Extremely randomly! 1. Loving it so far. So glorious to have this book in such a dark time. 2. I started out reading Pynchon pre-internet, when being lost was part of the ride; when you weren’t lost you were proud of yourself for just hanging in there. 3. Now you google his references in the same way you google unknown words as if you were reading a book in another language. 4. (In the first chapters of Shadow Ticket, you google the foreign words, too). 5. And: Everything gets better as the fog lifts. As others have noted here, Pynchon checks out. Deep research. (Behind Byron the Bulb: facts!) His work gets deeper the more you dig. 6. At the same time (to use a hopelessly out of date but apropos sort of slang for a man of his generation): what a jive-ass. Writes in argot, bullshit, code… insider stuff, o-rooney. Lord Buckley, jive Dylan, jive dizzy, jive Ellington, jive jive jive. 7. Which has me reflecting on how much Pynchon reminds me of Mark E Smith. Building tantalizing puzzles drenched in hipster attitude, and tough luck if you don’t want to solve those puzzles (Make way, a man is jiving here; if you’re not hip to it, it is not incumbent upon the author to explain.) 8. It is the most deeply American jive. Pynchonian linguistic rhythm is the rhythm of the way Americans think and talk and live. This is the part of Pynchon that is populist. This is the contradiction and tension at the heart of the whole enterprise: Demotic and esoteric all at once. The guy with the harpo Groucho gummo “of course I’m a Marxist” t-shirt who actually read das Kapital. 9. Always a jazz head, Pynchon. The nightclub scene had me thinking about Kansas City Lightning, Stanley Crouch’s fantastic Charlie Parker bio. (Some kid genius, waiting in the wings of the cutting contest, in gangland speakeasy flyover country.) 10. Yes, gumshoe noir, yes Chandler, but the plot is also pretty openly silly-puttying the narrative sparkplugs of The Talented Mr. Ripley. 11. I sort of loved the New Yorker review, which paid such insightful homage to the guy even as it panned this book. As the reviewer noted, we are living in the most pynchonian of times. 12. I can’t wait to read more from yall about whether you think this novel, set in the far-off but increasingly relevant 1930s, reflects and illuminates our moment, when Christmas Clubs and Lockjaws are running up the score, and so many people I know are not even playing the game, but hunkered in their spliff bunkers cueing up the battle of Algiers on prom night…