Matthew Nelson & Mookie: Infinite Pynchon with Zero Restraint

Mookie's an "old veteran hoofer" Pynchon fan, having discovered the iconic author in the 1980s and obsessing ever since, while Matthew Nelson, now finishing his doctorate on Pynchon's fiction at the University of St Andrews, found him a different way entirely: at 14, in the paranoid, hypermediated fog right after 9/11, in a world already reshaped by YouTube and conspiracy spirals that the acclaimed novelist seemed to have predicted decades early. That generational gap consisting of two readers separated by almost thirty years, arriving at the same obsessive body of work from opposite ends of American history, is the engine running underneath this compelling conversation. 

And Pynchon rewards their long-haul, cross-generational reading, because the same handful of obsessions recur across his entire fifty-year bibliography, deepening each time. Boundary and duality above all: the line between animate and inanimate running through V., the split between the elect and the preterite — and a stark black-and-white racial duality — driving Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon's literal and figurative obsession with the lines humans draw across land, people, and ideas. Underneath all of it sits Pynchon's vision of paranoia, entropy, and authoritarian control, ordinary people caught inside what Mookie calls a "labyrinthine hellscape" they can never fully discern. 

From that foundation, the conversation turns personal and sharp. Mookie stakes out a provocative claim: Pynchon's male protagonists (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, Zoyd Wheeler, Doc Sportello) are neutered on purpose, stripped of agency, cultural precursors of Cold Play, the Star Wars sequels, and other cultural disasters, while his women (Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow) are the ones actually driving the drama. Matthew complicates that instinct, arguing the loser protagonists are avatars for collective helplessness under a system too vast to fight, not failures of nerve. They debate whether Against the Day is self-indulgent Pynchon competing with his own literary heir David Foster Wallace, trade an uncomfortable personal story about meeting DFW in person, and land, finally, on the biggest question of all: whether Pynchon, underneath the conspiracy and the entropy, is reaching for something transcendent. His most sprawling novel ends, after all, on a single word: grace.

Fair warning, this episode of Ink vs Algorithm goes full inside sports on Pynchon. If you've read him, buckle up. If you haven't, it might just be the push you need to start.

The Guest

Matthew Nelson is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews, working under supervisor Gavin Hopps. His thesis research concerns the theological implications of Thomas Pynchon's fiction, investigating how Pynchon's postsecular work questions both secular and religious constructions of reality, and situating it within the Gothic literary tradition — specifically American Gothic, alongside Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Incverse Algorithm, the Writers Podcast. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and I've got Matthew Nelson in the pod today. Welcome aboard, Matthew. Hey, great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. You are a doctorate in theology and literature, and Mike Robinson, the world-famous LA writer, introduced us. He goes, Mookie, I read your science fiction and fantasy book, and it reminds me of Thomas Pynchon, which I thought was flattering. He goes, I got a I got a pinchon guy for you, Nelson. He's a huge fan. And the way Mike put it is, you have you got a PhD in Thomas Pinchon. So I thought that was pretty cool. And uh he connected us. So thank you, Mike Robinson. Check us out. We did a separate podcast with Mike. And now I got you, Matthew. And I can't wait to do some Thomas Pinchon Inside Sports with you. Yes, sir. Same here. Same here. It's good to be with a fellow Pinchonian.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

A Pinchonian, a pinchoner. Yeah. Pinchonite. Uh pinch uh there's gotta be at least there's gotta be some variation. We're talking about pinching here. There's uh there's a multiplicity at every at every moment, every every bending curve.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

And we can throw in some meta puns and some goofy names, and we can we can go full meta with this. But before we dive in, tell our viewers and listeners a little bit about yourself. I find your dual doctorate interesting in both literature and theology, and the theological component is fascinating given the worlds that Thomas Pynchon creates. There's a lot of commentary about religion and its relationship to belief and science and boundary. So this will this will be juicy. Tell us a little bit about yourself first, Matt. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 2:06

So um yeah, I I guess the short story about the my doctorate is uh I graduated from the University of St. Andrews, it's in Scotland, and there is an institute called the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts. So it's all about this relationship of those three. And I got accepted to write a whole thesis on the work of Thomas Pynchon and his curious engagement with um with religion, with um, you know, just his extremely it's wild. I mean, anyone, yeah, he's even dived in just a little bit of pension. It's wild stuff, and there's so much there. But I so I did I did work um a few years ago in that, and I am, yeah, and I'm a writer myself, or I try to be of of fiction as well. Um, we could start there, I guess, but yeah, I'm a Pinchonian who's done some work at this intersection of theology and literature.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

And what was the thesis of your thesis? What was the point you were trying to demonstrate or prove related to theology and Mr. Pynchon?

SPEAKER_02 3:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:32

Um I would say basically it is um so it's a reading of Pynchon's body of work. I cover most of it. I couldn't quite couldn't quite get to every single novel, but it covers uh Pynchon's body of work and it reads it in relation to the Gothic tradition and specifically though, um the American Gothic, uh which is it's a sort of a it's a very fluid kind of term, but I read it in relation to American Gothic in order to show uh more precisely and more expansively how Pynchon engages with the religious, the mythic, um secularization processes and modernity and these kind of big, you know, this kind of stuff. And um that's kind of the innovation is you know, t Pynchon is sometimes read he is he's he's read here and there in relation to the Gothic, but you know more often it's the postmodern uh is kind of the you know the theoretical kind of you know designation. But um the American Gothic is the particular kind of angle I have on it.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Knowing Azuv, I'm assuming you probably dove deep into Mason Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow. Those two seem to capture that American Gothic theme in a in a very vivid way, and against the day as well. And we can dive into all these books when we go inside sports, inside Pynchon, but uh I could see where the Venn diagram comes together pretty pretty seamlessly in terms of what would be considered the American Gothic. Pynchon is an old school wasp. Apparently, his ancestry was traced to not the Nina, but maybe the Pinta, I think. Wasn't it the second ship of the three? Apparently, there was a Pynchon who was a cook on the Pinta or the Santa Maria, isn't that right?

SPEAKER_03 5:39

I believe that's correct. Yeah, he uh and you know, the big the big incredible kind of um foundationally American thing about or you know, foundational uh thing about his family is uh, as you know, I think William Pynchon, uh his ancestor, in I think it's 1650, he wrote this uh theological work that was the first banned book in America. Or at least that's its claim to fame, uh the meritorious price of our redemption.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

He was he was an early heretic by the stretch within that Puritan tradition, and reading it now, it's it seems to be so lot tied into the orthodoxy, but but it deviated enough to trigger enough people and jump a few generations, and we've got Thomas triggering a whole bunch of other people, many of whom are theologians. So I think the uh the connection is interesting. Uh Pynchon paradizes his own family. Shit, money in the word is the legacy of Tyrone Slothrop, and that's a thinly veiled commentary on the Pynchon family, going from boom to bust, some old school money, but not that much, and basically being wired in spite of themselves and probably to spite themselves into the American ethos, and he was very, very sensitive to that, and it erupts in a lot of his work, especially his better works, especially in Gravity's Rainbow and Mason Dixon. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 7:24

Yo, you're you're on it, man. You're on it.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

I'm a pinch in nerd. By way of personal apocryphal stories, I lived on New York's Upper West Side for a couple three years. I I lived in in Manhattan and its surroundings for about 13 years. I recently moved to Orange County from New York. And the bleeding edge takes place on the Upper West Side. And apparently Pynchon himself lives there and has lived there for quite some time. So I wonder if there might have been an older gentleman that I happened to cross while going from Broadway to Amsterdam, where I live by 98th Street. And wow, who knows who knows, right?

SPEAKER_03 8:08

If there's some omniscient or some way of finding out one day, maybe maybe you have crossed paths with the man himself. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

With the man himself. We shared oxygen atoms at that at that at that intersection, or maybe we ate in the same diner at the same time. You just you just never know. So these brushes with literary fame. And as far as uh him being seen or known, the reason that I would not know is because he's one of the most secretive writers. He doesn't like cameras, zero paparazzi, zero interviews. He appeared in 2004 on two Simpson episodes, where he was drawn with a paper bag on his head. And apparently the voiceover is him. And he makes jokes about cameras and Marge's books and being that reclusive author. So there's a little meta humor, even in his two appearances on The Simpsons. And Paul Thomas Anderson, the director, actually made a movie of inherent vice, and we can talk about that. And the recent battle, what is it, battle one battle after another with Leo DiCaprio is apparently loosely based on Vinland.

SPEAKER_03 9:21

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

So you've got these cultural cross-references. Thomas Pynchon is not a household name, yet he has infused himself within our culture in subtle ways, sometimes even bombastic ways, where the connections aren't overt. But uh, but he's been influential. And in terms of what we would consider postmodern literature, he's an absolute titan. He is a goat. So whether you love him or hate him, whether you get it or you don't, Thomas Pynchon is iconic. Born in 1937, I believe, makes him 88 years old now. And uh he grew up in Long Island, I think. He was in the Navy. His first book popped when he was young, 2627 V, and it instantly put him on the map. And in my humble bald headed opinion, Gravity's Rainbow immortalized that guy. That is a work of transcendent genius. We can talk more about it, but uh, I consider him the man. I've got issues with some of his stuff. Uh, he's he's he's an idol, but I have my own love-hate kind of relationship with my own perceptions of him and my own readings of them. But uh I put him as one of my favorites, and really Gravity's Rainbow is one of my without a doubt, top three books. If if if we can blast a few novels out there into the void, Gravity's Rainbow has got to go out there. Absolutely. Testament to human civilization. So that's that's my shtick. I got into pinching when I was young, and I'm I'm kind of as as Thomas himself would refer to me, I'm an old veteran hoofer. Yes, the term from Gravity's Rainbow. Uh, I was about 21, 22 when I read Gravity's Rainbow. I first came across it. That was 1986. So it was about 13 years after the thing was written. He was still hot. And it was prior to much of anything coming out afterwards. So we had to wait quite some time, I believe, for Vinland after that.

