“until the constellations, like the new stars of Pain-land, had become all unfamiliar and the earth’s seasons reversed.” – Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
While Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are apt for discussing and dissecting what I have done. Tuesday and Thursdays can be used for what I am doing, or will do.
I just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It is perhaps the single most difficult but simultaneously rewarding book I have read in years. The prose often borders on poetry, but always brings you right into the dystopian world of Europe at the close of WWII. But a Europe riddled with superstition, ancient mysticism and psycho-kinetic phenomena. The novel often jumps from character to character, place to place, writing style to writing style as if they were all part of the same viscous gelatin.
In Jam in the Band I was trying to copy the documentary style. If there’s anything I am proud of with Jam in the Band, as it’s what I set out to do with the story in the first place, it’s how the story is told though several different sources: fliers, letters, interviews, magazine covers, standard dramatic scenes, diary entries, etc. etc. But I am a rank amateur compared to Pynchon.
Pynchon reaches the levels that William Burroughs reaches with Naked Lunch. With Life of Vice #1 I was heavily influenced by what I knew of Burroughs, but I can only hope to push this further. I will keep you posted.
