BookWikis
March 18, 2007 7:18 PM   Subscribe

A new genre of literary wikis is in the works. Pynchon fans can find as well as contribute answers to questions about his works at the Thomas Pynchon Wiki. The site currently offers sections on The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Each offers spoiler-free page-by-page annotations, alphabetic search and a compilation of reviews. The Pynchon wikis were created by Tim Ware, "curator" of ThomasPynchon.com. Elsewhere, literary wikis have been started for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and the works of Shakespeare.
posted by beagle (37 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
The earliest serious attempt at this I know of was the "Metaweb" for Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It's gone defunct, which is sad, because those books really fucking needed it. I'm rereading the books now, and have been tempted to start another one at Wikia.
posted by gsteff at 7:25 PM on March 18, 2007


Thank you for this post, beagle. I'm getting "Internal Server Errors" now, but I look forward to using this when I reread Gravity's Rainbow.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:35 PM on March 18, 2007


Finnegans Wake. No apostrophe.

Good post. Thanks for this.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:38 PM on March 18, 2007


Ah! How I love/hate Pynchon. Thank you!
posted by mmahaffie at 7:42 PM on March 18, 2007


No apostrophe.
Dangit, I knew that. Thanks for the correction.
posted by beagle at 7:53 PM on March 18, 2007


A Finnegans Wake wiki! Yes! It's obvious to me that is the orthogenetic end function of the wiki.

Great post. I'm going to read Against the Day this summer, I think. This is probably gonna be a perfect supplement.
posted by painquale at 7:59 PM on March 18, 2007



Oh, for a Nabokov wiki!
posted by bukharin at 8:12 PM on March 18, 2007


Oh, for a Nabokov wiki!

Yeah, but if there was one, could you trust anything written there?
posted by Bixby23 at 8:14 PM on March 18, 2007


The edit wars between John Shade and Charles Kinbote would be ferocious.
posted by painquale at 8:17 PM on March 18, 2007 [4 favorites]


Holy Jesus shit. Going through the first ten lines of the annotated Finnegans Wake broke my mind.
posted by danb at 8:17 PM on March 18, 2007


Thanks for posting. I'm doing my thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and this will be a big help.
posted by obvious at 8:19 PM on March 18, 2007


The Pynchon wikis are great (I've contributed) but personally, I like to stay away from secondary materials until I've read the books at least once. Getting swept away and losing one's bearings is part of the fun of reading Pynchon (or Finnegans Wake.) The decoding comes later. FWIW, I think Against the Day is Pynchon's best book.
posted by muckster at 8:45 PM on March 18, 2007


gsteff: I was on the Metaweb, & I'm looking at reconstituting it.
posted by Pronoiac at 8:51 PM on March 18, 2007


Hm, having peeked through it a bit, I'm a little skeptical of the worth of the Against the Day wiki. Here's a deconstruction of one character's name:

Lew Basnight
"Bas" is French for "low", though "bas nuit" means nothing in French.
A detective named 'Lew' reminds us (who is "us"?) of Ross Macdonald's character Lew Archer which in turn recalls another detective, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade in San Francisco detective agency Spade & Archer. This may be a bad pun on 'lube-ass night'.
Very possibly, Pynchon is having some fun here, working a whole sexual angle, naming his character after the very 21st century phrase "BAS night," meaning a boys' night out, "BAS" being an acronym for "Bitches Ain't Shit" from the "song" by Dr. Dre (featuring Snoop Dogg, Dat Nigga Daz, Kurupt, Jewel). And, hey, Lew meets Nicholas Nookshaft, Grand Cohen of T.W.I.T. (Nookie Shaft? Twat crossed w/clit? A-and isn't that tetractys an inverted beaver?), where he meets Yashmeen, a very sexual woman. And then there's that whole "Beavers of the Brain" cyclomite episode (p. 183) (Beavers, fercrissakes!). Perhaps something worth following up.


That sounds like just so much free association. As far as I can tell, no one uses the phrase "BAS night" except for one guy in one random blog listed on google. I suspect that whoever wrote this entry just googled "bas night", found the blog guy using the phrase once, and listed it as a "very 21st century phrase" without bothering to see if anyone else has used it that way. I hope the whole wiki isn't full of entries by people hopped up on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs posting the first thing that pops into their heads. Then again, maybe that's the correct way to read Pynchon and Joyce. But if that's the case, I'll read the annotations of (Joyce scholars) William Tindall or Don Gifford or (fictional crank) Charles Kinbote because they're learned and/or geniuses; I don't want to read the ramblings of any boring ol' Pynchon fan who doesn't bother to do any solid research.