SPEAKER_03 11:39

That must have been yeah. That must have just been so incredible to um, you know, to have this legendary, you know, these legendary first three novels, V, Crying a Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. And then for 17 years, it was just there's nothing. Except for maybe a couple of articles and you know, introduction uh to a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Liner notes to the band Lotion. I don't know if you've seen those, right? He used to be a lotion fan. So just popping up here and there and kind of doing his thing, and uh stewing on Mason Dixon, which we need to talk about also. I put uh Gravity's Rainbow and Mason Dixon as as as the big ones. But that that's my that's my first blush. That's how I pop my Thomas Pinch and Cherry. Uh at the time I was 22, and it was like a literally like a needle in the vein, a big bump of methamphetamine for me in terms of just the dopamine burst. There's only a handful of artistic experiences that literally shook the foundation of how I looked at the world, how I considered art. Star Wars, when I was 13, 1977, seeing that on the big screen for the first time was one of them. And reading Gravity's Rainbow is in is in that short list of jaw-dropping, mind-blowing wow, I didn't even know you could do this stuff, kind of experiences. It's the textual version of Van Halen 1. It's like boom, nothing the same after these things are released to the world. How about you? How how the what's interesting about our conversation is it's cross-generational. I'm tacitly assuming you're at least five, ten years younger than I am, and uh, and you're you're of a different generation, so your exposure to pinch in is very, very different from mine, the culture in which you were raised and grew up and experienced it. So I'm fascinating to hear about your your first blush with the man with the works, and why you think it's stuck to the point where you dedicated your your PhD work to him.

SPEAKER_03 14:01

Yeah. Good. Good questions. Um first off, yeah, it's great to uh yeah, hear where you're coming from with this. And I yeah, we'll love to get into uh that there's so much you've already alluded to. We'll definitely have to get into. But for me my so I uh started reading classic literature. Um I grew up on Stephen King and like you know, horror, you know, horror stuff, horror movies, horror, horror literature. Um and in my undergrad, I was a philosophy major, and I started, you know, I wanted to be a writer, and I'm starting to read stuff like Dostoevsky, and I'm getting into, you know, Melville, and you know, starting starting the journey, you know, just starting the journey of of uh these classic works. And it was when I moved to Los Angeles, of course. Of course there had to be an LA move. Uh that was when I was trying to so I was trying to be a screenwriter and I was trying to uh and also trying to still work on my this novel, this eternal novel I've been writing. And I finally got to Thomas Pynchon in, you know, in my uh in my reading. And I read Inherent Vice, was my first one. And it was so I just found it so funny, first off, just hilarious. You know, that's kind of it's a hippie, they call it a a a hippie noir. This uh this uh pr private detective in 1970. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Docello.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

Doc Fortello, yes, played by Joaquin Phoenix, of course, in the in the film adaptation. And man, it just I thought that it I thought that it captured something about the strange paranoia of the um post 9-11 world, actually, because it's my I'm I'm 39. So I was 14 years old when 9-11 happened. I was um, you know, I guess it was about four years later, YouTube came onto the scene. Uh and so my world is very hyper-mediated, and there's so much strange like attempts of people to get at the truth, to get to the bottom of things. And there's this spiraling of, or maybe a revival of, you know, uh paranoia, conspiracy theory, this kind of stuff. And I found the the just the form of the detective that you know pensions take on the detective story and inherent advice, it just rang so true in this funny way. It captured the absurdity of our times. And um, and also, okay, so anyway, uh without going on and on, I just it grabbed me and that began my journey ever deeper into pension land. Uh and I I went through from there to the uh the first kind of pension detective story, The Crying a Lot 49, which is of course his short second novel or novella, depending on who you ask, uh, or or long short story, according to Thomas Pension himself.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

And apparently fulfilling a contractual obligation because he promised that if he would if they put out V, he owed he owed another novel. And uh and apparently is working on Gravity's Rainbow in parallel, and he just needed to get something out, so he uh pushed Crying of Lot out the door. What's interesting about it, though, it's a female protagonist, Oedipus Moss, right? And we can talk about his choice of protagonists and the archetypes he uses, but um, but that is another detective story. It's also embroiled in a conspiracy within a conspiracy. It brings up the nature of truth, and in ways, Pynchon was way ahead of the curve in terms of conspiracy theories, paranoia, distrust of the government and the system. And uh and it and it borne itself out, especially to your point when digital media and social media made the promulgation of misinformation pretty much the norm. This was all prior to that, when when he wrote crying and around Inherent Vice's time was right at the cusp, right? And uh and he tapped into it early on. He got it.

SPEAKER_03 18:40

Absolutely. And it was kind of and I I just even though, of course, you know, Inherent Vice is it's you know, it's a lesser novel in the in Pynchon's body of work, it the the depth of understanding of that mediated culture we're in, even even though it's about you know it's it's set in 1970, uh, but it feels so prescient. I mean, he's writing in a kind of anachronistic, you know, he or he's he's playing with certain um uh the the way in which that moment was a seed of later kind of transformations in our our our mediated world. And anyway, uh I just found it rang so true.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

He loves that kind of anachronism, right? And uh, you know, Mason Dixon is is a classic of that where it's written in that century style with capitalized proper nouns, super long M-dashes, super long M-dash with a comma. Yes, right, and really long, complex sentences, very much in that style, and yet it's thoroughly contemporary. And inherent vice, to your point, does the same thing. So it happens in the 70s, you got Doc Sportello smoking weed and stumbling like Columbo through this mystery within a mystery, and yet it's very contemporary, it's it's it's anachronistic, deliberately in that playful way.

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_03 20:15

Uh it almost, and I so uh one could read uh all of Pynchon's body of work as detective fiction, like there's a way to look at it. You know, uh V is uh you could say it's about uh this um at least Stencil, there's this character named Stencil, and he's tracking down the mystery of this uh uh this woman, or it might be a woman, it might be a thing, it might be the void itself.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, it's the the ultimate MacGuffin V.

SPEAKER_03 20:50

Yes, it's somehow at the heart of the the horror of the 20th century and what like what happened in the 20th century, or how did we how do we get here? And it's uh anyway, you can read that as a detective story. Um Lot 49, of course, is uh is very much playing with uh the original detective story was um uh Oedipus the Oedipus Rex, right? Uh who who Oedipus is named after, who's you know, solving the the this mystery. And um, and then Gravity's Rainbow, you know, Slothrop is compared to a uh detective, and he's looking for the rocket, this kind of heart, the dark heart of extension of his own penis, basically.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

So his erections anticipate the landing of the V2 rocket during the Blitz. Yes, most importantly, we must How how is how's that for the theme of a novel? I used to be reading that book and people, hey Mookie, what's that book about? And I used to say, Well, you got this guy stationed in England during the blitz. And his boners know where the rocket's gonna land. And they're like, right on, dude.

SPEAKER_03 22:07

Yup. Deep into that uh again, that strange interaction with um with America's Puritan or you know, its Puritan beginnings, one could say, uh, with the uh, you know, this idea, pigeon has this uh interaction with the idea of providence, you know, right through the uh through slothrop's erections and the boundary between the elect and the preterite.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

And and that that's a theme that we can discuss too. So in addition to each of his stories being a detective tale, essentially, he's obsessed with particular themes, one of which is boundary, the deline delineation between the animate and the inanimate. That's all over V. And then in Gravity's Rainbow, you've got the elect and the preterite, you've got white and black, you have a big racial component and racial theme in Gravity's Rainbow.

SPEAKER_03 23:09

The the Rocket, yeah, male and female, the rocket is both uh a phallus and a womb, strangely enough. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Yeah, and then Mason Dixon is literally and figuratively a book about lines and boundaries and demarcating land and people and ideas, recurring themes. That's the one thing of many that I love about him so much is that he's got these recurring obsessive and recursive themes that he never lets go. And once you read one book from him, you start to speak his language, you understand his lexicon and his worldview. And what's wonderful about it is regardless which book you pick up, the themes keep resonating. Thermodynamics as influencing even culture and feeding into conspiracy theories. Yes, this line between the living and the dead, between the truth and falsehood, what can be known and what can't be known. And then overarching everything is the system, the bureaucracy, echoing William S. Burroughs, his his contemporary, Naked Lunch. You know, Pynchon read it and lived that book because it's almost like Pynchon took vignettes from Burroughs' masterpiece and blew them into entire chapters and novels and and expositions.

SPEAKER_03 24:40

And there's, you know, so it's the system, but also the zone, or like the, or there's the the interplay between what is determined and controlled, and you know, these forces that seem to be uh um you know setting the parameters of our lives and walling us in. And yet at the same time, Pension continues to imagine the possibility of spaces of freedom and spaces in which you know there are communities that that find alternate ways of living or that try to try to uh sometimes sometimes un often unsuccessfully to live outside the system or to find ways of being uh uh not fully subject, uh at least spiritually, one could say, within this, you know, these dominating forces. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

