"This is not writing...

>Expecting the proles to understand the depth of their own malaise

To be heavily jocular about the greek myths, one must first begin from the angle that they are incredibly serious. People who accept the myths to be fairly light and absurd do not dedicate even comic novels to them. A satire must ultimately come from something sincere.

Nice try, but no. That's total horseshit.

How is it? There isn't this dichotomy between humour and serious issues that you believe there is. When you think that humour is about expectations, what is more unexpected than a novel dealing with myth that is satirical and irreverent. The need to pick holes in something in the form of a work that you have dedicated some time to implies that you consider the subject worthy of spending a fair amount of time on. Think of Swift and his modest proposal.

Keep posting his bantz please.

>confusing harakiri with seppuku

reeeeeeeee

>there is a difference
MASAKA

>So it is that Gravity's Rainbow, apocalyptic enough as it sounds, should be recommended by the man from the New York Times as one of the five books to take to the moon (there, of course, its seven hundred pages of fine print might conceivably float free) and by the man from Saturday Review as an advance "beyond" Agoby Dick and Ulysses. Why any reasonably intelligent critic would think that there is a point "beyond" the two, and that even if there was it was necessary to reach it, is "beyond" me. But there it is, on the cover of this gargantuan obelisk of a book. Of course, the American critics have always had a penchant for the Great American Novel, one which would somehow fabricate both a history and a culture in one volume, and their eccentric ravings can be dismissed as the foibles of latter-day Romans looking for a Greece.

>But it amazes me that a reputable English publisher can reprint their gush, and add some of his own to boot. According to the blurb, Pynchon has been greeted as "more bizarre, complex, obscene, difficult and stunning than anything since James Joyce." Hail fellow, well met kind of prose and of course I am pleased to note that it is now considered an advantage to be both difficult and obscene — not to say complex and, I would add, an excruciating bore.

>But the world is Mr Pynchon's oyster, and his private war radiates through time and space with as much subtlety as a stain. Occupied Holland, where Hansel and Gretel never had it so good, and pre-war Germany, the factotum of seances and poverty, are relentlessly exposed; similarly, the African tribe of the Zone-Hereros and the Kirghiz peasants of Central Asia are given the old historical one-two and are drawn into a cultural design as breathtaking as it is irrelevant. For the central portions of the narrative seem (and in a narrative of such staggering insouciance, 'seem' is to be believed) to be devoted to the wanderings of Slothrop. His psychic gifts render him the conventional outcast, and his later days are spent in the solitary track of the Rocket.

>I have to admit defeat at this point, and confess that I had no idea who or what the Rocket was. It may have been of such heavy symbolic intent that it went completely under my head, and I had to be content with the incidental detail of Slothrop's trips. He is lost and found in Zurich and Argentina, pursued by agents and tripleagents in a bewildering variety of guises. The Rocket is eventually fired, but not before the future has become a mechanical nightmare of considerable proportions. Yes, I would say it was bizarre.

They're the same thing.

If you Veeky Forumsizens feel enraged, know that Bloom considers him to be one of the greatest living writers.