I want to talk about this book, but it seems like the only things people discuss are the prose and the funny anecdotes

Veeky Forums, are you a Mason or a Dixon?

I'm more of a Mason

I'm more of a mason also. although dixon whipping the slave dude is something I'd do. I remember I saw some dude fighting with his gf across the street and he hauled off and knocked her out cold. I started screaming at him and chased after him. don't even know what I'd do if I caught him. he had to much distance on me though. chased him right through a crowded parking lot. weird time.

Who else wants to do a book club of M&D sometime this fall/winter?

Would be cozy.

I haven't yet started reading Pynchon, but if I enjoy lot49 and Inherent Vice I'd be down to get into M&D with you guys.
Pynchon never particularly piqued my interest because I don't typically enjoy humor, but since he's so acclaimed I'm going to check him out

>I don't typically enjoy humor
wat
if you mean you don't like things that are marketed as humourism or comedy, pynchon books aren't that, and don't base your idea of an author's reputation on Veeky Forums shitposts

Where does Pynchon fit in to the Canon? His works always seemed devoid of any meaning besides quirky, albeit genius, references and technique.

nigger pynchon is harold blooms favorite authors of the last 100 years

I started reading "The Crying in Lot 49" today and I think it is great. However, I'm 21 and I started reading again only a couple months ago (I read On The Road, Metamorphosis and Fahrenheit 451, all great) and I thought this Pynchon book was very dense. Just after reading the first chapter, I went on to read a summary on the internet to get a better idea of what I just read. There were many parts I missed and I basically said to myself "ahhh, so that's what he meant".
So, my question is simple: Is Pynchon always this hard to process, or is it that I need to read other stuff to get into this "deeper" kind of novels?
How can I develop a better skill to read?

>he unironically fell for the goofs and gags meme

You have to read him slowly, which means you have to enjoy it
Getting the stray references (which is more a game of identifying sources on what went on at the time than a search for meaning) is 99% of the time unnecessary and completely besides the point

Good advice.

>Why is Dixon able to do all this crazy shit

Laughs and Laylines. Why wouldn't Dixon go to hell "A collapsing sphere"?

>Who is Haligast?
Haligast
Hali Gast
Holy Ghast
Holy Ghost.

>What's up with Ethelmer & de Pugh flirting w/ Tenebrae?

Cousins could get away with it back then.

You ask pretty strange questions, buckaroo. Haligast is just a comic character, a gag thrown in who makes some funny puns and comments. Dixon's magical shit is learnt from Emerson and part of Pynchon's general silliness. Ethelmer and DePugh, see also cousins actually got married back then. Shit, Einstein married his cousin.

More interesting line of inquiry: Daphne du Maurier was a pretty shitty authoress who wrote and published "Rebecca" in 1938, a book that was justly derided by critics of its day as trite but was nonetheless a bestseller, and for some reason has been somewhat revived by literary critics of today as a thing to study, but is still a shit book that's more apt to be in trivia-questions and in somewhat obscure pop-culture references.

In it, it's heavily suggested that the ghost of Rebecca (to say the least) heavily disapproves of her husband marrying again, and tries to thwart it paranormally but never overtly. It's actually a bit clever how the book could be read as either romantic/realistic or as a ghost story.

Anyway, it's exactly the somewhat obscure trivia-question answer/pop-culture reference Pynchon loves to refer to in his works. Is it possible he was making a book-long allusion to it by having Rebekah haunt the work? She shows up more in the book than you would think. Look beyond her overt appearances and at the subtle hints and clues about her. Look at the consistent personification of nonhuman/nonconscious things as strangely conscious (the L.E.D. or Fang, the talking clocks, the seemingly sentient clock Emerson gives Dixon which supposedly has the secret of perpetual motion (which is what is said to be inside of Vaucanson's Duck after a certain point in her construction, which is what the soul is reputed to have), Jenkin's Ear, the Golem in the end of the story, and so on and so forth).

>Daphne du Maurier "Rebecca"
Interesting, had never heard about it. It seems more likely to be an inspiration coming from the name which happened to work well into his themes than an allusion with further purpose behind it, but one would need to have read both books to know

>inspiration coming from the name which happened to work well into his themes
That's what I was going to write too, but it sounded too speculative so I left it out. Also, I've read both works and I definitely think there's an affinity between them, for what it's worth.

What I was going to say is Pynchon probably himself decided to make an allusion to Rebecca by having Rebekah haunt Mason or afterwards realized there was a connection between the two when he first put the ghost of Rebekah in, and then realized he could actually incorporate an entire ghost story in the whole novel in the vein of "Rebecca", further adding to the kitschy tone Pynchon loves to create by mixing genre-fiction with literary fiction (there's also sci-fi elements in the book, romance, werewolves, fantasy, erotica, UFOes/discussion about extraterrestrials etc., so a huge ghost-story behind it all doesn't sound so unlikely to me).

Also, the giving of consciousness to normally unconscious/inhuman things or even animals seems to also play an important part by talking about the boundaries between the mechanical and human and how they were starting to be blurred even this early with science, making it a direct ancestor of the concerns in Gravity's Rainbow (even though it was written after). The goofy heights that he takes to make things that aren't normally seen as alive seem alive isn't statistically probable as something that just randomly keeps recurring, IMO.

Now that you mention it, I don't recall it being suggested that Rebekah keeps him sullen and away from other women on purpose. The haunting being all felt through Mason doesn't make it very explicit, perhaps having Rebecca in mind changes the perspective or raises some clues. The way I'd read it, though it's been a couple years, she was not personally malignant or revengeful but more of a connection to the land that got louder the further away he went, this also being a connection to the earth as opposed to the stars - cue the Duck.

>boundaries between the mechanical and human and how they were starting to be blurred even this early with science
I wouldn't assume that this is relevant to Pynchon's use of that theme in V. or GR, but the boundaries were actually not as blurred then as even earlier in history, when mechanical objects were always thought to be enchanted by demonic spirits, or earth spirits, or the winds, or ghosts... and later increasingly through knowledge of, yeah, astrology. That's including clocks and the like but also "images" (moving statues, in 10c-14c. illustrations they're always drawn as identical to people aside from color), mechanical animals...

How about werewolves

>This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

WHAT DID HE MEAN BY THIS?!

>You have to read him slowly
More than that, you have to read him twice.

Mason in private, Dixon in public. I find both to be very melancholy though

>Cornelius Vroom, anxious as others in the House upon the Topick of Nubility and its unforeseen Woes, has forbidden his daughters to eat any of the native Cookery, particularly that of the Malay, in his Belief that the Spices encourage Adolescents into “Sin,” by which he means Lust that crosses racial barriers.

/pol/ meets Veeky Forums

IMO the only one for which a second read truly cannot be dispensed with is Gravity's Rainbow. That is not to say the others aren't worth it, but none of them is as much of a mess.

How about them werewolves tho

I cried at the end of Mason & Dixon.

I think it was personal and human in a way that Gravity's Rainbow was too brilliant and cerebral to be (not to imply GR wasn't personal; Mason & Dixon was just more so).

Soooooo how was the family in the beginning related to Mason and/or Dixon? Kinda missed that.

Rev.d Cherrycoke knew them, that's all, and came there because Mason lived nearby and had just died and he wanted to go to his funeral. The Rev is brother-in-law of the guy who owns the house.

For some reason I feel like that frame is the biggest genre element in the whole novel

>De Pugh
Was this a feghoot setup?