The novel changed my life. I was an English major when I read it when it first came out. Roger Mexico using the Poisson distribution to tally the V-2 bomb hits on London (actual data) led me to the study of statistics, my profession.
An incredible book! I remember being quite confused the first time I read it, but in spite of that enjoying the marvelous writing throughout. Now I reread it every couple years. I don't think there is an episode in GR where Pynchon is not operating on AT LEAST three or four different subtextual levels at once. He is an absolute master, a writer's writer, who pushed the bounds of what a novel could and can be. I wonder if books will ever be this good again? Thank you for these commentaries.
It's by far the funniest book I have ever read. I remember laughing out loud at the scene where Pointsman (as I recall anyway) is fantasizing about winning a Nobel prize for his research into Slothrope. Such is his pleasure, he masturbates and cums while crying 'Stockholm'! I can't think of a funnier passage in any other book I have ever read1
The cyclical parabolic arc describing world ages can also be seen in Giambattista Vico's New Science with the divine, heroic, and human eras. Vico was huge for the development of Joyce's FW, so I figured I'd mention it. Thanks for all your hard work, John.
Holy shit. The master exegete has returned ready to slaughter all the other pseudo-content creators. In less than a year we will have 20 videos explaining Finnegans Wake and all the western canon that is necessary before understanding it ... and it is going to be amazing. Thank you very much for the work you are doing, John !!
I’m turning 41 this year, and just reading Pynchon for the first time with GR. Halfway through and I love it, enough so that I have already purchased M&D and AtD. But there’s no denying that GR is difficult, and a lot of it is hard to grasp. I know I will be reading it again and I will grasp more the 2nd time around. But I’m finding it profound. Profane and purposefully absurd too, but definitely profound. I also find certain pages of it simply beautiful. Sad and beautiful. I’ll be watching your videos as I work my way through the books. I appreciate you making them. I’m curious if you would mind giving your personal ranking of all of Pynchon’s novels? And I’m also curious to know if his other novels are as difficult as GR?
Something interesting. In an essay titled "closer my couch than thee" Pychon talks in theological terms about the history of laziness. One major points in the dialectic of laziness is Ben Franklins "poor richard's almanac" which he considers a pseudo-secularized diest praise of diligence that he considers to be met in response by Hermann Melvilles "bartlby the scrivener", I think the epigraph is an allusion to this line of thought as a consistent theme throughout the book is either the drive to further engage in the hidden project around the war and the rocket or to disengage with it and live a worldy life (mexico and jessica, leni and franz) for example.
Lewis Mumford’s “Pentagon of Power”: the utopian promise of a New World, its subversion by ancient predilections for cruelty, and the tithes we pay to Technology, seems to inform the theme of the text more than any secondary source I’ve found.
New world utopian dreams appearing every few hundred years, when the burden of a corrupted civilization overwhelms the polity. If there’s a cycle it goes: New World, geographical or political or both, is colonized, new world is corrupted/tarnished by latent old world, technological advances provide means for exploring new world, new world colonized etc etc ad infinitum
Cause - effect (relativity also questions this, disrupts German idealistic thinking as well) Want to hear more about this :) Preterite - not working, left out fully from society. Not rewarded with money/marriage. Not centre of society
The psychic tolll of living on Mars would be too much. Imagine spending your life on a dead sterile world. An environment devoid of life. It would be a true horror.
I am pretty sure, you are mistaken about Einstein .... Relativity does not REVERSE cause and effect !!! The insights of the theory of special relativity confirmed the assumption of causality, but they made the meaning of the word "simultaneous" observer-dependent. In the theory of general relativity, the concept of causality is generalized in the most straightforward way: the effect must belong to the future light cone of its cause, even if the spacetime is curved.
great stuff. the only thing odd about is that your voice and mouth are not in synch. like bad Bruce Lee movie voice over. am i the only one experiencing this, i wonder?
Basing overall quality on entertaining quality also is very shallow. I can read Millennium trilogy (and this is quality low-brow literature) and feel very entertained, but it definitely isn't on level of overall quality (pacing, language, originality) of books like GR, Infinite Jest or Blood Meridian.
