This was quite good. First third very insightful, the rest a bit too long and heavy on spoilers. Would recommend reading to "decoherence" subhead.
humanodon from prior conversations, can't recall anyone else offhand.
To address the first paragraph, who are the "large-scale, ambitious, and experimentally inclined American [or otherwise] writers" these daysl? And which of them should I be reading?
Mitchell I read, the other two not. I shall correct that shortly. Thank you. Mitchell's latest felt odd, to me. Too familiar, too repetitious of previously better executed form and perhaps deserving of the criticism of it being an amateur foray into the fantasy genre. It engaged me but did not take my breath away as did the works leading up to Cloud Atlas.
I misread the title as 'A review of Python's bleeding Edge' and thought it was an article on the Python 2 vs 3 wars; I'm mildly disheartened.
I remember you saying it was great and Pynchon didn't seem out of his realm at all. Did you just finish it?
Retry: In a previous thread, I asked you: "Did it seem like Pynchon, considering he is tackling very contemporary material, seem aged at all or irrelevant?" You said, resoundingly, "NO." Since you are posting about it again, I thought maybe you had just recently finished and at the time of our previous conversation were still in the process of reading Bleeding Edge. I was curious as to whether your experience that lead to the comment above about the last two-thirds of the novel perhaps sullied your initial opinion, which was pretty positive. No snark intended. My first comment sucked.
Ah! I had forgotten about that convo. No, I finished it ages ago. Interestingly the review (you may've read it) tackles the relevance issue head on and agreed completely with me. Still no. Very impressed and I think some critics are viewing Bleeding Edge as something of a return to form (a return which I think was hinted at heavily in Inherent Vice, which I consider a very good novel).
Yeah, I noticed that was one of the first things mentioned when I skimmed through the article, which is great. I'm really tempted to jump into Mason and Dixon on the enthusiastic recommendation of a Thom Yorke look-alike I met in Marfa several years ago, but I need a break from big books.
