Oppenheimer.

You? Never. Did the Kenosha kid?

So I have given my students a grammar exercise and there is Pynchon in it.

“Budapest, like love in Paris or greed in New York, would be somehow more authentic.”

“Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?” www.cnn.com/travel/artic...

Tom McMillan (original marker courtesy of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon)

your moment of calm

My first DNF of the year, now that I’m finally allowing myself to do this! (I actually would have also DNF’ed Jane Austen’s Persuasion last weekend if it wasn’t for a book group.) I’m on fire!

I’m curious whether anyone can point me to any fictitious film- makers with an equally fictitious filmography. I’m only familiar with two: James O Incandenza (DFW’s Infinite Jest) and Max Castle (Theodore Roszak’s Flicker). Drawing a blank regarding others.

"What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song"

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story

"What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song."

I despise Thomas Pynchon with every fiber of my being so I got triggered there for a minute lol

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, re the creation of the New Turkic Alphabet: "On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs ...

“There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley…The plan went wrong. He is being broken down…and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style…they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity.”

That friend actually told me the other day: "Last year, I read got sober. And I read GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. And my dad died. And I had my first kid. And honestly the Pynchon was the hardest part."

"Suppose," said Profane to the sea gull, who was blinking at him, "suppose I was God." He inched on to the platform and lay on his stomach, with nose, eyes and cowboy hat sticking over the edge, like a horizontal Kilroy.”

Gravity's Rainbow. Jonathan Lethem once put it very well: "For Joyce, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Pynchon, history is a nightmare within which we must become lucid dreamers." You can see the great curve in Pynchon and then, after that, you see it everywhere.

“Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity –.”

Pynchon I think is one of the people who can see the invisible string on which the globe dangles, and he has some stern questions for the owner of the great hand that occasionally plucks that string.

"why is pynchon a recluse" because when you want fascists dead you are a target bsky.app/profile/cfmc...

Against the Day by Pynchon. One Line at a Time. 1123: Merle and Roswell went down to the creek and joined a bucket brigade, hoses were run from hydrants, and later some engines showed up from Cleveland. atd1line.blogspot.com/2025/12/chap...

Pynchon gone fucking beautiful describing a motorcycle: “…no substitute for his old Harley Flathead, which, though less of a coherent machine than a history of maintenance melodramas each waiting its turn to be enacted, he now misses heartbroken as a cowboy in a song…”

Whenever I hear somebody say 'Kaiser Permanente' I think it's a Pynchon character

“By 1945, the factory system - which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution - had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz.”

RIP, King. Claude, San Francisco's beloved albino alligator, dies at age 30 www.sfgate.com/local/articl...