The counter force that's literal in gravity's rainbow, and then you have that as one of his many recurring themes, too: that action, reaction, the Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and for Pynchon, the synthesis is rebellion. But the challenge is that the rebellion takes place within a deterministic mathematical universe, so even that is restricted and frustrated and subject to the same whims and even narcissism of what precipitated it. So there's a circularity to his storytelling, and some people get frustrated that there's there's a lack of real resolution. He just likes to set up the soapbox and he'll break the narrative and he'll start explaining and talking and preaching and letting you know exactly how he feels about what's going on in this world that he's created, and then he'll seamlessly go right back into the narrative. So he violates some of the time-tested and now obsessive rules about show, don't tell. Thomas Pinchon loves to tell you what's going on, and he loves to narrate his own worlds for you. So I think that that's cool. If you're into it, you love it. If you find it obtrusive and annoying, then you don't like it. But he's annotating, in a sense, in a meta way, his own stories and novels. He's his own critic. And he is that as a very useful and fun device. And that's another thing I love about him, which is it's like, what rules are you talking about? I'm using novels and my writing and literature as a way to pontificate and share my worldview. And yes, it's political, and yes, it's something that I want to tell the world should or could be. Yeah, totally, totally. I I'd love to get your take on the things about Thomas that annoy me. And and I think that would be a great exercise because you're coming at him from right now and a freshly academic point of view, and and you're of the younger generation. So your point of view on even some of his archetypes and characters might be very different from mine, being the old veteran hoofer. So let's play a protagonist game for a second with the next chapter of Inside Pinchin. I have a problem with his protagonists, and his protagonists are usually male losers, hippie freaks, and by his own definition, schlamiels. There's the schlamiel and the schlamozzle. So the schlamiel drops the soup into the lap of the schlamozzle. It's an old Yiddish phrase. And Benny Profane from V is the archetype of an anti-hero Pynchon protagonist who repeats over and over throughout his ove. Benny Profane is a slob, he's half employed, he's bald, he probably looks a little like me, if Pynchon would see me ranting right now. He's heavier set, he's got ketchup spilled on his t-shirt, he rides the subway, he tries to get laid, isn't always successful, and shit just happens to him. He has almost no agency and and very little opinion, and that's Benny Profane. And he's central to be the counterpoint to Stencil, whom you brought up, who is the world traveler and trying to figure out this V thing. And then you have Tyrone Slothrop, who's the guy who gets the boners in anticipation of the V2 landing in London, and he is Benny Professor. He's sloppy, he's got mustard on his uniform, he just wants to go out there and get laid. And he's like Marvin in Pulp Fiction. He doesn't really have an opinion, usually. He gets wiser to it and he starts to figure it out, and he runs away from the system, and eventually he tries to join and organize this counterforce. So he's got a little bit more volition than Benny, but he's pretty much Benny all over again. And then you've got Zoid Wheeler in Vinland, and Zoid is Benny. He just throws himself through plate glass windows once a year. He's a con man and a hustler, he's a hippie and he's a bum. And he just wants to milk off the government and be a pain in the ass and grow his weed. Just leave me alone already, right? And then you've got Hicks McTaggart recently in Shadow Ticket, and he's a lot like Doc Sportello. So Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice is high all the time. He's stubling through his case, and he's like a dumb Columbo. It's less about him figuring shit out than him just stubling into one conspiracy after another. Now, my take on this male, hippie, loser protagonist for pinchon is that the system, right, is patriarchal, authoritarian, and oppressive. And the pinchon counterforce to that is the neutered male. He has no agency, he's kind of a moron, and shit just happens to him. So that gets his hero off the hook, and it enables his hero in a sense to start to maybe sort of figure it out that he's being used to. Now, I'll give you back the mic. I want to contrast that to his female protagonist. Odippa Moss from Crying A Lot 49 is a go-getter. She's female. She wants to figure out this Tristero business, and she's enveloped in this situation, and she's hauling ass trying to figure it out, get her out of it. Right? Maxine Tarnow, right, in Bleeding Edge, who I think is a thinly veiled portrait of Pynchon's own wife, frankly, that he married and lived with the West Side. Yeah. She is also a creature of agency. She's trying to get to the heart of the matter here, and she's not having it. And the Twin Towers have come down, and his world is upside down, and she's a go-getter going to do it. So, in a nutshell, my problem with Mr. Pynchon is I really hate his protagonists. I think they're they're they're bums, they're hippie fucks, they're losers, and and I have trouble with this contrarian hipster nostalgia from the sixties. Oh, Doc Sportello is so cool. I just think he's a douchebag and a bum. And the same goes for most of his other male characters who aren't evil or plotting or building the conspiracy. And to me, my last point, his bigger novels work because this hippie fuck loser is enmeshed within an astonishing, detailed, interwoven, complex, brilliantly described and orchestrated world of immense complexity and sophistication. Gravity's Rainbow begins with that ride up the elevator, right? It's really an ascent, right? And it self-referentially describes Gravity's Rainbow with the steam and the pistons and the gears and the cranking, it's it's steampunk. So you mentioned American gothic, and I think it's steampunk too, and it's glorious. And the same rules apply for V to your point about the mystery. And whenever one of his hippie fuck losers is in this masterful construct of world building and intricacy and complexity, then the contrast between the two gets me through. But when one of these hippie fuck losers becomes the whole point of the book, like Inherent Vice and even recently Shadow Ticket, I'm tuned out. I'm like, Tom, you've you've lost me. So anyway, that's that's a big unloading. But I wanted to set this up as what I love, hate, and hate, love about one of my favorite writers, which is ironically enough, he sentimentalizes an anti-hero that does not appeal to me subjectively. And he he turns a douchebag and a loser into a hero, and I don't buy it.

SPEAKER_03 36:16

I would just say I guess my not even my counterpoint, but just the way the slightly different way I look at it is uh I I do agree that a pension novel, the the the longer novels, in a way they work better and they're more interesting because you're not just yeah, like he's not a he's not a traditional novelist where you're he's not gonna have a really deep characterization and and you know these there's not a lot of depth there. But but here's the thing.

SPEAKER_02 36:48

It's kind of let me see if I can put this um let's start with maybe inherent vice.

SPEAKER_03 37:00

So that one. I yes he is yes, he's a very limited as a character, but like Slothrop, he's clearly caught up in this world. He doesn't understand, he's he gets high, and is the way in which he's a loser or whatever, like Benny, you know, and um I don't think Pynchon is I don't think he's making them a hero as much as he's uh he's portraying the hapless um modern person in the midst of a world that is has become kind of incomprehensible, where the the bad guys and the bad systems just seem to keep running amok and and and turning self-destructive, you know. Um in in a way that uh it's like we can't do anything about it. So his I just see his characters at his most basic level, they're like avatars of that sense of collective helplessness, but also but also I think he is uh the better of those characters like Maxine uh does use her ingenuity and Doc to a certain extent, Doc's Portello. Um, they do end up using their ingenuity or their uh like Doc. It's funny, Doc has a um uh uh he has a hold on, get this right. Uh Doc has a sensitive nose, I believe. And then Maxine, it's her bladder that's sensitive, and slothrop, it's his penis.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Hey, well, I love this. And it's an angle that that I ignored, which is he's projecting the the common man in the midst of this labyrinthine a hellscape of control, authoritarianism, and entropy. Exactly, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:03

And and I get that that is not satisfying on a traditional level of the novel, you know, and it's part of why I think Pynchon is alienating, he he's difficult to get into for many people who are used to a more, you know, traditional kind of novel. Not saying that's you, but like it's just in general. I find Pension is a hard, um he's a hard sell to even get into. And it's and it's it's related to this flaw, it's related to this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Yeah. I I think his prose is super dense and he's multi-genre. So within only a paragraph, within a single paragraph, it'll be fantasy, science fiction, goth, historical documentary, science, uh all blended together, usually when he's on fire, like Gravity's Rainbow, seamlessly. The guy is cranking. And that's what blew my mind when I first read it is I I didn't think that you could do that, and do that so well. And and I think it's a double, double-edged kind of situation. If you're receptive to that, and if you're well read enough to understand at least 20% of his references, then it'll blow your mind. And whether or not you you dig the characters or not, just the execution of the prose is phenomenal and mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_03 40:29

I think, yeah, but I you know what I do also think, though, at the same time, the um, as far as kind of the idea about um maybe you do have to have some background knowledge of certain things to kind of, you know, to get into it or to see what he's unraveling. But at the same time, I find he stimulates your curiosity. He's he it's so wondrous. Like he's you feel like he's read everything in this, again, it's intimidating in a certain way and maybe annoying for some people, but I just find the immersion in the wealth of reference. Like I like my questions about life and my questions about what's real, and like he's interacting with that in this way that mirrors the uh just the strangeness of life today. Uh like life um that's uh it's a wash in in um in film, in social media, in images. Uh there's a certain kind of groundlessness to things. And I find that the tension of one of the tensions that his protagonists navigate is they're like they're looking for like what's at work at the bottom of things. You know, Oedipah, you know, she gets drawn into this mystery of the Tristero, right? Uh uh, or anyway, there's just like search for some ground or some or ground of grounds, or I don't know, something like sometimes it's not God, you know, him or herself itself, but it's you know, he his characters are searching for that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

They are. Um, but to me though, the guys are mostly slackers, they're either diabol diabolical instruments of authoritarian entropy, or they're slackers. It's like bottle rockets with Owen Wilson. Oh, you know, it's the same kind of character. And he he neuters them deliberately. And I think you make a fantastic point that it's deliberate in the sense of creating this avatar of the common man. You're you're thrown into it, you have no idea what's going on. Bartle be the scribner. I prefer not to. It's this mentality that everything is so insane that participating is even more crazy. And we're better off just throwing in the towel before we even begin because everything is so corrupt, broken, bureaucratic, and and oppressive. My my challenge, though, is and in ways he might even have been ahead of his time because look at the movies that have become so popular, look at the music. Coldplay. How does cold play compare to the post-industrial punk scene in Manchester? I mean, you have Joy Division, which was very grim, but then you've got Coldplay, which is it it lacks balls. It's like Ian Curtis was throwing fits on stage, and shadow play was going down, and it was existential angst, but with force and anger. And then the zeitgeist has shifted into this whiny emo stuff. Which has become ubiquitous. And in ways, Pinchon's sensibility is similarly whiny emo when it comes to these slackers caught in the mess.

SPEAKER_03 44:19

Well I I think like the like the industrial kind of music of uh you know like uh yeah, just the whole industrial eighties and nineties kind of stuff. Um uh to me, like the man the human being caught in the monstrous machine and the grinding of gears and the maybe it's a maybe it's maybe it is like you're saying, maybe it is the whiny I I got it the whiny individual, but like the world in which they are, it's very uh hard and industrial.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

How do you react to it? Like I used to love Echo and the Bunnymen at their prime. And they were uh a massive Ian McCulloch and uh and Will Sargent, and it was deliberately mechanical. It it was industrial. You had Defritis paying these patterns on the drum set, and it was like machine music, only sophisticated and very well written. Even Pete Townsend from The Who said, you know, those bunny men really know how to write songs back in the day, heaven up here. And the reason I bring them up is McCulloch used to sing like Jim Morrison, like uh, you know, a promise. You know, he's bellowing and he's letting it out, and he's fighting that system. He's up against the machine, and he's pouring his heart out. And then the next generation is Chris Martin.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

And what what happened?

SPEAKER_00 46:00

And I bring this up within the context of our favorite writer, Thomas Pinchon. And in ways, I I'm I'm pointing a finger at Tom, which is like Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, even recently, Hicks McTaggart. These guys are like Chris Martin, they're they're they're emo, and they're whining their way through the machine. And I want some some machismo, Tom. I want a hero with balls.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

That's that's really interesting, man.

SPEAKER_00 46:33

I and it's women, but and then you know, as I brought up, you know, Odipa, yeah, and and Maxine, right? Yeah, they're they're doing it. Tom allows his female protagonists to go out there and kick ass and take names. They're inquisitive, they've got agency, and they're not putting up with this shit. And his men are like these whiny emo creatures that are like that are like balls going back and forth, a pinball machine.

