the 'Yupper West Side' of His New Novel — by Boris Kachka, Vulture,
8/25/13

Maxine of the Mean Streets — by Keith Miller, Literary Review, 29/08/2013

Pynchonicity — by Gary Lippman, The Paris Review, September 5, 2013

"A Search Result With No Instructions on How to Look for It" — by Troy
Patterson, Slate, Friday, Sept. 6, 2013

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon — by Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman, 07.
September 2013

Pynchon’s potboiler explores 9/11 attacks — by Andrew Ervin,
PhillyCom, Sunday, September 8, 2013

Thomas Pynchon Returns as a Prophet of the Post–Snowden Era — by Jason
Tanz, Wired, 09.09.13

Pynchon’s Deep Web — by Michael Jarvis, Los Angeles Review of Books,
September 10th, 2013

A Calamity Tailor–Made for Internet Conspiracy Theories — by Michiko
Kakutani, The New York Times, September 10, 2013

"Bleeding Edge": Thomas Pynchon goes truther — by Andrew Leonard,
Salon, Wednesday, Sep 11, 2013

Thomas Pynchon Takes on September 11 — by Adam Kirsch, The New
Republic, September 11, 2013

Thomas Pynchon meets 9/11 in 'Bleeding Edge' — by Carolyn Kellogg, LA
Times, September 11, 2013

Thomas Pynchon Meets His Match: The Internet — by Alexander Nazaryan,
The Daily Beast Sep 11, 2013

Reading about the day the towers fell — by David L. Ulin, LA Times,
September 11, 2013

Book World: Thomas Pynchon’s 'Bleeding Edge' — by Michael Dirda, The
Washington Post, September 11, 2013

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon — by Theo Tait, The Guardian, Friday
13 September 2013

Pynchon’s new book "Bleeding Edge" is call to arms — by Mike Fischer,
JS Online, Sept. 13, 2013

Thomas Pynchon: Bleeding Edge - A Novel (Jonathan Cape) — by Hugh
McDonald, the Herald, Saturday 14 September 2013

No one writes likes Pynchon on the 'Bleeding Edge' — by Don Oldenburg,
USA Today, September 14, 2013

