Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Part One, Chapter 1 – 11, page 3 – 115



A screaming comes across the sky,
Snowballs have flown their arcs,
Rev’d Cherrycoke tells a tale high,
Dr. Pepper makes no remarks.

Cphe wrote: "I hope it is okay to start commenting. It is the 6/7 right here and right now.

My initial impression is it's not a work that you can leave for any length of time otherwise you do get out of a read..."

Agreed about the reading rhythm - so I've made a point of reading at least 20 pages a day to stay in tune.

The capitalization is, formally, an attempt to reproduce the seemingly random capitalization found in 18th century printed materials. I would wager, however, that Pynchon's choice of which words to capitalize is not random.

I'm struggling. I've been trying for a week to read the first 100 pages, and I am still around page 80. Parts of the story are exciting, and many lines are humorous, but they are interspersed with conversations I have trouble following. My mind wanders. I fall asleep a lot. I'm still not really sure what is going on--why these astronomers are on this ship and what it is they are supposed to accomplish. I was hoping Jim would give us one of his inspired and often enlightening summaries for this part. I guess I just want someone to explain to me what I am reading.

Well, there's this, which may or may not help you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

That is definitely helpful, Nicole, thank you for sharing. I had a similar one for Infinite Jest and it was great!

Thank you, Nicole. That is extremely helpful. Reading that summary, I've discovered I understood more than I realized of what I was reading, and now I don't feel quite so dense.

Cphe wrote: "In someways the book has a bit of a "steampunk" feel to it (at least in my opinion) that bl..."

i felt kind of the same Cphe. i also pictured characters from a cartoon show or from the movie A cock and bull story. i think a definition of Pynchon could be: "a writer who likes to play jokes onto his characters and stories and expect the reader could follow those jokes" no matter the subject the point is tell something that makes noise (not always makes sense).
there are pages that need to be read more than once. hey, one could do that with a book.

my personal feeling is that all the stuff about astronomy has something, a hint, about the personalities of the main characters.

I really like the way he writes, his long descriptions, and the wide variety of characters. He definitely has an eye for details.

Cphe wrote: "Never truly appreciated just how far reaching and invasive the Dutch East India Company were at the time."

the very first multinational.

in other hand I could picture the Vroom daughters as these:

This may be a little late - I just started - but..

Oh god, the spelling.

I'm not used to (real or fake) 18th century english grammar, and the random Capitalisation is really, really distracting.

It is not so much the capitalisation itsself that drives me up the wall, but the irregularity of it.

In my native language caps are used for all nouns, nominalisations and suchlike, so when encountering capitalisations I subconsciously expect them to stick to the grammaticl rules that have been drilled into me since age 6.
Everytime Pynchon fails to use a capital letter for a noun or capitalises a verb, the little pedant inside my head goes 'WRONG!' and distracts me from the story.

It gets easier the more I read, but the first few pages were hard.

Plus, the last time I encountered this many apostrophes I was reading Shakespeare - and apparently that was enough to form a fixed association.
I encounter far fewer 'th's than I expect and everytime they fail to appear I get pulled right out of the immersion.
(All of these failed expectations make for a very weird reading experience!)

Apart from that though, I'm really enjoying the book so far.
The style, genre and 'topick' are right up my alley.
I'm already glad I joined this group. :)

Emma, I'm glad to know someone besides me is back near the beginning. I've finished the week one reading, but barely started on the next part. I set the book aside for a while and I am just getting back to it. It does get easier to read as you get used to it. Also, it seems to me that most of the spelling oddities are connected to the Reverend Cherrycoke character, and when he is not around I like the book more.

Emma wrote: "This may be a little late - I just started - but..

Oh god, the spelling.

I'm not used to (real or fake) 18th century english grammar, and the random Capitalisation is really, really distracting.
..."

Some questions you might ask yourself - Why is Pynchon doing this with the capitalization and commas? Is he trying to annoy the reader? Draw attention to certain words? Or is he just doing this as a lame attempt at mimicking earlier English grammar? Within a given sentence, does the improperly capitalized word gain in importance because of its capitalization? And if so, how and why?

Pynchon is all about language and complex constructions, so why are these formal anomalies being used to tell this story?