SPEAKER_03 47:07

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder. So you have um, so you have these moments of um, so there's um like Dixon and you know, again, Mason and Dixon, we haven't talked about two.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

That's its own thing. We can we can talk about them for sure, right? Yeah, that's kind of a separate thing, and I want to dive into that book because arguably I think that that that's an eternal masterpiece, that book. That is mind-blowing that book. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 47:41

I just I and the the one thing I was gonna bring up, and I think I could try to relate it to some of these characters that we've already talked about, but you know, Dixon has this moment at the end where he um he grabs the slave driver's whip, and you know, it very much exercises uh agency. Uh again, maybe it's he's had enough.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

The whole book he's been conciliatory and he's kind of fit mold that I've been complaining about. Yeah, and he's fine, he finally snaps. Just like when Tyrone finally finally has had enough, you know, Tyrone runs away, and then the counterforce. Dixon is analogous to that. There is an arc to the the slacker to the to the real hero. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

I mean, um yeah, and I think of maybe even uh what does he do? I think maybe uh slothrop at one point, he grabs some part from the was it from something that's cutting down trees or something. He's or like I think the narrator instructs him, like, here's something you could do.

SPEAKER_00 48:52

The wall comes down and Tom actually talks to directly to Tyrone and says, Yeah, you shouldn't put up with that. It's it's almost like Pynchon himself got sick of his weasley protagonist, like, do something already.

SPEAKER_03 49:09

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you have also in you have in um uh again, I think your point does still stand when it comes to like Zoe Wheeler of of Vinelin, but even uh you have like the the the um the sisterhood of the um uh the uh Kunoichi attentives uh what is it anyway, yeah. And you have these very so those are like again, they're female though.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

To your point though, these are that's what I'm saying. Even the butt-kicking and tertiary women are all kicking ass. Pension allows these female characters to actually have agency. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:49

That is, yeah. I mean, but it's funny because in the early, you know, there's the whole thing, at least in the academic world, of like this pushback against you know, uh pension's his portrayals of women, at least in the early novels. It's like in the later ones, I think that they get more um, you know, that the more dynamic, uh more heroic. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think to some extent that critique stands for for for for both men and women, but I think you're you're on to something there. I gotta think about that. I yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Yeah, and and I don't mean to nitpick a genius' oo, but uh I think yeah, but that's our job. We're so vested and we're so engaged in this man's genius that when when he disappoints and we makes conscious, really well thought out decisions that we disagree with, it's kind of like science. Like physical physicists now can't wait for the large Hadron Collider to find an anomaly, right? Scientific revolutions are led by crisis. So if if you keep running experiments and everything is to expectation, nothing interesting comes out. And the fact that I hate my favorite writers' protagonists reveals a lot about him and his writing, but also points in creative directions for me as a writer, too. Which is I wrote a book and I have a character who is not Tyrone Slothrop. He displays qualities of the slacker, but I've turned him into a zoomer Gen Z male. So he's he's a hustler, he's a con man, he's an extreme sports enthusiast, he's drug addicted, sex addicted, and he's really a piece of shit kind of person, but I believe that he's likable. And here's the thing I give this mofo volition, he drives the story with his own stupidity, ineptitude, and greed. But I got so frustrated, for example, with my favorite writer turning every story into a cold play concert that I wanted to conscientiously take a different path. And uh, and I think I did, but but I think this is this is what makes literary criticism interesting. You know, when you when you fall in love with a writer and you don't just spend hours kissing that guy's ass and going on Reddit and telling everyone, oh, I love this book. It's finding flaws in the people we respect the most.

SPEAKER_03 52:32

Absolutely. No, that that is so good. And I think your whole kind of uh comparison to Coldplay is is hilarious. You should definitely write if you haven't put words to that in an essay. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:46

Why Thomas Pynchon's heroes are like Chris Martin.

SPEAKER_03 52:53

Oh, that's it's it's really funny.

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Uh here's another angle on this, and I think it's it's it's a halo effect, and I don't know if it's cause or effect, you know, cat chasing its tail, but let's talk about Pynchon's politics for a second. Because I think I think these are connected, and I think this will resonate with you, and I'm really interested in hearing your opinion about my opinion about what you think Pynchon is about, too. Yeah. I think I think Pynchon, if you put him in a category, is like a progressive liberal. If you look at the contemporary landscape of American politics, he believes in the inherent equality of all human beings. He he he's resentful and even guilty about his wasp past. He makes fun of it in Gravity's Rainbow, the Roseland Ballroom scene where Tyrone literally goes down the toilet, becomes an expose on everything horrible about America from a racist point of view. And it's a beautiful piece of writing. It's really it's evocative, it's horrific. It's it's it's so deep and meaningful and gorgeous in its exposition, but it's fundamentally pointing a finger at the male, white, heterosexual, implicitly and systemically racist underpinning of the United States of America. And he sees these faults as an outcome even of thermodynamics. That's one of the beauties of the book, where he connects these to mathematical and scientific principles in a deterministic kind of way. I mean, who did that? It pynchon is awesome, but at the same time, I'm I'm I'm showing that Pynchon has an agenda here. He's not a value neutral kind of guy, he's a guy who grew up ashamed of his background. He was ashamed of what America had become, and he points a finger at the white male, heterosexual douchebag who has created this society, which is so intrinsically flawed, unequal, and horrible at its heart, as its core. Like William S. Burroughs wrote that if you feel America, you feel the rottenness that it's that is that is oozing out of the soil. We took this land from the indigenous population. We are conquerors, we are oppressors. I am one of them, and this is my testament to everything that we fucked up about America, and here is why. And now I'm not saying that he's right or wrong, I'm merely saying that that's the lens that I believe Thomas Pynchon views America. And this goes reverberates throughout Mason Dixon, too. If you really pay attention to Mason Dixon, it's no different, I believe, than what I just espoused, which is you have an old school wasp who happens to be a literary genius who hates hates what his people have done and sees it as something that needs to be course corrected.

SPEAKER_03 56:27

So yeah, no, you're uh I think I agree with you up to a point, and this is exactly something that talk about. So um I'm gonna try not to get long-winded here because this taps into something I've been long-winded. You you please be long-winded. Well-winded. No, it's it's great. No, it's great stuff. Um, because uh so there is a curious pension's curious relationship with what America is, like what what it was supposed to be, the dream of America versus the reality of what it became. So that runs throughout his body of work. And again, that's part of what inspired me to to um to address his work in terms of the American Gothic. And, you know, and I do think, and I do include within that designation like Herman Herman Melville. The the big three would be Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. But but the very first novelist in America, or first professional novelist, was Charles Brockdon Brown, who wrote a Gothic novel called Violand, uh, an American tale about this uh yeah, this this guy who um he is the son of a well anyway, I'm not gonna try to describe that, but um so so long story short, but what what what Pynchon and the this American Gothic tradition is on about, part of it, is this wrestling with um the dream of America, the hope for a truly democratic space. It's uh it's it's um some escape from the horror of the past, the Caesarist horror of the past, uh an escape from uh the monarchical authoritarian um it's a uh America is the original zone of freedom, like the hope for America, and it gets betrayed over and over and over again. And so I think my read of uh, and I don't think I'm uh like I find it difficult to be precise enough when talking about this, but my general read of his politics um is that yes, he's some on the progressive left, you could call it, um, but it's a leftism that uh it's reconnecting with like what uh it's it's it's not uh it's not just on the left. It's uh um it's seeking for something that's truer and more um like like something that uh retrieves uh this almost utopian dream that cannot be and um um but yeah anyway, there's there's a there's a tension implicit in anything like uh uh a utopian sense of America or your utopianism in general. And so Pynchon is exploring that tension between the the utopian and the uh the ways in which that turns to horror. Um anyway, America and the modern world is supposed to be this almost utopian space that's that's turned on its head, and American literature constantly explores that, I think.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

Um I agree, it's just how does he get there and how does he evoke that sensibility? And then what does he prioritize and what does he deprioritize? So I've been ranting about his emasculated males and his hyper-empowered females, and that's that's a very lefty progressive sensibility, too. Look at Hollywood, look at the trajectory of Star Wars, where you have the the Lucasfilm Disney sequels, and what happened was the old favorites who were very masculine, very much Ismo, the Han Solos of the world, the Luke Skywalkers, the coming of age story, they're supplanted and they're flipped. Han Solo, when he reappears in the sequel, is old and washed up, and he's back to his old selfish bootlegging ways. And Luke is isolated on an island drinking alien slop from the teeth of some ostrich creature. And then you have Ray, who is the empowered female superhero who is flawless, learns everything instantly, and is the ultimate girl boss. Now, politically, I'm neither left nor right. So I I don't support one extreme or the other. I tend to think of myself as a libertarian in that less government is better. And I think I have an objective view as to what's wrong with both sides of the political equation, especially these days, especially with the reigning administration being on one extreme, right? Going from one, we're ping pong back and forth. But I'm trying to evoke that that Pynchon's sensibility is very 60s hippie, hanging out with Richard Farinha, who he whom he dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to. You know, Pynchon is the weed-smoking hippie guy on the beach who happens to be a fucking literary genius. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:50

Absolutely. I and I think uh he's also but he's also really hard on the hippies. And he's really, I think he's the complexity of Vineland and all even of um, maybe to a lesser extent, the the loose adaptation of it, one battle after another, which is a whole other other subject. A whole other thing. And the reading, but the readings, I get kind of frustrated with the um with the way in which one battle of after another was taken as by by many people as some kind of a simply like I don't know, some kind of a woke. There's good these are critiques about it, there's some kind of woke leftist thing or something. There's more going on there, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:35

I kind of disagree with the there's way more and the Paul Thomas adaptation is you have the core characters and their relationships with each other, but that's where the similarities essentially stop with uh with the book. That's right. And if anything, Paul Thomas Anderson is agreeing with me. It's like inherent vice, the movie was a mess. If you didn't read the source material, and if you weren't like a pinching acolyte like you and I are, you're like literally, what the fuck is going on here? And part of the problem, too, was Doc being this weed smoking slacker. There's no hero, there's no arc of a hero story here. You're you're a viewer stumbling through this mess of a narrative, as is the protagonist in the book. And and and Paul Thomas adapting the new movie, Inherent Vice was a complete flop. I think it made only $14 million, and it cost twice that much just to make.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:36

It's his least. I love Paul Thomas Anderson, but it's his it's the least of his films, probably.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:42

Yeah, and I blame the source material. And I think Thomas Anderson loves Pynchon, and I think they're friends, they hang out together. And he's like, I want to make another one of your books, Tom, but we're not gonna fuck it up this time, and I'm gonna listen indirectly to Mookie, which is I'm gonna make the protagonist The secret sauce is Mookie. We're gonna crank this up, they're gonna blow shit up, Tom. They're actually gonna do something to fight the system instead of like hanging around and waiting for shit to happen. Right, right, right. So it's almost like Paul fixed it, which is like, I love you, Tom, but we're not gonna make the same mistakes like we did with Inherent Vice. I'm gonna keep the core characters, and I get what you're doing with the core theme of the book, but we're gonna blow this shit up. We're gonna have fun with it, and we're not gonna be restrained with this delicate slackerism. We're gonna let these characters go apeshit. And it worked. It was a huge hit critically and commercially.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:52