(Another strike against the "anti-elitist populism" of wikis?)
posted by painquale at 8:52 PM on March 18, 2007


Uh, you know, strike that last sentence from the record. I'm clearly baiting, and I don't mean to do so.
posted by painquale at 8:56 PM on March 18, 2007


the "Metaweb" for Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It's gone defunct, which is sad, because those books really fucking needed it.

Well, I don't know about need. Fun and informative, though, they'd be.

I read (mostly fiction, some non-fiction) on my ancient crickety crackety steam-powered Thinkpad, usually a couple of hours at night in bed every night, before sleep. I've done it for 8 years or so, and it suits me very well indeed. The Thinkpad's dying slowly, though, and I will need to replace it at some point.

My dream machine to do that at the moment is Samsung's new Q2, which has, as far as I'm concerned, a pretty much perfect form factor for the two-pages-open ebook style I use for most everything (as well as being a full-OS Vista PC, of course). Lying in bed, with that thing glommed on to my wireless network, and the ability to zoom off to one of these wikis or whatever at will. My literatiwoody could break stones. Please send money.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:22 PM on March 18, 2007




So, ummm..... anybody finish Against The Day?

I'm, like 650 pages in and, umm.... I'm thinking of calling it quits.

Don't get me wrong - I love Pynchon, I loved Gravity's Rainbow, and I loved The Crying of Lot 49, but this one is... testing my patience.

I don't know quite what it is - it might just be that Gravity's Rainbow was more calculus, while Against the Day is more linear algebra.

Plus, I don't get his whole 'dual nature' fixation.

Should I bother to finish it? Any thoughts?
posted by Afroblanco at 9:35 PM on March 18, 2007


Michael Wood review of Against the Day, from the London Review of Books.
posted by slow, man at 10:35 PM on March 18, 2007


Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the CĂ©vennes and Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde (disclaimer: self-post)

Wikisource is a good place to do basic wiki annotations but I would not recommend it for anything you want creative control over (layout or content), Wikisource admins are pretty ridged, more conservative than at Wikipedia, big fish in a small pond - your either in with the core group of admins or out of luck. Why bother when you can go independent elsewhere. Kind of a shame as Wikisource has some nice integration with Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikicommons - but your at the mercy of people who could care less about annotations, which is kind of ironic given Wikisource's charter.
posted by stbalbach at 10:53 PM on March 18, 2007


(very good find, beagle!)
posted by Dizzy at 12:39 AM on March 19, 2007


The earliest serious attempt at this I know of was the "Metaweb" for Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

I think I can beat that one: the annotations for William Gaddis's novels have been around for longer, I'm pretty sure. (These are generally quite reliable, by the way.)
posted by Prospero at 5:04 AM on March 19, 2007


Afroblanco -- I so looked forward to Against the Day, and I only made it 200 pages or so before setting it down.
posted by jimfl at 6:32 AM on March 19, 2007


Prospero: but note that the Gaddis annotations are not wikis that anyone can contribute to. I think the Pynchon site is way ahead of the curve in that department, but I would expect more of these to appear.
posted by beagle at 7:22 AM on March 19, 2007


The earliest serious attempt at this

Web annotations are nothing new, but using a Wiki to do the annotations is a sort of sub-genre with a lot of potential since they are easy to set up and easy for people to participate in.
posted by stbalbach at 7:25 AM on March 19, 2007


ahh.. what beagle just said :)
posted by stbalbach at 7:25 AM on March 19, 2007


[...]but note that the Gaddis annotations are not wikis that anyone can contribute to.

Fair enough, or at least the point doesn't merit debate (though it's not true to say that only a certain set of people can only contribute annotations to the Gaddis site--the site's owners invite submissions by e-mail, and submissions are credited to the submitter after being reviewed). It is true that the process of submitting annotations is much more transparent in these wikis.

That said, I'm not entirely sure that a wiki is the best possible means of achieving this sort of thing. At least in theory (if not in practice), Wikipedia entries arrive through the process of elaboration and revision at some sort of approximation of absolute truth--however, in matters of interpretation, which are essentially matters of opinion, that corrective mechanism doesn't serve the same purpose. For instance, take this entry:

shadow had taken the immeasurable plain
Contrasts "the light over the ranges". Possibly an allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah, the "cities of the plain" in Genesis 19, in which the angels advise Lot and his family: "do not look back and do not stop anywhere in the Plain. Flee to the hills or you will be swept away" (19:17). The cities of the plain, is also the title of i) the translated fourth volume of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (original title Sodome et Gomorrhe) and ii) Cormac McCarthy's third novel of The Border Trilogy.

I think it's crap, and I think that any reasonable person would agree with me. But absent an appeal to authority, there's no real reason for the entry to be deleted or revised. And in the case of this particular wiki, unlike Wikipedia, appeals to authority have no real basis.