@@haze1123 it is a novel about the development of the military industrial state apparatus and the blueprint for the destruction of humanity but it is also beautifully written and funny and absurd. It reminds me a lot of Moby Dick, another novel that blowhards are easily intimidated by and assume is "not entertaining." GR is super fun to read once you have gotten to a level of understanding with it and is constantly rewarding to revisit. Complexity may not equal quality but it is a quality its own. Thomas Pynchon set a truly enormous intellectual task for himself of trying to explain how the whole world went so wrong without losing the audience or being ponderous or boring and he accomplished it. That's why it's an incredible work of art. I wish people wouldn't play up the complexity or difficulty so much because it is truly rewarding if you take the time to read it (and you don't even *need* supplemental materials - when he wrote it in the 60s and 70s he did it knowing such materials didn't exist. The fact that we can look up so much historical information and criticism and analysis of the novel is just good fortune for us)
@@bfox420 Sounds like you're a very careful and intelligent reader. Can you describe the funniest plot twist that happens in the novel? I might have missed it.
@haze1123 the girl screaming attack helicopter instead of beautiful thief because she couldn't pronounced R but it was 20s so nobody knew what attack helicopter is.
The fact that you have to read second hand sources to “get it“ should automatically disqualify this book, and others like it, from being the best of any century.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
This novel changed my life, i see it as more of a personal guide than a novel, it’s so good.
The novel changed my life. I was an English major when I read it when it first came out. Roger Mexico using the Poisson distribution to tally the V-2 bomb hits on London (actual data) led me to the study of statistics, my profession.
Damnn
Damn I barely graduated high-school and read this and loved it. Now i'm a physical laborer. WHAT GIVES?!
An incredible book! I remember being quite confused the first time I read it, but in spite of that enjoying the marvelous writing throughout. Now I reread it every couple years. I don't think there is an episode in GR where Pynchon is not operating on AT LEAST three or four different subtextual levels at once. He is an absolute master, a writer's writer, who pushed the bounds of what a novel could and can be. I wonder if books will ever be this good again? Thank you for these commentaries.
It's by far the funniest book I have ever read. I remember laughing out loud at the scene where Pointsman (as I recall anyway) is fantasizing about winning a Nobel prize for his research into Slothrope. Such is his pleasure, he masturbates and cums while crying 'Stockholm'! I can't think of a funnier passage in any other book I have ever read1
Thank you John, I really can't think of another place, really anywhere, where you can get such erudite, concise, and all around brilliant commentary
Many thanks!
The cyclical parabolic arc describing world ages can also be seen in Giambattista Vico's New Science with the divine, heroic, and human eras. Vico was huge for the development of Joyce's FW, so I figured I'd mention it. Thanks for all your hard work, John.
What an awesome analysis! You have blown my mind away. You made my day! Thanks!
Holy shit. The master exegete has returned ready to slaughter all the other pseudo-content creators.
In less than a year we will have 20 videos explaining Finnegans Wake and all the western canon that is necessary before understanding it ... and it is going to be amazing.
Thank you very much for the work you are doing, John !!
You are quite welcome! And you're right: both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are coming!
John, thank you for this video. Take care of yourself and please keep up the great videos. You are inspiring!
I’m turning 41 this year, and just reading Pynchon for the first time with GR. Halfway through and I love it, enough so that I have already purchased M&D and AtD. But there’s no denying that GR is difficult, and a lot of it is hard to grasp. I know I will be reading it again and I will grasp more the 2nd time around.
But I’m finding it profound. Profane and purposefully absurd too, but definitely profound. I also find certain pages of it simply beautiful. Sad and beautiful.
I’ll be watching your videos as I work my way through the books. I appreciate you making them.
I’m curious if you would mind giving your personal ranking of all of Pynchon’s novels?
And I’m also curious to know if his other novels are as difficult as GR?
Something interesting. In an essay titled "closer my couch than thee" Pychon talks in theological terms about the history of laziness. One major points in the dialectic of laziness is Ben Franklins "poor richard's almanac" which he considers a pseudo-secularized diest praise of diligence that he considers to be met in response by Hermann Melvilles "bartlby the scrivener", I think the epigraph is an allusion to this line of thought as a consistent theme throughout the book is either the drive to further engage in the hidden project around the war and the rocket or to disengage with it and live a worldy life (mexico and jessica, leni and franz) for example.
Lewis Mumford’s “Pentagon of Power”: the utopian promise of a New World, its subversion by ancient predilections for cruelty, and the tithes we pay to Technology, seems to inform the theme of the text more than any secondary source I’ve found.