Definitely, definitely. Yep. Yeah, it's uh I think uh I think you're probably right about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:00

I wonder what Tom felt about it. I think watching it, he's like, oh well, you know, this is this is like Vinlan on meth. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:11

But Vin Vinlan, Vinland is but Vinland, it's it's so it's wild though. There's stuff in there that I think the uh that one battle after another didn't approach. Like I was all those kind of weird things about UFOs and the the paranormal dimensions and of of pensions work. He he didn't even come anywhere close to that. And um there's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:39

You brought up the paranormal, the paranormal dimension, and you're a theology guy, right? And I want to talk about against the day now. Oh yeah, that that's a perfect transition because the paranormal shit goes left field in against the day to the point where I think Pynchon was. Like is believing in the spirit world, right? It's like they're animated and they're amongst us and they're influencing history, and he infuses his usual conspiracy theory construct with the occult in ways that take it to a whole new level. So, what what's your impression of his longest, most sprawling novel that that that came out? When was it 2006? I think 2006.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:32

Yeah. Um overall, I really dig it, honestly. I think, but here's the thing it is it's beyond centerless.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:43

Like, you know, it's I think it's maybe six different threads that are all vying with one another, and they're all um traverse, it traverses with the traverse family. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:57

Um I again, I'm uh I think there's so many flaws to it, but there's but the way it just lets itself loose with just ideas and the and the it I think it captured, and for those who haven't you know encountered this yet, uh this novel, it's set between 1893 and the years just after World War I. So it kind of captures this.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:24

It's kind of starting at the World's Fair.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:27

At the World's Fair in Chicago, yep. Yeah, and it it captures the this journey and that historical moment from like the excitement of the um, you know, it's the end of the 19th century, and there's this new century, and there's there's these new possibilities, and these the main characters are the chums of chance, as we start off at least. The chums of chance, and they're balloonists, or they're you know, uh the these airmen, and they're gonna uh and there's there's a sense of youthfulness and um and all these new, you know, there's electricity that's being conquering the world, and you know, lights and and um cars, anyway. So but then it's like that as typical in Penchon's, you know, you know, stories, like it turns to horror, it turns to but but but in a way that's not as oppressive and gloomy as as as Gravity's Rainbow. It's lacking maybe in a good way, but maybe in a in a negative way. Um it's lacking uh uh against the day, it's lacking that um almost like the sinister like I don't know, it it it's it's it's it's it's it's it's just so out there and it's so loop the loop and it's so um doesn't know what it wants to be that it for me I just thought it was like this idea engine. Like I'm just I'm just strapped to this engine of ideas and uh and I loving it, but it also doesn't work as a uh anything like a coherent story. I don't well, I mean, maybe that's too harsh, but it it it's hard to get a handle on.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:09

It's totally fair, and in ways, it's everything Mookie's complained about Thomas Pinchon 10x. 10x. You have you have especially the male male characters stumbling through the story, they have no agency whatsoever, it seems to me. Even the even the chummies, you know, some of the prose is unbelievably gorgeous. Like that that ballooning sequence is just masterful writing, and throughout the book, you'll be churning through this kind of hermeneutic manuscript, where to your point it just keeps going on and on and on, it's got no center, ostensibly deliberately, and he just keeps cranking.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:58

And it's go ahead and yet and yet the the thing about that, and this is it's hard to put words to this, but it's in that sense, in that very centerlessness, in the very elusiveness of any coherent through line that you could just point to, yet it's still like all of pensions works. There's this sense of connectedness and this sense that things are like he's um creating this multi-layered portrait of the way things are and all their layers and all of their complexities. And he he does that in a um in a way that I find enlivening and that I find is grasping after uh the real, you know. Uh and again, that's I think the the uh the the many engagements with so there's like both western and eastern religion and uh uh shamanism and all the Hermetic tradition and stuff, the tarot, the angels.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:01

Everything, yeah. The Kabbalah is in there. Yeah, very much you know what's awesome? I I love the way you've characterized it. Gravity's Rainbow, if you look at it structurally, is a parabola. If you if you when you read the book, it's like the early chapters are the launch, it's a deliberative liftoff. And by the time you get to the counterforce at the end, it's like gravity has taken over. The you know literally when you're reading gravity's rainbow when the power has cut, because that's the big decision that's made on the part of the rocket, right? It's got the internal guidance system, and it's all about I think it's called what, Anschluss or what's loose. Branch loose, right? It's when you you cut the power and then it it becomes a projectile. And the book itself is recursive in its narrative format. You know, right when you've got branch loose and the narrative starts to become a projectile. And in a in an analogous way, against the day is a balloon ride. It's no accidents that it opens like that, which is you're you're heating it up and you're filling the balloon, and then you leave the earth. But balloons have limited volition and agency, they're they're buffeted by the atmosphere. And against the day is this transcendent genius having a balloon ride of his own indulgence. And and if you look at it that way, it's masterful and kind of interesting. I just found it incredibly tedious to the point of being boring and again indulgent in all aspects of what I don't like about Pynchon, which is going off on forever tangents, being highly, highly political in his own way, and not holding back to the point where you really lose sight of exactly what the hell he's trying to accomplish here. And again, heroes with no real control of their own circumstance. So I just found that book really interesting. I think the New York Times reviewer, um Margolis, reviewed it, and she said, Imagine a book written by a pinchon fan, which is a satirical take on pinchon, and then you end up with Against the Day. I would be against the day. It's like pinching against pinchon. So I don't know, maybe he was reached a point in his life where he was just kind of kicking back, and uh, maybe he was content and relaxed, and you know, the and the weed finally caught up. Here's one aspect that Thomas Pynchon literally came out and said marijuana is very, very useful. And his brain seems to be wired in such like if I smoke a joint, I am completely dysfunctional. I've got like an ADHD brain, like you know, give me 120 milligrams of Adderall and I'm on it for six hours. And and I'm really not a diagnosed and I'm not a treated ADHD person, but I think you know, that's realistically the effect. If I've done recreational drugs, I've always gravitated towards speed and not the downers. Because that's I'm dopamine deprived. I need it. If I smoke weed, I'm checked out. I think Pynchon's brain is wired in such a way that he's the kind of guy he smokes weed, he's in there. He could sit there with his graph paper. You know, he writes everything by hand, right? He writes everything by hand on graph paper in these kind of block letters. That's how this guy writes. So he's high and he's kicking it, and he's got his graph paper, and he's got a stack of his reference books that he's reading and relating, and he's in the zone. And I think against the day, he got so comfortable with his own writing methodology that he lost himself in his own bullshit. That's what I think happened. I think maybe so.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:07

I no, I you know what it is, you know what it is, though? I think uh um again, what gets me going in that it's on a sentence by sentence basis. Like, again, I I don't want to be too forgiving of it, but it just I I admit it's gorgeous.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:27

If you take isolated blocks from Against the Day, and you don't need to plow through all that pinch and bullshit, yeah, you have some of the best written prose ever in Against the Day, but but they're diamonds in the rough. It's like he's he's just he's in the zone, his own zone, and he's doing his thing, and boom. So it it could have used an editor, and I hate to say that, but uh, you know how nowadays it's a whole specialty. You're uh you're a you're a developmental editor. I hate that. I literally have convulsions when I hear someone's a developmental editor. I go, don't even get near me. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:16

He could have really used a little bit of feedback on it, which is Tom. Tom, it's a fucking book is what it's 1100 pages long.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:25

Which the it's it's it's it's it's like the George Lucas syndrome, right? Or like, you know, what you get to a certain level of and then you're you don't have anyone to really properly check you. And how could you, you know, like a one-go wrong?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:41

You're you're so used to smelling your own farts that all the self-doubt that got you to be the genius you are now is gone, and then your own worst tendencies have an opportunity to dominate and overwhelm what could otherwise be another masterpiece that you produce. So, all right, Tom, this this this turd is 1100 pages long, and I see about five 550 pages of pure brilliance. So, how about we chop chop, buddy?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:12

Well, it is it is interesting that he went and wrote um these very relatively pared-down novels in his last you know three so far.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:23

But they're structurally so different, though. Look at um I did an I did an analysis of my own book. I pumped my own book into Claude and I did uh line-by-line analysis because I took this unique approach to essentially writing in tweets. My whole fucking novel is written in tweets. Now, if you do the same thing with Pynchon, let's say, and you just put it into an LLM, not to steal it per se, but just to analyze it based on the density of the prose and the length of the paragraphs, his books are in two categories. They're the dense, encyclopedic, Herman Malville, Moby Dick style boom books, okay, which I think are his masterpieces, except for Against the Day, for all the reasons that we're citing. And these are specifically V, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason Dixon, right? Boom, boom, boom. That to me is is pinching. Yeah. Then you got these what I consider the in-between and filler novels, which are the what I call the hippie fuck novels. That's the Crying a Lot 49. And then you've got less or so, because it's it's a little bit different, but then you've got the other ones, like again, Vinland and Inherent Vice, and recently Shadow Ticket are the density of the prose, the the the the length of time and effort and interconnectivity, and what we would classically consider pinching. It's almost like it's written by a different author.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:58

It kind of well, but again, one of those um I like I find first off, I agree with you that like the prime pension is definitely, you know, is definitely the Gravity's Rainbow, Mason and Dixon. Um, but even boom, boom, boom.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:15

If it you know, the guys should be remembered forever for for those books.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:20

Definitely, definitely. But it's like even within that um that that trio of of books, they all kind of feel very different in their style. Like uh like in terms of the like V is you know what I mean? Like there's a commonality, of course, and there's there's tendencies and threads and all that, but just V is just feels so different from Gravity's Rainbow. And Gravity's Rainbow is obviously very different from this hyper-stylized um 18th century uh you know Mason and Dixon. Uh uh and then, you know, uh within the shorter novels too, I find I find uh the the um like inherent vice, it feels very different from Bleeding Edge, even though they're separated by just four years, even though they're ostensibly, you know, more limited, you know, detective character novels. Like they have like he pension really changes it up. And I like that it kind of reminds me of um uh one of my favorite filmmakers is Stanley Kubrick. And um Kubrick, you know, he did like a different genre almost every film. And you know, like wow, the same guy that made The Shining made, you know, 2001 A Space Odyssey, made, you know. And I find it's a it's anyway, it's somewhere in the universe of similarity with I find with pension. Um but yeah, but often it's it is the um some of the worst tendencies as you're describing do get amplified when he in his latter years when his, you know, yeah, they become yeah, over overdone and and yeah. He'd reach Brent's list.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:06