Thomas Pynchon’s Silicon Alley — by Mike Godwin, September 14, 2013


2013/9/14 Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com>:
> This was great up to the point where he started discussing BE and I had to
> shut it down, for now.
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:14 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I don't need nor like psychoanalists of folks they've never met.
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, September 12, 2013, Phil Burnside wrote:
>>>
>>> SEPTEMBER 12, 2013: [Vladimir Putin][North Korea][David Foster
>>> Wallace][Organic farming]
>>>
>>>
>>> ARCHIVE / 2013 / OCTOBER
>>> < Previous Article | Next Article >
>>> REVIEW — From the October 2013 issue
>>> First Family, Second Life
>>> Thomas Pynchon goes online
>>> By Joshua Cohen
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Single Page
>>> Printing Page
>>> Discussed in this essay:
>>> Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press. 496 pages. $28.95.
>>> P
>>> inco de Normandie sailed to England with William the Conqueror. His
>>> son, Hugh, held seven “knights’ fees in Lincolnshire” and four
>>> “bovates in Friskney.” Four centuries later, his descendant Edward
>>> Pynchon was ennobled and granted a coat of arms “per bend argent and
>>> sable, three roundles with a bordure engrailed, counterchanged.” By
>>> then the Pincheuns had settled snugly into gentry life in Essex.
>>> Nicholas Pinchon became High Sheriff of London in 1533, and his son,
>>> or nephew, John married Jane Empson, daughter of Sir Richard Empson, a
>>> minister to, and casualty of, the doomed regime of Henry VII. John’s
>>> son was also John, and his son was William Pynchon, who in 1630 sailed
>>> with John Winthrop to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which he
>>> was elected treasurer. He established the towns of Roxbury and, while
>>> pursuing the fur trade, Springfield, where he deposed the accused
>>> witches in the trial preceding Salem. He served as model for Colonel
>>> Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and in 1650
>>> wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, whose critique of
>>> Puritan Calvinism caused it to be burned in Boston and to become the
>>> New World’s first banned book, though only nine copies survived the
>>> pyre. (Among those who voted against the censure was William
>>> Hauthorne, Hawthorne’s first colonist ancestor.) This was the
>>> proto-American literary debut of a family that later included the
>>> Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823–1904), president of Trinity
>>> College, Hartford, and author of The Chemical Forces:
>>> Heat–Light–Electricity . . . An Introduction to Chemical Physics; Dr.
>>> Edwin Pynchon (1856–1914), author of “Surgical Correction of
>>> Deformities of the Nasal Septum”; and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., born
>>> in 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, author of V., The Crying of Lot
>>> 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against
>>> the Day, Inherent Vice, and now Bleeding Edge.
>>>
>>> Anyone who’s written at the end of so long and distinguished a line
>>> has been faced with a choice: either embrace the legacy or attempt to
>>> disassociate from it. (Hawthorne added the w to distance himself from
>>> John Hathorne, cruelest of the Salem magistrates.) This, of course, is
>>> merely a more public version of the decision of whether, and how, to
>>> transmute individual experience into prose. Thomas Pynchon — the most
>>> private, or publicly private, of American novelists — has been
>>> considering such disclosures for half a century now, in the way he’s
>>> handled both his famous family in his work and his own fame in life.
>>> The single overtly autobiographical statement he has provided to date
>>> appears in the introduction to a collection of his early and only
>>> short fiction, Slow Learner:
>>> Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had
>>> nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is
>>> nearly the direct opposite. . . . [F]or in fact the fiction both
>>> published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was
>>> precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by
>>> having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more
>>> shared levels of the life we all really live.
>>> I
>>> ’ve read that introduction a dozen times, and most of Pynchon’s novels
>>> at least twice, yet I’m still not sure what to make of this assertion.
>>> I’m still not sure whether V. (1963) — which takes as its premise the
>>> search for a mysterious, free-floating signifier that might be a woman
>>> named Victoria, and/or Veronica, and/or an incarnation of the goddess
>>> Venus, and/or the city of Valletta, and/or victory in WWI and/or WWII
>>> — becomes any clearer with the knowledge that Pynchon wrote it after
>>> serving in the Navy and attending Cornell, where he audited lectures
>>> by that shape-shifter Nabokov. Nor am I sure whether The Crying of Lot
>>> 49 (1966) — which concerns the machinations of a certain Yoyodyne,