New world utopian dreams appearing every few hundred years, when the burden of a corrupted civilization overwhelms the polity. If there’s a cycle it goes: New World, geographical or political or both, is colonized, new world is corrupted/tarnished by latent old world, technological advances provide means for exploring new world, new world colonized etc etc ad infinitum
Awesome I just read this! Now I just want to read it again
5:50 but there's actually a correspondence here, just not what one would expect: Virgo opposes Pisces in the zodiac
I love this so much thank you again 🤗
an excellent beginning
alright. this oughta be good around the time we get to brigadier pudding's lovely encounter early on in section 2
thank you!!!!
Awesome, man, back on that horse! Or I guess rocket, in this case. Another Pynchon book I've read.
Cause - effect (relativity also questions this, disrupts German idealistic thinking as well)
Want to hear more about this :)
Preterite - not working, left out fully from society. Not rewarded with money/marriage. Not centre of society
Is banana chosen for phallic imagery? Is it just sweet sickening?
This is great..Gravity's Rainbow is infinitely complex.
The psychic tolll of living on Mars would be too much. Imagine spending your life on a dead sterile world. An environment devoid of life. It would be a true horror.
Sounds a lot like 21st century america...
Life in a bleak desert, far from civilisation. Even worse than living in Dubai or Saudi Arabia.
Sounds like america. Except on mars I dont have to worry about being killed by random migrants.
You got me right away with the Frank Miller reference :-)
I am pretty sure, you are mistaken about Einstein .... Relativity does not REVERSE cause and effect !!! The insights of the theory of special relativity confirmed the assumption of causality, but they made the meaning of the word "simultaneous" observer-dependent. In the theory of general relativity, the concept of causality is generalized in the most straightforward way: the effect must belong to the future light cone of its cause, even if the spacetime is curved.
Just curious, how should one read the book and the commentary by Weisenburger? Commentary first, then the book? Or simultaneously to the book?
Weisenburger first then the chapter so you know what you're looking at.
Very excited about this Pynchon series. Will you do Mason&Dixon too?
That's the plan.
Never read the book but what makes it so great? Simply because it is complex?
To me? Depth and absurdity.
It is a singular event that resists summation. Simply read it and see for yourself.
Maybe the most beautifully poetic prose I've yet encountered. Just my take.
Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy is miles ahead of Gravity's Rainbow and anything Pynchon has written.
I found Lookout Cartridge confusing and hard to get into. I need to give it another go, his stuff seems very dense.
Hey John, what do you think about Proust’s In Search of Lost time?
One of the best novels ever written. Hands down.
great stuff. the only thing odd about is that your voice and mouth are not in synch. like bad Bruce Lee movie voice over. am i the only one experiencing this, i wonder?
With novels, complexity does not equal quality. GR is a rat's nest of riddles, but not entertaining. The emperor has no clothes.
Basing overall quality on entertaining quality also is very shallow. I can read Millennium trilogy (and this is quality low-brow literature) and feel very entertained, but it definitely isn't on level of overall quality (pacing, language, originality) of books like GR, Infinite Jest or Blood Meridian.
Fiction can be entertaining or enlightening. When done well, it is both.
So, what important lessons did you learn from GR?
@@haze1123 it is a novel about the development of the military industrial state apparatus and the blueprint for the destruction of humanity but it is also beautifully written and funny and absurd. It reminds me a lot of Moby Dick, another novel that blowhards are easily intimidated by and assume is "not entertaining." GR is super fun to read once you have gotten to a level of understanding with it and is constantly rewarding to revisit. Complexity may not equal quality but it is a quality its own. Thomas Pynchon set a truly enormous intellectual task for himself of trying to explain how the whole world went so wrong without losing the audience or being ponderous or boring and he accomplished it. That's why it's an incredible work of art. I wish people wouldn't play up the complexity or difficulty so much because it is truly rewarding if you take the time to read it (and you don't even *need* supplemental materials - when he wrote it in the 60s and 70s he did it knowing such materials didn't exist. The fact that we can look up so much historical information and criticism and analysis of the novel is just good fortune for us)
@@bfox420 Sounds like you're a very careful and intelligent reader.
Can you describe the funniest plot twist that happens in the novel? I might have missed it.
@haze1123 the girl screaming attack helicopter instead of beautiful thief because she couldn't pronounced R but it was 20s so nobody knew what attack helicopter is.
The fact that you have to read second hand sources to “get it“ should automatically disqualify this book, and others like it, from being the best of any century.
No, it just means there are smarter people than you.
@@eskybakzu712 care to elaborate?
Whoosh 😂
@@autofocus4556 care to elaborate?
@@kevinarriaza1951 it’s above your understanding. It’s godlike in its stature.