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The like the the last line in uh in Some Like It Hot, you know, no nobody's perfect. Right, right, right. You you you happen to be a man, that's okay. We'll we'll make do. And uh and our favorite genius writer, well, you know, he's got his own indulgences and his own uh peccadillos, and that that's what makes him great. And your point is really well taken, though. I have this tendency of lumping him into genius pinchon and slacker hippie bullshit pinchon. And I and I think that that's an unfair generalization because to your point, it's an excellent point. Each of the genius pinchon books are very distinct, and each of the hippie bullshit pinchon books so funny are are are very much uh very different too.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:58

Forever that is gonna be the category, Mookie, but I uh think I think all these wonderful right, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:05

So, so how does how does all this translate? You mentioned that you're a writer too, and this podcast ostensibly is dedicated to people who love writing, uh, the battle between writing, human writing, and AI now, and we could talk a little bit about that because you're in a sense coming of age into this insane craziness of the singularity. And then you love pinch and it do you find that he influences you? Um, how does it feel to be your own writer in this age? I mean, let's take everything that we've churned through and make it more personal about you.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:46

Sure. I mean, my um as far as my output goes, um uh like I had phases where I was influenced by particular writers. There was the Lovecraft phase, and then there was the Corinth McCarthy, you know, I wrote a very also Flannery O'Connor. Um again, this sort of southern Gothic, and um, and then uh for a brief moment I thought I could I could do like a Melville, you know, a Melville style, whatever. But but long story short, um the the uh novel, I call it my eternal unfinished novel, uh one day maybe it maybe it will be, but um that one is to a fault uh influenced, I think, by Pension. But it's again the the influence uh at least initially, it wasn't just that, oh I I was you know so in love with this one writer. It was just that Pension is such a master of what we are as a society that I couldn't help. But because I'm trying to tell the truth and trying to find the funny, like I'm I'm trying to um uh process through this story something about the strangeness of our times. There's a character who's he is a bit of a um a uh an Oedipus Moss type character.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:21

Um he are uh is on this please please give him balls, give him cojones. Yeah, definitely infuse him with at least a little bit of testosterone, just to please movie.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:35

Rest assured it's a quest for balls. It's just it's uh uh he's on a quest for balls. Nice. Uh nice. So yeah, no, I uh uh um funnily enough, by the way, uh David Foster Wallace, who we haven't talked about at all. Um I'm not a huge I I I think he's brilliant in in all kinds of ways, but interestingly, David Foster Wallace, who was influenced by Pension as well, he uh his first novel he wrote, Broom of the System, he later went on to say, like, I didn't even know it at the time, but he realized he had basically rewritten Crying a Lot 49. And that, again, not at all comparing myself to David Foster Wallace, but like I think because David Foster Wallace was is such a um he's uh I mean he's brilliantly perceptive, right? And that's what that's one of my aims, is just to be perceptive and to be uh to see what's actually there. Um I think he couldn't help but uh tell a similar story as pension because he's trying, you know, he's he's he's in the same stew that that pension, it's not just that pension is cooked up, it's that pension is part of and is mirrored back to us in this very dynamic and interesting way. And so in that sense, um I uh the more I read of pension, the more I realized how much I'm part of the stew of things that pension has so uh brilliantly written about, but also brilliant, and I say brilliantly, but I also to your point, which is very you're I love I like I'm liking your critiques, even if I need to think about them more to, you know, um I think to your point, even with Pension's brilliance he is also reflecting something about our lack of uh our lack of characterization, our lack of agency, our haplessness, our uh the way we're hippie, um, I mean we're we're we're cult we're Chris Martins or whatever, you know? And and fiction should it should kind of push on that, maybe, and maybe uh uh uh but in a way that's also anyway, there's a bad way of doing that, and there's an interesting way of doing that. And I love that you're that you're kind of on about attempting to uh uh uh weave something that is uh on the that that that's dealing with that.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:58

So in my own way, I've also been trying to do that with my work, but I think that's really on point, which is what's the zeitgeist? Which uh John John Up John Updike of all people called it the quotidian, which is how do people talk? What do they believe? How do they feel about things? What's the impact of technology and history and society on how we look at ourselves and the world? And then what does that have to do with with literature? And the answer is everything. So, to your great point, Pynchon did a great job of tapping into that site, guys, yes, and and really pumping it through, as did David Foster Wallace. An infinite jest is what's always compared to Pynchon, and and in ways, uh David Foster Wallace took took took the good and the bad from Pynchon that way.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:54

Yeah, I I as you're saying that out loud, I'm just again, I don't want to be too hard on an I honestly haven't finished. I I made it halfway through Infinite Jest. And one day, one day I think I will read it. Yeah, I think it does deserve to be read in full. But the way that you see Against the Day is the way that I a lot of the way I feel about Infinite Jest. And I and I wonder, I do kind of wonder if it like just as David Foster Wallace was influenced by Pynchon, I wonder if Pynchon was almost trying to outdo his younger, his progeny, his literary progeny. Uh uh Against the Day is very much published ten years after Infinite Jest, right? And I wonder if Pynchon had read that and like, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:45

I I think that's an absolutely brilliant observation I never thought about. And I think it it it it really could ring true because infinite gest in terms of its strength is really how these encyclopedic narrative geniuses really fire on all cylinders. The genres keep changing, uh, layering of the prose. So you'll read a paragraph and it's simultaneously saying about 18 things at the same time. And if you reread it and reread it, and you read it after you've read later parts of the narrative, it's it's a living, breathing thing because it's layered so intricately and so brilliantly. That's both Pynchon and David Foster Wallace at their best. Absolutely. And this transcendent erudition. And David Foster Wallace took that to its extreme postmodern bullshit with the endless footnotes and citations and his apparent hatred of irony and all that horseshit that he kept going on about. You know, so he's got his own excesses, but he's he's clearly gifted. And infinite jest was his magnum opus. And you bring out a great point because around halfway through Infinite Jest, after you meet all the characters, the major themes are evoked of addiction related to uh extreme physical ability, like the tennis star, yes, and and the drug addicts coexisting and interwoven because it's an element of the same thing, our addicted culture, right? We're a culture of consumerism and addiction, and that's what makes for excellence. You need to be addicted to doing what you're doing to be excellent at it. And he was an addicted writer, too. I mean, and he suffered from depression, so he's really writing about himself this whole time, and and that worked. And about a half halfway through the novel, it turns into Against the Day, which is these endless explorations. I call it again a hermeneutic style where it's writing for writing's sake, and it's not about the coherence of each vignette, but it's about the feeling of diving headfirst into the soup, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:09

And then you're like, oh come on, dude.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:14

So what I I I can't I can't agree more with that. That's very well put. And you're putting words to some of what I've I've felt in my what I have read of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:24

You're bang on point. You're bang on point.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:27

What do you and I um have you read The Pale King? Because that is the um, you can it's technically it's unfinished, you know, it's his third novel. And I find that to be by far like he pushes past, I found him, though he has some of the same tendencies that that very much still fit the bill that you're describing, he's pushing past them in certain interesting ways. And I just it's so I mean it's tragic on so many levels, but um, but I really thought that one was just head of head and tails above infinite Jess. But have you read did you read The Pell King?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:02

Did you ever Oh, I didn't. I never I never did. I actually saw David Foster Wallace do a reading of Infinite Jess during the book tour.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:10

No way.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:11

And he shows up in his do-rag and his and his like Hawaiian, his poofy Hawaiian shirt, and his little round glasses, and he does readings, and he was on psychoactive med, so he's taking sips of water constantly because he had dry mouth. You know, it was kind of a tragic figure. He was really doped up on the SSRIs, he struggled through his depression. People, uh one guy even asked him about whether he likes Thomas Pynchon, and he went on this little tangent about Gravity's Rainbow is a great book, but I didn't want it to influence me too much. And then he he struck me as being really an asshole and a douche. And I'm not the only one who felt that way about David Foster Wilde personally. I don't mean to disparage the guy, especially posthumously, and we're sitting here acknowledging that he's a literary giant, but I thought I thought he was a jerk. And I went back home and I was about 700 pages into the novel, and I had trouble finishing it. Because Gore Vidal made it a point of not meeting the artists of works that he admired because 99% of the time the human disappointed him. And and those lines from Palipsest, his biography, hit me right between the eyes, which is like, oh man, meeting David Foster Wallace completely destroyed my reading of David Foster Wallace.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:39

So that's my my direct experience with this guy, which is like, oh totally, and again, this is not kind of uh maybe this is like looking on the bright side or something too much, but like I do think sometimes we uh if we get a chance to see, you know, people like this in person, like we're also seeing them when they're on the stage, and we're we're getting kind of a uh, you know, it's uh it is them and it is whatever, you know, not to get them off the hook, but we're also seeing uh, you know, the slice of them. And again, I know there is lots of I'm actually uh only well I'm just slightly informed of some of the let's just say the uh the problematic the things about foster walls.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:24

I know they've come out and and I don't I'm not I'm not deep into that stuff, but I I I know there's stuff out there, and uh you know, so but yeah, he's it wasn't just the reading though, and I don't mean to dwell on David Foster Wallace being an asshole, but I mean just for the sake of it though, and to dovetail off of what you just said, the reason I was so alienated by this guy, I bought three copies, three hard copy versions of Infinite Just for him to sign. He was he was sitting there at a table, and you can get Infinite Just first edition signed by David Foster Wallace, right? So I'm standing in line, I got my three books, and they're expensive, they're hardcover. I'm like spending like a hundred bucks in '90s money to buy three fucking copies of his book. And I finally get to him, and he's just shooting off, you know, who what's your name? How should I dedicate it? And I go, you know, I go, dedicate it to me, my friend, blah, blah, blah. And I go, you know, I just want to mention that there's an awesome advertisement for tennis rackets, I think. And it has John McEnroe and Eddie Van Halen, and they swapped electric guitar for tennis racket, tennis racket for electric guitar. So you have these transcendent geniuses in their own modalities, and they've swapped. And it made me think of your jest here because of this juxtaposition of obsession, addiction, and talent, and how these things are interchangeable while he's signing.

