100 episodes
Pynchon in Public Podcast Bo Butler
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- Books
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4.8 • 66 Ratings
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Thomas Pynchon's novels are as wonderful as they are difficult. Our show, done in seasons, addresses one book at a time in a panel-discussion format. While we aren't experts, we do try very hard to understand and analyze as much as we can. We also occasionally have guests, songs, and you never know...perhaps Mr. Pynchon himself.
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108: Maybe the Kazoos Will Save Us
In which we look at the final three sections of chapter seven in Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V.
Bo begins with a New York Times article by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You can read it here.
Aug mentions an interest piece on Pynchon in the Boston Review.
Bo mentions another piece about Pynchon.
Lastly, Aug mentions the book Stranger Than We Can Imagine, by John Higgs. -
107: Get Out the Vogt
In which we take a look at sections 6 through 8 of chapter 7 of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V.
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106: I Almost Spit Out My Tea
In which we have a look at sections two through five of chapter 7 of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V.
Bo mentions that Vheissu reminds him of The Vhorr, a novel by Brian Catling.
Alan mentions the movie Lost Horizon (1937).
Bo points out the Pynchon is the first person credited with using “shrink” to mean a therapist in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is a screenshot.
The Birth of Venus painting at the heart of the story. -
105: Vheissu on Your Mutha
In which we start looking at chapter 7 of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. We discuss the opening and the first two of the numbered sections.
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104: I Almost Enjoyed Reading Pynchon
In which we take a look as chapter 6 of Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V.
Paola and Alan talk about the Feast of San Gennaro, which you can read more about here. -
103: Everything Else That Used to Be Worthwhile
In which we sit around talking in proper nouns about chapter five (v) of Thomas Pynchon’s V. We’ll be back in two weeks with a discussion on chapter six.
We’ve talked before about the Baader-Meinhof Complex. If you’d like to know more, you can read about it here.
Radiohead has a song called “Fog” on their album Knives Out that seems to reference V. They also have a version called “Fog (Again)” that was the source of a joke in our episode.
Bo occasionally mentions that he was born without a sense of smell, a condition called congenital anosmia. Here’s a very good video that explains the condition and what it’s like to live with, if you would like to learn more.
Customer Reviews
Very good show
Show can be enlightening, and I love the hosts. Not a huge fan of the theme song
Thomas Pynchon Nerdfest
Chris, Bo, and their guest Pynchon fanatics discuss his notoriously dense novels the way I do with my friends and the paranoiac voice in my head. They aim their tele- or microscopes, depending on the subject, at each passage and tease out in-crowd jokes, camouflaged symbolism, esoteric cultural references, academic absurdites, obscure character relationships, post-modern self-references, and propositions in metaphysics that hide in the pages of Pynchon’s writing. I devour each episode as I would the subject novel and often replay them, book in hand, laughing out loud, and nodding affirmatively.
As with any such podcast, I sometimes find myself shouting at the hosts for overlooking or misinterpreting a cultural reference obvious to someone like myself, born a decade or two earlier. But who can blame them? No on will ever decipher Thomas Pynchon completely. His novels suggest that perhaps even he might not have cracked that nut yet.
Keep it up guys! I can’t wait for the Mason
A Podcast of Characters
In a world of constant vanishing points into the endless new newness what was that I lost my train of thought and bought a new holy electric need machine, PIP cast is...sac-religious.
Bring on Mason and Dixon.
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