>>> “one of the giants of the aerospace industry” — is enriched by the
>>> information that between 1960 and 1962 Pynchon lived in Seattle and
>>> worked for Boeing as a technical writer for the Bomarc
>>> interceptor-missile project. Then again, it strikes me that Pynchon’s
>>> defense-contracting stint finds direct expression in Gravity’s Rainbow
>>> (1973), that treatment of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. But
>>> I’m still confused as to whether I should read the hero of that novel
>>> — Tyrone Slothrop, an American G.I. whose erections foretell the
>>> ground-zero impacts of V-2s in London — as an embodiment of John
>>> Winthrop or, because Slothrop’s ancestor William Slothrop is portrayed
>>> as having published a controversial theological treatise called On
>>> Preterition, as a surrogate for the author himself.
>>> Gravity’s Rainbow was written by hand on quadrille engineering paper,
>>> and on Kool cigarettes, coffee, and cheeseburgers (to name just the
>>> legal substances), in Mexico City and in a whitewashed bungalow on
>>> 33rd Street in Manhattan Beach, California. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize
>>> committee refused to honor the novel, despite the jurors’ unanimous
>>> recommendation (the committee called it “turgid” and “overwritten,”
>>> “obscene” and “unreadable”). But it went on to win the National Book
>>> Award in 1974, for which ceremony Pynchon dispatched a comedian,
>>> “Professor” Irwin Corey, to deliver a nonsensical improvised speech.
>>> In the Eighties, Pynchon left his agent, Candida Donadio, to be
>>> represented by Melanie Jackson, great-granddaughter of Theodore
>>> Roosevelt and granddaughter of Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court
>>> justice and Nuremberg prosecutor. The two married in the Nineties and
>>> had a son, Jackson, who was such a fan of The Simpsons that Pynchon
>>> made a cameo (his animation was drawn with a paper bag instead of a
>>> head). Only ten images of Pynchon are publicly available, including a
>>> video captured by CNN in 1997 that occasioned this rebuke: “ ‘Recluse’
>>> is a code word generated by journalists . . . meaning ‘doesn’t like to
>>> talk to reporters.’ ” Then there’s the photo published by the Times of
>>> London in 1997, which provoked legal threats from Henry Holt,
>>> Pynchon’s publisher at the time.
>>> What else? Pynchon was raised Catholic and attended Mass. He was the
>>> best friend of Richard Fariña (author of Been Down So Long It Looks
>>> Like Up to Me) and the best man at Fariña’s wedding to Mimi Baez
>>> (Joan’s sister). He was reportedly so ashamed of his Bugs Bunny teeth
>>> that he underwent extensive cosmetic dental surgery . . .
>>> All this information came to me via the Internet, which has
>>> established Pynchon as its literary divinity. Not Philip K. Dick, not
>>> William Gibson — it’s Pynchon who commands the largest and loudest
>>> community online. It’s a congregation of fanboys, academics,
>>> techno-anarchists, wannabe fictioneers, parents’ basement–dwellers,
>>> and burnouts — some using real names, some using fake names, many
>>> anonymous — who analyze and squabble over every scrap of the Shroud
>>> and sliver of the Cross, in search of the Message.
>>> In the early days of home-use Internet, back when the first major
>>> e-marketer appeared under the sobriquet Yoyodyne (sold to Yahoo in
>>> 1998 for $30 million in stock), users of Yahoo and AOL message boards
>>> and chat rooms asserted that Pynchon was J. D. Salinger or the
>>> Unabomber, a Branch Davidian or “Wanda Tinasky,” who in witty
>>> mock-Pynchonian letters to the editors of the Anderson Valley
>>> Advertiser identified “herself” as a bag lady living under a bridge in
>>> northern California. With the gradual uploading of scholarship in the
>>> form of journal PDFs and dissertation .docs, the Internet got its act
>>> together, and by the mid-Nineties the digital Pynchonverse had become
>>> a disciplined research collective of amateurs and professionals,
>>> though one that took a break every toke or two to speculate wildly.
>>> Hey, get a load of this — Pynchon’s working on a novel about Lewis &
>>> Clark (rather, Mason & Dixon); Michael Naumann, past publisher of
>>> Henry Holt and former German minister of culture, helped Pynchon
>>> gather materials concerning the David Hilbert circle in Göttingen, and
>>> said the author’s next book would trace the amours of the Russian
>>> mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (material appearing in Against the
>>> Day). Pynchon himself never participated in any of this, of course,
>>> though there were at least a dozen contributors I can remember who
>>> claimed to be him, or were suspected of being him. My favorite posted
>>> under the webonym Martin Scribler, and if you’re bored already:
>>> waste.org.
>>> S
>>> erious literary discussion on the Internet began with Pynchon fans —
>>> which is just the type of generalization to spark a flame war with the
>>> science-fiction freaks, who’d claim that the Pynchonites showed up
>>> late to the party. I certainly did. It was 1994, and I was thirteen or