unknown 1:35:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:57

And he looked up at me with the utmost dismissive contempt, which is basically like, get the fuck out of my face. I've got a line of people, and I need to sign another fucking book. And that that was the candid moment with the artiste. So instead of showing a little bit of grace, that I'm bringing up this metaphor that I thought was pretty cool. You know, it was it was a famous ad at that time. He was utterly dismissive. Get the fuck out of my face was his look. And after I already concluded that he was a douchebag during the reading, I was like, oh man, how am I gonna go home and read another 50,000 words from this guy? Yes, yes. Oh man. Anyway, so God, God bless you, David Foster. I know you had issues. I've suffered from depression at various points in my life. I can relate, I appreciate your art and what you brought to humanity. God bless, bro. But that doesn't mean you were in a douchebag. Right, right. Thank you. One other thing I want to bring up is you know how I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, I lived on New York's Upper West Side, and you know, bleeding edge takes place there, and Pinch and lives there. And there's a high probability that we might have even crossed paths walking on the street, or we might even sat at different booths next to each other in the same diner. It's possible. Did you cross in maybe cross in space and time? Or in yeah, yeah, exactly. But here's the thing because of my David Foster Wallace experience, I am terrified of meeting Thomas Pynchon. Because even though we've been, you know, saying the good, the bad, the ugly about his oo, I admire him more than any other writer to this day. And I'm in awe of works like Gravity's Rainbow and Mason Dixon. And I've got him on the pedestal still, at least in my imagination. And if I would meet meet the guy at 88 and he's like picking his teeth, and you know, he's he's he's an asshole, I'd be like, oh, not him too. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:19

No, not pensioned. You can't be fully human and have your just show some humility, please.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:33

You know, funny, you know, Edic, not to um uh make too much of this, but I um so as much as pension uh is this intimidatingly for many people, an intimidatingly erudite, you know, writer and all this, I find the posture I'm not sure if I can put words to this perfectly, but the posture there is this strange humility to like uh or an openness to uh to constantly to learning and to like discovering. And there's a um you brought up the word grace with relation to the uh to foster wallace and sort of uh maybe a lack thereof, but it's interesting that Pension's um that Pension's uh largest novel against the day, this 1,000 page plus tome, it ends on the word grace. And um and there's something about uh again in the title itself, and this is kind of a unit the unifying thing even amidst the multiplicity. Um it's like it's uh it's uh pension overall, and this novel in many and various ways, it's seeking after the grace that's hidden in the cracks. Uh the the you know, uh the the title is kind of a quote of scripture actually, and against the day of judgment and the destruction of the the of the heavens by fire and all this. And pension is like saying, like, uh, yes, we're kind of there, but there's also uh these these strange and surprising kinds of grace at work, and like, what is that about? And and even the white his novels are seated with uh with uh with songs, and we haven't talked about that, but like the the the silly songs he loved singing, he personally loves singing, and his characters, it's like reading a musical.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:32

Yeah, his characters just spontaneously burst into poetry or uh singing or right, and that that that's a humanity that's there. Yes, I I I sense exactly where you're getting at, which is reinforced by some of the themes. So, for example, back to David Foster Wallace. What is infinite jest really about? It's about two types of people. The one are the sports superstars in the tennis academy, who are world-class athletes, they're at the top of their game, 100% dedication, maniacs when it comes to discipline, and they're naturally talented. They're like transcendent human beings. And then right across the street is the halfway house with the losers, drug addicts, and bums. But most of them are there because they're equally obsessive about their addictiveness. They're that same energy that goes into creating a tennis superstar goes into a heroin addict who is obsessed, obsessed, and fixated and can't let it go. And David Foster Wallace himself is like that, which is I'm gonna be the best professor at Pomona College, I'm gonna be the best writer, I'm gonna write for all these magazines, and I'm gonna write the best novel ever. I'm gonna outdo Herman Melville, James Joyce, and Thomas Pynchon, and it's gonna be a bestseller, and I'm gonna be world famous, and I'm gonna be recognized as this epic personality. And he's out there and he's doing book tours and he's a professor and he's getting involved in affairs that we're hearing about now, and he's struggling with depression, but he's also a megalomaniac. And look at Thomas Pynchon zero interviews, zero paparazzi, leave me alone. It's not about me, it's about my writing. Interpret it any which way you want, and I'm just gonna keep minding my own business and cranking this shit out, take it or leave it. I'm having a good life. I have my nice wife, I've got my kid, Jackson Pinchin, and and go for it, leave me alone. That says a lot about a person, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that that's what you're getting at here. I think that there's a humanity here that that other artists might not embody.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:04

It's the yeah, and it's the yeah, that sense of um humanity and something um uh pro there's something profoundly good about uh the human person and how we're, you know, uh just despite despite the ways in which we have almost become the rocket itself, you know, we we human humanity upon the earth has has has wrought such destruction to the creatures and ourselves of the of the planet and the creation, the capital, you know, the in in the terms of the uh kind of the Puritan language of uh William Pynchon. But um uh but it's like uh Pynchon is constantly there's just a sense of humanity, the sense of um Yeah, I don't know. It's I I I I I find that I I feel that strongly reading his work. And uh somehow that stands out uh even yeah, it stands out amidst the the things that are that he writes about that are monstrous and and and and uh off the wall and uh the alienation at work and all that kind of big those big things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:14

And it's also in juxtaposition to many criticisms of his characters, which beyond my griping, is that they're cartoon cutouts. Yeah, yeah, they're per they're performative, even the funny names like Tyrone Slothrop, which is obviously a pun on Northrop, Northrop then Rummin, an arms manufacturer, and Tyrone is an African American name, which introduces the juxtaposition of the themes the Rosalind ballroom, the racism, his wasp background, and it shows that Tyrone from birth is this weird hybrid. He is the system, he is this imperial wasp Puritan maniac DNA, and he's Tyrone Slothro, right? So he's this combination of the two coming together, and all of his character names are goofy Benny Profane Stencil, all the way through a different mas uh uh wick's cherry coke, the narrator of Mason Dixon, right? Yeah, the Wick is what brings the light, and Coke is the coal, which is the fuel of the light of illumination, and it's been consumerized, cherry coke, right? Which is again consumer prime. That is so Pynchon, but do we learn much about Wicks? I mean, he's the narrator and he's endearing. Yeah, who is he? Who the fuck is Wix Cherry Coke? And for that matter, who the fuck is Mason and Dixon? They're vehicles for Pynchon's exposition and world building, and we never really reach inside a character, it's not very subjective at all. Yeah, they're they're they're mechanisms of metaphor and symbol and plot and action, unless they're male, because they don't really do anything except get buffeted around the plot. See what I mean? So that's the irony here is that you have a deeply human, deeply feeling personality who write who writes cartoon cutouts for his characters. They're really devoid of any internal state. It's very expositional.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:46

And that very, yeah, these very qualities that you're naming, which are I think you're on point. Um, it's almost it's it's it's a it's a difficult thing to express, like how one does, like for those who haven't read Pension or haven't, you know, done the dive and gotten into it, like the fact that you could walk away from portrayals of these very cartoonish characters and these very carp, you know, that they're all the name's allegorical and they're you know, they're they're they're jokes, you know, they're jokes within jokes within jokes. Yet somehow cumulatively, um at least for me, and not I don't speak for everyone, but for me, I do walk away with uh with a sense of the human and a sense of uh and again that it's the human under assault. And under uh uh the the human in the grinder of of this very mechanized world. And um Yeah, and and there's there's these tender moments, you know. He has these real these moments.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:48

Like I actually tear up at the end of Mason and Dixon, like he's talking about his, you know, his your his son and America and that that imagery of America continuing west. And the imagery of that is deeply emotional and deeply human. It's just pure pure poetry at the end of that book.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:11

Yeah. And even a lesser, you know, um work like Inherent Vice, you know, um, I believe like the last passage actually gets me. It's about him sort of seeing it being in the fog, you know, and you know, maybe he could drive far enough where you couldn't tell anymore who was what kind of person or what, and you would all I don't know, there's a sense maybe of some kind of human oneness, but that's lost uh in in the fog, and there's a sense of um Yeah, there's just this profound um there's these these moments, there's these moments where the where the humanity of characters come out. Oh I know, I know what doc there's one moment where Doc I think he's reflecting on uh his uh a memory of him and his mother and how like the when he when he learned that like we're gonna die and and then like Doc cries and the chapter ends. And it was like, I don't know, I felt I felt that.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:15

And I and I even the fog is like a great Gatsby like moment almost, right? With the with the fog and the and the indistinctness, and then the sense of like the collective consciousness is is rolling in there. Yes, yes. So the humanity does come out and it's sparing, and that makes it noteworthy, and it's the the opposite of just emoting all the time, and it's the opposite of just going on and on about internal states and building backstory. It's basically throwing cartoon characters in this absurdist, conspiratorial, pinching universe. Yeah, but but it but it feels right, it it feels like it's it's own thing and it's so smart and it's so interconnected usually that that the humanity comes out despite these ostensibly shallow two-dimensional characterizations. That's right. That's right. Well put. What have you taken out of it? For example, like what really infused in my own writing is the confidence of not looking at a story from a single vantage point in a single genre. Pinchin taught me taught me that this these boxes that we put ourselves in science fiction, fantasy, historical drama, personal narrative, biopic are all kind of bullshit. And you're you're self-limiting in your imagination and your storytelling is if you box yourself from the beginning and then try to tell a story that's a cozy romantic ghost fantasy then then then you might as well sell crypto or real estate because there's a lot of better ways to make money and have a career. And for me it's like if you're gonna bother writing a novel go for it and let it out and let your voice sing and don't be restrictive in terms of genre and expectation I I learned that. And I also learned the power of the narrative voice which is express your damn opinion. Come out and be your own annotator because that makes for a thrilling narrative it adds a layer of complexity and intimacy. And all of a sudden you as the writer and the narrator are another character in the book. Yeah and and that's one thing that's prevalent throughout all of Pynchon's novels is he's ubiquitous. He once said you really just write about yourself and I learned finally that my writing is good and writing is best when you're really just writing about your own experiences. So in a sense every character is an extension of him every narrative is basically putting him into these situations. And he's never far from the world and the world building and the characters. He's gonna come up he's gonna set up the soapbox and he's gonna tell you about thermodynamics and its relationship to government he's gonna tell you about the role of the occult in history and he's gonna do whatever feels right in the moment and he's gonna actually tell you about the narrative itself. There's a ton of meta moments throughout especially his bigger books. This happens in V to a lesser extent but it's all over Gravity's Rainbow where the narrator just starts telling you about the story that he's writing and how he feels about it and where the characters are and where he hopes they're gonna get to and then he pontificates about the historical context and he reminds you of what you need to know at that point right so if you're paying attention it's not that hard and he does and he does it throughout literally Mason Dixon is Wick's Cherry Coke narrating the entire story at the fire to the twins. That's the entire fucking novel. Yeah he's that artifice of Thomas Pynchon as narrator being a character in the book telling his own story about himself and then he puts himself literally in Mason Dixon as doing exactly that. Yeah yeah yeah well I learned that thank thanks Tom for better or for worse like the the novel I always wanted to read I wrote I feel and I learned a lot from you buddy I learned not to limit myself based on what I thought a genre could or should be and I love putting up the podium I'm gonna come out and do whatever the fuck I feel like in my narrative devoid of a developmental editor telling me it's in the way and whether I sell five books or five million I don't care you you've created a style of writing and exposition and a depth and an attitude toward writing that I love. Yeah. Thank you Thomas Pinchon you're the man even though I hate your fucking male character even even though yeah we're uh uh we're coldplayized uh colplays I and and I was alluding to this earlier too that because I think Thomas failed in these protagonists I doubly triply doubled and tripled down on my protagonist not being like them my my protagonist is like an anti anti pinching hero he's reprehensible and awful but I think and I hope likable and he's driving his own goddamn story and he might be driving it into the ground but this guy is leading the tale by his own agency and I think it makes for a better story yeah so that's what I learned good stuff man good stuff uh I a lot of that resonates with me for like it's that's great.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:22

