r/ThomasPynchon

I've been reading Gravity's Rainbow for a little over a month and I'm currently trying to finish the third part. As stated in the title, it is amazing to me how Pynchon is able to talk about Argentinian authors like Borges, Lugones, and Hernández with such deep knowledge. He also compares Perón with Rosas and talks about los descamisados. Beyond that, he even knows the way gauchos talked. I'm sure most Argentinians nowadays don't know some of the words El Ñato says. How was a North American writer in the seventies aware of them?
I'm used to watching media that portrays Argentina or Latin America completely wrongly, or with a very surface-level understanding, so this is very surprising to me. Based on that, I'm willing to take anything he says about Central Asian tribes, or any other culture, as fact.

Howdy Weirdos,

It's Sunday again, and I assume you know what the means? Another thread of "What Are You Into This Week"?

Our weekly thread dedicated to discussing what we've been reading, watching, listening to, and playing the past week.

Have you:

• Been reading a good book? A few good books?
• Did you watch an exceptional stage production?
• Listen to an amazing new album or song or band? Discovered an amazing old album/song/band?
• Watch a mind-blowing film or tv show?
• Immerse yourself in an incredible video game? Board game? RPG?

We want to hear about it, every Sunday.

Please, tell us all about it. Recommend and suggest what you've been reading/watching/playing/listening to. Talk to others about what they've been into.

Tell us:

What Are You Into This Week?

- r/ThomasPynchon Moderator Team

So I recently watched Babylon, a 2022 movie directed by Damien Chazelle about the crazy world of 1920s Hollywood and the transition from silent film to sound. I liked it personally, but this post isn’t about the movie itself.

There’s a character that appears throughout the movie called “the Count” who wears a Dracula-style cape and deals drugs to movie stars. I thought that seemed familiar until I remembered what it reminded me of: Mucho Maas in Vineland, who after divorcing Oedipa became a successful record producer and took on the persona of “Count Drugula”, wearing a stereotypical Dracula costume while doling out drugs to people.

To me this seemed too specific to be coincidental. While it’s possible that Chazelle got inspiration directly from Vineland, I was wondering if maybe both him and Pynchon were drawing from an existing archetype/character/historical figure. Was there anything like this in pop culture before? Was “drug dealer Count Dracula” an actual person or character?

Looking up “Count Drugula” you see songs with that title released after 2000. “Dracula” and “drug dealer” shows some articles about Bela Lugosi confessing to drug use, which is interesting but unlikely to be THE inspiration for both characters.

Anyone here have any insight into this? Curious to see what people say

gravity's rainbow. Just finished Part 1 yesterday. Starting Part 2 today. But now I'm thinking, in paranoiac fashion, about how appropriate this book is for me at this point in my life (this book was made for me, like Slothrop's rocket). "An army of lovers can be defeated". The working class is invisible in this book, all you see are isolated and atomized bureaucrats, officers, professionals.

Since transitioning from industrial labor to cleaning college dorms, I learned a lot about my own psychology. This transition didn't occur in a personal vacuum, or at random: it happened because I moved in with my boyfriend. The factories around here only had night shifts available, and besides, his mom used to be a cleaner at the same college I now work at. He likes that I remind him of his mom. He even got a cheap limo from a funeral home when I moved in, because he grew up hearing this story about how his mom couldn't get her car to start one day and a friend had to drive her to work in a limo. Roger and Jessica are, I guess, the main lovers in the story.

Well, love is not enough. During the semester, I got depressed as fuck. I stopped doing much of anything—reading, writing (not that I had ever been a very disciplined reader or writer, but this was different). My cat also died, which didn't help. For some reason, I became very interested in bataille, but in a very superficial way that didn't involve much actual reading. I told my analyst I wanted to dissolve and become a convulsing body with no identity. In a few sessions, I managed to breakdown into a bizarre combination of laughter, tears, and yes, convulsions. Nothing was very interesting or worthwhile.

Well, the semester ended. The students went home, and we started deep cleaning the dormitories. This is a highly collaborative process: a crew of about twenty of us go from building to building. During the semester, I was completely isolated, mopping my own sections, cleaning the toilets I was designated, never getting to meet the other cleaners in other buildings. All of a sudden, now, it's like being in a factory again: after deep cleaning the students' rooms, we have scrub crews of five people where one person slops, followed by a scrubber, followed by a sucker with the wet vac, followed by a warm rinse and a cold rinse.