>>> fourteen when I found the Playboys in the basement and the Pynchon
>>> novels on a shelf in my father’s office. On the floor between was the
>>> new computer, a Gateway. Internet porn was difficult to find and slow
>>> to load, but the Pynchon guides, being text-based, were instantly
>>> gratifying. I read the threads — the rumor and gossip arbitrage,
>>> conspiracy swaps and paranoia — as if they were stray strands of
>>> Pynchon’s own narratology. I had a 28.8k dial-up modem and, despite
>>> all Pynchon’s warnings about technocracy’s incursions, no notion of
>>> what surveillance and social control lay ahead.
>>> It was the Web that educated me about contemporary literature, not
>>> through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there,
>>> but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what
>>> Pynchon — and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T.
>>> Vollmann and David Foster Wallace — were working toward in fiction: a
>>> plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the
>>> characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among
>>> institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections),
>>> and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I
>>> read about Modernism — big M — and postmodernism — small p — thanks to
>>> links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I
>>> couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a
>>> GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made
>>> by and intended for a small but discerning audience; postmodernism, by
>>> contrast, had popular or populist aspirations — it wanted to be
>>> famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements
>>> connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom
>>> LeClair to describe the methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don
>>> DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula LeGuin, Joseph McElroy
>>> — and Pynchon.
>>> Before these writers, books deployed closed systems of symbols that,
>>> if untangled, provided a substrate of meaning separate from, but
>>> communicating with, the action and dialogue (think of Fitzgerald’s ad
>>> for Dr. T. J. Eckleburg or Hemingway’s bullfighting). But these new
>>> writers favored books that operated on open systems, that treated the
>>> entire world symbolically, and that were inextricably enmeshed with
>>> the literary whole (think of the contrast between twentieth-century
>>> sensibility and eighteenth-century language in Mason & Dixon, or the
>>> palimpsest of genres — scientific, spy thriller, teen adventure,
>>> western — in Against the Day). Perhaps the paragon of the systems
>>> novel’s associative processes is the Byron the Bulb episode of
>>> Gravity’s Rainbow. An ostensibly immortal lightbulb named Byron
>>> illuminates, among other places, “an all-girl opium den” and “the home
>>> of a glass-blower who is afraid of the night” in Weimar Berlin, the
>>> brothel of a Hamburg prostitute whose “customer tonight is a
>>> cost-accountant who likes to have bulbs screwed into his asshole,” and
>>> the bunk of a Nazi scientist in a subterranean rocket factory in
>>> Nordhausen. It’s a section whose fifteen-year time frame also
>>> accommodates examinations of “ ‘Phoebus,’ the international light-bulb
>>> cartel, headquartered in Switzerland”; the mutual business interests
>>> of General Electric and Krupp; the production of filaments; and the
>>> synthesis of tungsten carbide.
>>> Fiction has long been described in the terms of a coeval technology,
>>> at least since the fade of the vacuum tube, but it was the genius of
>>> the systems novelists to produce fiction expressly along the same
>>> schematics. In the Seventies their novels could be said to function
>>> like transistors, while in the Eighties they could be said to function
>>> like integrated circuits. By the Nineties, however, systems technique
>>> had been usurped online: the Internet replicated its protocols, while
>>> the Web replicated its surface-shifting — the rapidly changing scenes,
>>> the characters introduced, developed, then dropped.
>>> Back when I frequented Amazon — before my favorite independent
>>> bookstores began closing and I quit the site, cold turkey, in 2006 — I
>>> was fascinated by how much it resembled the novels I was buying on it:
>>> I’d click on a book by Pynchon, and then lower down or on a sidebar of
>>> the page I’d find other titles to add to my cart, suggestions
>>> generated by the site’s algorithms, but also supplied by other users.
>>> People who bought Mason & Dixon also bought Vineland; if I clicked, I
>>> found that people who bought Vineland also bought books about the
>>> history of the FBI, the CIA, and the War on Drugs, and from there I’d
>>> be just a click or two away from the people who also bought
>>> fallout-shelter survival kits, pallets of canned meat, bottled water,
>>> and tinfoil. Wikipedia’s debut reinforced this organizational lesson.
>>> As of the date of this writing, the voluminous Thomas Pynchon wiki —
>>> which if printed out would surely eclipse the oeuvre of its subject
>
>
>
>
> --
> www.innergroovemusic.com