Thomas Pynchon on Modern American Men

How does Thomas Pynchon feel about American Men? In today's video, we will explore a rare nonfiction statement by Pynchon about modern culture. Pynchon discusses how most men are little boys, why they view women as vessels for their pleasure, and where we went wrong as men.
This is our first big venture into Pynchon's work, and I will post daily videos on Pynchon from now on!
Want to READ Gravity's Rainbow with a group and finally finish it? You will also get access to the Gravity's Rainbow course and the Write Conscious book club. Go here, I will make sure you finish it!
writeconscious.substack.com/p...

[@gratefuldeadreviews3073]

Finally you are doing Pynchon content!

[@philosophia9927]

That’s what I’m saying

[@pseudoplotinus]

Ian enters his Pynchon ark

[@WriteConscious]

Lol, you guys are on the Pynchon ARK with me now! 😂

[@TyroneSlothropEatsBananas]

What? -Richard M. Nixon I have many thoughts, but honestly, this is a weird topic to start with when it comes to Pynchon.

[@iuseitToo]

@TyroneSlothropEatsBananas the original epigraph of pt 4 were Joni Mitchell lyrics, (forget what song, what album, but it's not hard to find) and she asked they be removed. I'm sure at some point she kicked herself in the ass for not letting it alone... GR hadn't become the infamous book that it is today so she was probably like, "yeahhh this is a little too much... don't associate me with this insane WWII novel"... I'm a jonifan but oooff, what an awful move

[@TyroneSlothropEatsBananas]

@@iuseitToo Yeah I knew about the Joni Mitchell quote.

[@flynnjaman]

What books would you recommend to both men & women to help with the individuation process?

[@SeveringJuan]

I love your video, you always go so hard and eloquently, you're right on the money

[@enriccoc7794]

Hey speaking of rituals, do you know of any books on pagan rituals that you could recommend? Or rituals more generally (nonfiction)?

[@WriteConscious]

send me an email brotha

[@asemicwriter]

Hi Ian, i'm a long time fan of your channel. I'm a 50-year-old writer from Minnesota. I'm glad someone is trying to get young males into literature. Being a male means you are basically born to fight. I mainly read classic literature and nonfiction. I just don't have the $ to throw away on new books. So I usually read new authors who do live readings. I'm sure the ai slush will be good for something. But right now I am taking a slower approach to writing instead of speeding towards literary extinction. I'm glad you are trying to teach English these days. Spanglish is probably the language of the future here in the states. I mainly write in English, but I also make a lot of abstract calligraphy. Basic literacy is where we need to start, instead of having language tied to an overly complicated machine. I got into books and writing via comic books and zines. Maybe introduce your students to petroglyphs and animal tracks. I write with a broad spectrum, sometimes the alphabet and at other times a scribble. Oh well, I wish you success with your writing, it's a tough business these days. You put out a lot of videos, so you must have some ai assistance. I write for humans but grew up with robots in movies and TV. Greetings from a fellow scribe.

[@jasperchance3382]

adolescents everywhere you turn

[@jameswood608]

Pynchon puffs that loud nonstop like a bawsss cmon now

[@adrianstumpp5883]

A bit of a chicken and the egg problem. Do our addictive behaviors prevent us from authentic connection or does a lack of authentic connection lead us to addictive behaviors. I hope while you go down the Pynchon rabbit hole you do a deep dive on The Crying of Lot 49. It's his best novel, IMO. And not just because it's short. All of Pynchon's major themes are expressed with great economy and depth, which is hard to pull off. The exploration of conspiracy theories is haunting and prophetic. My first Pynchon was Mason & Dixon, which I loved, but I've always thought his first two, V. and Lot 49, are his best.

[@theashenpodcast3638]

I dream that I've found us both again with spring so many strangers lives away and we so free out walking by the sea with someone else's paper words to say they took us at the gates of green return too lost by then to stop and ask them do children meet again? Does any trace remain along the superhighways of July (spoke from memory)

[@bsven6336]

My version of the thought you expressed at 11:14 is "...consider women merely a life support system for a vagina..." but your wording has a brute blunt charm too.😉

[@TheComiKen]

I think about masculinity constantly. I can't help it. I'll be looking into the process of individuation next.

[@wexwuthor1776]

So who is a real man from the past that we should admire?

[@WriteConscious]

One who came to my mind that is relevant to this conversation that is still living is Wendell Berry. Excelled as a legendary author in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He is a farmer and homesteader who helped authors with the technical aspects of starting a farm IRL and w/ books, and also was a huge envrionmentalist while still championing small farmers. He had a family and never got divorced, had any scandals, or anything like that. He also was a very spiritual Christian who lived/preached the best version of Christianity I've seen. Mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.