I only started M&D today but I'm unsure whether to continue. The only Pynchon book I've finished is Vineland and I don't think I particularly liked it.

I don't mind the 18th C style of writing as I actually find 18th C writing more flowing than modern styles. It's the deliberate confusion that annoys me as well as the idiotic jokes. e.g. calling the dog Learned English Dog just so he can start a sentence 'L.E.D. blinks'.

If I continue I may have to follow Jim's approach, and read something like an episode a day. So many people love Pynchon that I'm curious to know why. So far the effect on me is the same as when I read Ulysses. I plodded through it, didn't really like it but gained a sort of respect for it; and I suspect it may be the same with M&D.

Has anyone abandoned it?

What is the 'L.E.D. blinks' joke? I think it doesn't translate to Portuguese..

Renato wrote: "What is the 'L.E.D. blinks' joke? I think it doesn't translate to Portuguese.."

Well, I'm assuming he's using L.E.D. to mean Light Emitting Diode (knowing that Pynchon likes his maths and science) - I mean it's a play on words really.

Maybe I was feeling a bit crabby when I started the book. I'll give it another go tomorrow and see whether to continue.

Renato wrote: "What is the 'L.E.D. blinks' joke? I think it doesn't translate to Portuguese.."

Apart from 'Learned English Dog' L.E.D. is usually short for Light Emitting Diode - a lamp.

To be quite honest, I actually liked that part because it was so idiotic. It has all the charm of a christmas cracker joke, which is rather endearing imo.

Jim wrote: " Pynchon is all about language and complex constructions, so why are these formal anomalies being used to tell this story?"

Thanks for the input Jim, I'll keep these questions in mind while reading.
This is my first Pynchon, so it will probably take some time to get to know his style.
For now I though, I don't feel able to pick up on all the nuances I know must be there - this has been called his 'best work' by many, after all - but we'll see. Maybe I'll get there eventually.

Oh of course! Thanks for explaining!

The Learned Dog is asked 'What is the integral of one over book d(book)?' This is a bad maths joke; the answer is log (book) as the integral of (1/x) dx is log (x)....even mathematicians don't find it funny. Does anyone know why he's asked'where the bee sucks?'

I'd say the answer to that is meant to be 'the flower' - afaik that's an old timey euphemism for the female genitalia.

Just to add some light on the manner of capitalization, it was John Hart who first advocated the use of it in emphasizing important words and phrases, but by the 18th century people had become carried away and, in most cases, felt it a trend to capitalize every noun and verb. You can still find this trend in languages today, such as modern German.

You got me interested Niklos, so I looked it up (thanks for that!).
I've never once paused to ask myself why we capitalize nouns - I suppose growing up with it it felt like such a 'normal' thing to do - so that was a very instructive 15 minutes I've just had (thanks again).

Google told me the following:
Initially capitals have been used only to mark the beginning of a text.
Later (starting around the 13th century, I think) they start appearing regularly at the beginning of scentences, to help distinguish one from the next (the usage of a period to mark the end of a scentence wasn't common at that point in time) and the first usage of capitals for emphasis - especially in religious documents - can be found in medieval texts.

Over the course of the next few centuries the use of caps to mark paragraphs, verses and stanzas becomes common, and by the 15th century names, places and honorary titles can be found to be capitalised with some regularity.
Capitalisation for special emphasis becomes incresingly common - even in secular writings - around the same time.

In German specifically, instead of more or less random capitalisation, people incresingly adhere to certain - at that time unwritten - rules (most likely related to Luthers translation of the bible in the 1520s), which culminated in the regular capitalisation of all nouns by the end of the 17th century.

Despite this, you're not wrong about John Hart, Niklos.
He did advocate it, but in a different context: at the time America was looking to define itsself as something distincly different from the British and was looking to shape a 'new' language.
Hart probably proposed capitalisation for emphasis as a fixed rule for american-english (instead of a trendy but entirely optional thing to do).

If you're interested The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park contains a few really interesting chapters on all the changes that were proposed at the time. It's a really fascinating subject!

I'm really sorry for all the off-topic stuff.
I hope you don't mind :)