Um yeah I'm not sure how to if I was just to summarize it it would be like I see pension so he's throwing up a mirror to what we are what we've become what this this attempt to reckon with the with the horrors of history and the what America could have been and what it's become but yet he confronts what's dystopian and what has been profoundly disappointing and he keeps a sense of humor. And he uh keeps on uh he maintains a posture of openness uh uh to what remains to be discovered.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:04

There's a to to uh I see this energy of like asking the better question you know uh he's looking for the better question he's uh in this almost dialectical uh maybe it's a battle with himself or a battle uh you know um with uh with with uh the the culture that has formed selves like uh him maybe and selves uh people um and systems that have come to be and yeah he's trying to stay attuned uh he's he wants to yeah uh but there's there's a there's a there's a search for a search for an encounter with some kind of grace at work in the in the system and that's and I I feel that and I in my own writing uh want to also do some version of that that is not just a copy of a pension and for all its greatness but also is doing um you know doing something in a in a unique way I think that's terrific it's not being derivative but it's being inspired by and and and your take on it I think is glorious in the sense of of the humanity behind it that you clearly have a a very talented person who's very discerning obviously very erudite but also deeply sensitized to the circumstance that he lives within with real hopefulness that humanity can learn something that we get better at what we do and that we can ultimately just make life better for our fellow humans I mean that that's really the underpinning of all of his stuff which is he's sharing horror as a counterpoint and a counterexample to the paradise that we could create for ourselves if we just pull our heads out of our own asses and and do something about it. Yeah yeah definitely and maybe we'll find that we're um yeah like our it's our attempt to sometimes it's our attempt to create the paradise that they that's that's the heart of what goes so astray and we we we need to be yeah maybe consider more humble we need to be a little more humble with yeah yeah exactly exactly yeah because we've got amazing ability I mean look at look at science and engineering and technology it's astonishing what these what these uh you know these glorified apes on the third rock from this this yellow dwarf star two thirds out of the way of this barrel galaxy in this cluster in this tendril in this universe have done pretty impressive and it's a shame that a lot of it's backfired and become mechanisms of oppression yeah but we we could turn it around rockets could deliver a payload that blows up a city and gives our boy Tyrone an erection but the same the same payload can take these humans to the moon and it has and it's the same guy whom he quotes at the beginning of uh Gravity's Rain about nature does not know death it just knows uh rebirth yeah by Werner von Braun of all people yes yes um and again so I mean then part of and even as I'm giving words to maybe some of the maybe more hopeful dimensions of pension he's also again it's uh he's in this interplay he he um uh he simultaneously does have this hope but also it gets canceled and then it gets renewed and then it gets canceled and then you know um but uh yeah yeah good stuff well it's got us cranking uh effortlessly for two hours about the the dude that we that we love and that we nitpick over but uh but I think we both feel grace and gratitude that we've got a writer and an intellect and a talent that has embodied so much of our own aspirations for creative expression. Because ultimately we latch on to these creative heroes because we want to be like them. We want that similar power of expression and innovation and and we want to do some of the things that they've done which is write a novel that blows people's minds and reveals some of the truths about human beings society where we are and where we can go and that's literature that's literature yeah and maybe and maybe in our creating we might understand how we've been formed and how we've been like the mystery of what it means to be a being and me being created or formed or or being just sprung up like you know it's it's ambiguous in pension but there's a there's there's a mystery to what uh what um what creating itself unlocks when we when when we when we're creating out of that that um open and honest place.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:28

Yes yes and and I think behind it all too is I got the feeling especially after reading against the day that he he really believes in some kind of transcendence and this I think this is a great way to cap it because you're a theology student as well I don't think Pynchon is a mechanistic deterministic fatalist atheist I don't I don't either no I don't either I I think this guy actually believes in some kind of spiritual underpinning to things and I think he's arrived he arrived at that around the time he was you know diving into the interminable and endless against the day where he was he was in there and he was really believing it. Definitely and I think that that's profound in its own way I don't think Thomas Pinchon is an atheist or even an agnostic. I think he really believes in other worlds and some kinds of angels and demons and maybe even some kind of transcendent omniscient presence.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:41

I really do I think if he if he'd be listening to this he'd be like nodding his head that you know he might not understand really what it is but I think through all of his contemplation and thinking and world building he believes in God in some sense yeah definitely I I'm in agreement and and that's part of um you know my quest is like to understand like to consider what what exactly you know what what does what is it work and what does penchance mean or what does he understand about things and how does his literature uh deal with the transcendent how does it um how does it inhabit this um that there's this word used in academic space I'm not sure if it's made it to just whatever but the post secular that word's come across your radar but it's this idea you know this there's this sense that it can't fully rest in some kind of secular uh completely secularized atheistic kind of way of uh understanding but it also can't rest in the like strong belief like the classic traditional any kind of traditional doctrinal understandings of reality. So it's a this curious hybridized uh uh thing going on.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:00

But um but what does seem to be the case is there's a um there's a uh there is a pull towards uh an openness to the the transcendence and to whether it's to God or to something like that or gods or you know it's very it's very indeterminate with Pynchon but he does seem to be some kind of he has some kind of um of of belief or something that undergirds his you know or a belief in act uh some kind of uh sense of you know that uh that undergirds his uh his uh uh energies and his intellect and his play playfulness and all that makes him so uh enlivening to read it could even be like Loki or the Egyptian god of writing thought Thoth who is both an Ibis bird and a baboon which which shows that inherent dichotomy and the playfulness the court jester of the universe could be the one the one really in charge right and I I think he might angle he might angle toward that in a way that's meaningful. Yeah and look at the philosophy of science quantum mechanics the multi worlds theory of Everett the mathematical multiverse of Tegmark uh Stephen Wolfram's Rouliad the idea of a computational universe but one where where its essence is completely different than how we perceive it from being and you have quantum entanglement this idea that even space and time might not be absolute points to some kind of inspirational mysterious backbone of reality itself that's connecting people that's independent of space and time and this could be wired within the framework of reality itself so when you really start thinking about science in this speculative kind of way uh it it points to that post secular kind of sensibility that you've described which is there's a limit to rationalism there's a limit to determinism there's a limit to our cognitive understanding of analytically deconstructing and slicing and dicing the world and the opposite of that is this biocentric emergent creation of our own consciousness interacting with whatever the hell is out there to create what we experience and what we feel and we don't know nothing. And what we see is an illusion is a kind of simulation and if even the essence of our own perception is this far removed from what absolute reality we know could or should be then what the hell man right believing some kind of entity or God is not that much of a stretch at that point. Right right oh I I love it man that's exactly yeah that that was such a great Pinchonian um description of how uh even in the journey of of um human beings exercising their scientific capacity to to see what's there, to study the natural world, we encounter mystery upon mystery and we go from a Newtonian kind of uh framework or paradigm to now this quantum mechanical paradigm and then all of the uh uh um the uh the current cosmological crisis cosmology now and you know like it all ends up bloming when you um and uh I think that anyway I I think it's appropriate we're kind of almost concluding on a note of uh of um the endless uh the the the questions that that this fiction provokes the big ones the big ones and you know if if the universe is infinite or there's an infinite number of universes within some kind of infiniverse right then there's endless options and endless iterations and you have Borges library of babel where every possible book is contained and then you have the the idea that every possible reality plays itself out and that begs the question of free will and it it spins amorfati the Nietzschean idea with its own eternal recurrence and determinism and it's very pinchon esque because he grapples with these same issues throughout all of his books and does it in such a creative and clever way superimposing the vicissitudes of historical circumstance to draw these out in ways that are always compelling and provocative and revealing and that's our pinchon right that's the that's the guy we love. Definitely definitely yep well thanks so much for your time ladies and gentlemen Matthew Nelson he's the only guy I know who wrote a PhD thesis on our favorite writer Thomas Ruggles Pinchon Jr. Gotta get the junior in there yes the the man so uh so thanks so much for your time I'd love to bring you back in uh in in maybe a few months or a little while we could continue the conversation we could dive into other aspects of it as we let this our conversation germinate because I got great insights from you on a lot of things I've never thought about regarding pension and writing and and everything that's cooking and uh and let's see how it shakes out. Uh Tom is 88 and he's still walk wandering around the upper west side there's an old there's an old Yiddish proverb that the more you complain the longer God lets you live. So on that note I hope Tom has it in him to crank out a few more novels with emasculated protagonists and tough women and maybe he's got another encyclopedic bomb in the works who knows right because I I like uh I like that hope and uh yeah I know thank you so much Mookie for having me on this has been wonderful I definitely am down to continue the conversation yeah yeah like comment and share everybody this will be on YouTube and there'll be clips and I'll do the audio version which will be on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and whatever and uh share it with your pinching friends definitely uh I'm sure it's been too inside pinching for a lot of folks but um I know there are people out there who love the Thomas and I think we covered some interesting provocative and evocative ground on this uh this uh this major American writer who's actually still with us and we hope for many years more so take care Matthew rock and roll thank you you too you too have a good day