[@tectorgorch8698]

Ian, visit or re-visit the work Robert Bly was doing in the 80s and 90s. It's brilliant as is his book,The Sibling Society (I feel that he lost the thread about halfway through this work but the first half is great). The Jungian stuff gets a bit "much" for me, but that's my problem, not Bly's... Cheers!

[@ekurisona663]

great topic man 🩵

[@qsky1]

Might be a little 'square' of me to share this but there's a good recent video of a David Brooks talk that hits on some of these very topics: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pXXHpKaKhqxpjMUsi=kXutZBOS9ipILjAB Also, I don't agree that good art needs to be made in a sober state. Lot's of truth comes from just having a good time with friends. One of my favorite bands is Ween, not the most sober band to ever play a note but that music hits deep. I think it all comes down to what David Brooks is talking about in the above videa... a general social/cultural malaise and pretty severe loneliness that comes from a lack of trust in each other even though we're evolved to be social, community-oriented animals.

[@flame85246]

Glad to see the Pynchon content! Have you ever heard of/read the literary critic Dan Schnider (shares the same name as the disgraced tv producer)? There are clips of him online calling every modern writer like Pynchon, DFW, and Franzen as “bad” and tries to frame it as an objective statement. If you know this critic, is there any merit to his comments on Pynchon or is he off his rocker?

[@iuseitToo]

No. He is just a hyperbolic reactionary. He's written a book, forget what it's called, I read some of it online and it didn't suck but it definitely wasn't good. I aint searching that thing out. Plus he just comes off super bitter and curmudgeonly about essentially all modern fiction... fucking hate that guy.

[@iuseitToo]

He begins to become inconsistent and hypocritical in his thoughts if you have the misfortune of watching enough of his stuff

[@flame85246]

@@iuseitToo fr, I noticed that too. I thought I was the only one

[@iuseitToo]

@flame85246 ...and in the Gravity's Rainbow video(s) he's just trashing it left and right... "incoherent mess" blah (it's straight up analogous to Bloom reading IJ and giving that 'critique', but on steroids lol) blah, some other bullshit... I feel like he just keeps it totallysuperficial. Like, isn't aware of, or outright dismisses the underlying motifs and patterns... for example he doesn't mention the tarot, the Duino Elegies (which are beautiful pieces on their own) but reading them in relation to something that inspired gravitys rainbow, they're really mindblowing, it's like a fucking 'Ur' text ... (that's the text that helps you decipher/better understand the text you are reading, right?)... and yeah he casually says he read GR in six hours or something. ...mmm, bullshit. Orrr NO SHIT YOU THINK IT'S A "~JUMBLED MEANINGLESS MESS" if you literally read GR in six hours, somehow... The cross of the rocket encased in two circles; RIPE with significance! The way the four quadrants it creates 'rhyme' w the four sections of the book, the four seasons and that strong link there with a bunch of other 'German Romantacism',** which is heavy in imagery of Nature and the aesthetics of nature; harmony with the 'natural world'... and so much more when you think about the circles, the cyclical nature of Things... but he would probably just dismiss this as snooty pontificating, but I mean... tf am I supposed to say?? These things are there, happening. Perhaps it's both the fact that TP does these things AND that they generate conversations about all this 'trivia'... The book kind of necessitates it. Def. a candidate for some potential mild neurodivergence. And I don't say that in a mean way at all, only as a possible reason he is the way he is. Edited to make longer and correct typos. **surely meant German Idealism... def inspired by German romantacism too... And I forget where I read/heard this meaning on the title: "Gravity's Rainbow" is the strata of the earth, the layers and layers of 'history' constantly being pulled in and trapped by the constant force of Gravity. And all that that might entail. Something like that. I dig it.

[@iuseitToo]

Transcribed review of GR by Dan Schneider...

[@ekurisona663]

I was listening to another booktuber the other day and he made the comment that it was an oxymoron for an artist to be conservative and I turned my head and just stared at my phone - can somebody explain to me why and how someone could believe art and conservatism are incompatible? how does somebody arrive at that conclusion? I mean where did they even start in their thinking to get there?