Well, all at once I was alive again. I started reading Gravity's Rainbow—I don't know why, but I'm glad I did. I talk to my coworkers about it. We make jokes, we text and snapchat each other, tell stories about the time I put my dick in a hot pizza when I was 12 or about my one coworker's experiences in prison, or tales about when one professor got fired for smearing shit all over the walls and using it to write messages about the dean. About who got raped by their stepdad, who did this, who did that, what it means to be gay, why some people are straight, about how much students love smearing their boogers on the walls and spilling soda in the furnaces, or how much trouble they have getting their shit into the actual toilets.

It's exactly like being in a factory again. I started working on getting better at writing (slow progress). I care about reading. I get excited about things again.

Well, there is a theme here: the enormous psychological benefit of being part of a crew, a workplace, of collaborative or cooperative labor and solidarity which can make a huge difference. Just some resonances from my own life, because I think this is hugely related to the book.

I'm sure some people will get pissed off and say, again, "just read the book". But, oh well, I'm not the type of person who can quietly read a book without discussion. Sucks for you. :p

Are there any interviews (either word or video) where Alan Moore talks about his Pynchon influence,especially about reading Gravity's Rainbow??

Infinite jest is one of my favorites but I’m nonetheless daunted to read gravity’s rainbow, is the audiobook good? Is there another Pynchon novel I should start with? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

I finished reading GR over the weekend. I read it with a friend, it was my first Pynchon and we met up 5 times (once per part but twice for the longest part) to discuss. Although I didn’t use a guide, I like to write down passages I like a lot longhand as it helps me remember and it turns out….. there’s a lot of passages in the book that I loved.

So it took me about 4 months to read it, including re-reading the first 85 pages or so (this helped a lot) but it involved me really investing 1-2 hours on most days to this book. Looked up like everything I did not know about (torn on if I’d recommend this to somebody who hasn’t read it yet) and overall I had a great experience.

It feels so bittersweet that it’s over since this schizoid book was the backdrop of my life for most of 2026. Anyways, it was awesome and I can’t wait to reread it in 2 years. I liked taking notes because just reading back my notes from a few months ago is really interesting.

Also this was the most difficult book I’ve read by a pretty wide margin so proud of myself for that. Taking a break from Pynchon for a while now but my next will either be Vineland or Bleeding Edge.

That’s all, happy to be part of the club.

And most importantly: >!"Hubba, hubba! Hey, she's pretty sunburned herself. Ain'tcha? You got a leetle mulatto in there, a leetle Mayheecano, honey? You sabe es pañol? You sabe fucky-fucky?"!<

Thought Pynchon fans would appreciate these:

Barnwell Rhett
Thurlow Weed
Leverett Saltonstall 
Josiah Gorgas
Leonidas Polk
Montgomery Meigs
Gideon Pillow 
Isaac Newton Brown 
Louis Wigfall 
Salmon Chase 
Galusha Grow 
Clement Vallandingham

Read through it a few times now, and I really don't see what's going on beyond the sentimental claptrap with a bunch of people singing in a church. Up til now it's been a pretty awesome ride with shit, erections, rockets, poisson distributions, pavlovian behaviorism, fun philosophical contrasts between Roger and pointsman, questionable paranoia, constant shifts so nothing I've read remains what it was, fragmentation, shifting perspective almost like cubism, machinery, and so on. The only real problem was the lack of a proletariat and the elite/preterite framing obscuring the class struggle. Now it's becoming, like, genuinely bad literature?

Wtf is this bullshit now? Is there a lot of this? Am I missing something? Is there irony here? Satire? Anything to save this? up to this point it's been my second favorite book besides maldoror. :/

edit: the next section is good again

The obsession with dogs in GR is a connection to V2's becuase it's like becareful where you step. In dog shit or a rocket coming to hit you directly in the head. I don't know where I know this but this connection seems real.

In 2025 I wrote a long profile of Vollmann for The Metropolitan Review.

Last week I was able to coordinate a visit, thanks to his publicist at Arcade (the publisher of Table for Fortune), and met with Vollmann at his Sacramento studio. We talked for three hours about Table for Fortune, journalism, and what he's doing with the time he has left. (We also went for barbecue.)