[@fireball43]

It isn’t an oxymoron. However, the Bible is the word of God and you can only do so much within those words before you reach ideological limitations. That doesn’t mean art that works within that ideology is worthless or bad. It just might reach points where you have to move beyond it to do your work. Ian sees Cormac as an example of that, moving beyond Christianity in his novels even if people see the Judge as the devil. Regardless, invalidating conservative artists is weird. You could just as easily invalidate the last radical artists as too conservative as the new artists start coming in. Art, regardless of how dated someone might think the mode it works within is, can have value. Even after we have moved beyond it. At the end of the day, these conversations are just the same old boring culture war fights that aren’t even worth considering. It’s not actually about any nuanced idea about what is or isn’t art. It’s about creating a binary to make it more convenient to hate something they don’t like.

[@diemes5463]

@@fireball43 Every social boundary you can imagine is crossed in the Bible.

[@fireball43]

@@diemes5463 I just used the Bible as an example of something that might have ideological limitations. Yes, some of the stories in it don’t have images one might call “conservative” but that isn’t really the point I’m trying to make. People, at a general level, are rejecting conservative artists because they aren’t “radical” enough. Regardless of how that might be. In a sense, it is true, but that is ignoring the value of art just because it isn’t “with the times”.

[@AleksandarBloom]

Why would an artist, a figure of formal and cultural progress, bow down to a bunch of already established nonsense? There is nothing to conserve, it's just an entailment and fear of losing your social position and material wealth wrapped differently. Conservative artist is just a propagandist for a system that does not care about him whatsoever.

[@AleksandarBloom]

​@@diemes5463Only to be reaffirmed ten times over. With a clutter of nonsense and a moral blackmail.

[@andrewgirvan3540]

To the point of the childish man vs childish woman topic. Side note while typing, either i erred or autocorrect changed vs to bs lol a little Freudian slip? What ghost in what machine eh?! And i digress. A wise man once told me, "don't try and win ". He did not elaborate. I've thought of this often. These mole hills do become mountains.

[@philosophia9927]

They’re really not digging this video on the Pynchon subreddit

[@R.L.Kramer]

Redditors are intellectual Vultures who pick apart everything to the bone, but much like vultures never actually hunt down their own ideas, they can only snack on the scraps of others

[@WriteConscious]

Lol, it's Reddit. If I had listened to the McCarthy subreddit, which also hated my stuff from day one, I wouldn't have helped thousands of people start reading McCarthy and start writing.

[@R.L.Kramer]

@@philosophia9927 lol I got deleted

[@philosophia9927]

@@WriteConscious I agree. Regardless, I appreciate your videos man. Fuck the neckbeards!

[@christopherfarley9331]

I think you are being way too judgmental of young men these days being juvenile infants who don'y want too grow up. For starters Society is more likely to be tolerate to hear women in pain than young boys, as young men are still encouraged to internalize there feelings, which is where alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and porn comes in to help these pain. Women are allowed to feel and cry and men are not. Yes, these are problems in our society today, especially with the high suicide rate among them, but please stop male bashing that is on every outlet today. Young Men right now need help and direction in large part, due to the displacement of jobs by technology.

[@johnnyxmusic]

You know there’s a way in which we allow our rock stars, starting in the late 60s… To live their Bacchanalian lifestyles… And we gave them a license to do it because they represented the freedom that we couldn’t have… except on the weekends. Now it seems as though there’s one candidate in the presidential race, to whom we have granted that same kind of license. Do objectify women, to sexually abuse them, to be friends with a sex trafficker… To treat women as objects… Etc. etc. etc. And we somehow just write it off as boys being boys… Or real men being real men. I really would like to understand how the supporters of this person justify all of his statements and actions.

[@gomezgomez7759]

I read up to page sixty of voneland. N random pages from gravitys rainbow. When hes good hes good. In vineland pynchon wrotes like a munch

[@iuseitToo]

The only people w mullets, far as I can see, are lefty hipsters these days lol

[@henrytheworst]

Hey man, I enjoy your videos on writing and you’re obviously a good teacher - but it seems like you’re projecting from some very bad specific personal experience onto hippies (that’s weird) and weed and porn addiction in a way that subtracts and distracts from the things you’re actually knowledgeable about. I still wanna join your book club though 😂

[@dylanmcmahon4902]

Pynchon, known for his absurd, trenchant depictions of the paranoid style of American politics, and this is what you choose to talk about? Why?

[@R.L.Kramer]

what have you chosen to publicly talk about?

[@dylanmcmahon4902]

@@R.L.Kramer I talk about football a lot with my friends

[@R.L.Kramer]

@@dylanmcmahon4902 Football is a brutal sport, the highest form of bread and circus used to tribalize men and rob them of their weekends, and this is what you choose to talk about. Why?

[@dylanmcmahon4902]

@@R.L.Kramer Because we are cool, normal people

[@gomezgomez7759]

Yea i enjoy this channel mostly but lately hes losing it. Take a break mister.