It is certainly true that the Internet makes it possible to spend months on collaborative exegetical work that would have taken many years otherwise. But it isn't necessarily true that a submission method for annotations that facilitates ease without review is the best possible method. Though it'll eventually be useful for the casual reader, I'd be uncomfortable with citing this Pynchon wiki in an academic context, just as I would Wikipedia. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable with citing the Gaddis annotations, which are overseen by Steven Moore, probably the most well-known Gaddis scholar around.

It depends on what you want out of a set of annotations, I guess. At any rate, a printed and bound set of annotations for Against the Day is extremely unlikely in the near future.
posted by Prospero at 8:17 AM on March 19, 2007


I agree that the wiki process is untidy (to borrow a word from Donald Rumsfeld after the looting of Iraq's antiquities). But it's in its infancy -- somewhere out of these examples a good process may emerge. Perhaps it's some kind of moderated wiki -- anyone can contribute but a moderator or committee of moderators can declare something to be crap and throw it out.

In the Pynchon wiki, comments are grouped by page, which seems to invite some of that farfetched or unsupported stuff. In contrast, the Finnegans wiki is mostly hyperlinked words and short phrases (with mostly short annotations), and seems to provide less opportunity for flights of fancy. The Finnegans wiki does seem to have some firm moderation in place, and is a great way of picking through the multiple layers of meaning Joyce intended in many instances.
posted by beagle at 8:40 AM on March 19, 2007


very clever. I'm surprised I didn't see this coming, but I have to admit it makes sense.
posted by malaprohibita at 11:40 AM on March 19, 2007


Prospero said what I was trying to say and makes great points all around. You really do start seeing the value of good literary criticism when you realize how many people do it badly.

I somehow assumed that the Finnegans Wake wiki was a compilation of published annotations and essays on Finnegans Wake. In any case, in order to make it anywhere in Finnegans Wake, you need to be a very able reader and interpreter. I don't think this is the case with Pynchon, who is (although great) often the hero of the dormitory poet-troubadour.
posted by painquale at 12:08 PM on March 19, 2007


So, ummm..... anybody finish Against The Day?

I'm, like 650 pages in and, umm.... I'm thinking of calling it quits.


Somewhere in between Venice, Vienna, and the Kashmir, eh? I daresay that even if you stick it out, you won't get the reward you deserve.

I quite enjoyed the first few chapters, but I definitely got a bit lost as the action shifted to Europe/Asia.

I am amazed, however, to hear ATD tagged as Pynchon's "most accessible" book. Hardly. M&D, Vineland, and Crying of Lot 49 are all much more "user friendly."

I did like it very much in the end. Not as much as M&D, but there's lots of good stuff between pp. 650-1083.

That James Wood review above is pretty good ...
posted by mrgrimm at 1:10 PM on March 19, 2007


Thanks all for the reviews and sympathy. I'll probably finish reading ATD someday. However, there are a bunch of books that have been piling up in my queue, and I think I'll knock a few of those out first.
posted by Afroblanco at 8:42 PM on March 19, 2007


Wiki annotations are probably most useful when they are from reliable source (not original research) and are NPOV. Basically, aggregate all previously published annotations into one place. That would be really useful.

If someone wants to make an original contribution, have some mechanism or separate page for those, with signed and dated attribution.
posted by stbalbach at 9:28 AM on March 20, 2007


Oh, for a Nabokov wiki!

Late to the game, but do you know about Zembla?
posted by trip and a half at 10:47 PM on March 24, 2007


The best way to get through ATD is to go 50 pages at a time. I have been very studious about it, trying my best to get 50 pages every other day or so (in one setting). The fact that I've read 3 books in the interim doesn't bode too well, and the fact that I'm going through Proust's Swann's Way at twice the rate I am going through ATD is sort of sad. Of course with ATD you have to read every single sentence at least twice, and the cross-check it with this Wiki (and a blog called Chums of Choice, which tells the narrative for people like me who get lost).

I like the fact that some characters take several hundred pages to even reappear. I love his prose, absolutely love it, it is sort of like wandering through an Arctic wasteland finding spars. Yeah most is just snow but once in awhile you'll find the peak of a mountain. I mean the allusions to terrorism/anarchism, 9/11, the Utah hell, tetris, all so great. The problem is that I don't have the ability to keep the hundreds of subplots and characters in my head at once and require the blogs and wikis to remind me about characters and the narrative of the story. I get so lost in his writing that I forget sometimes what the hell is going on. Of course I realize that what the hell is going on is not really the point, per se, but otherwise I might as well open to random pages and read the book that way (which, again, might be what Pynchon intended).

Again, the amount of philosophy and mathematics in the book is boggling. I was just reading several papers regarding Brownian motion and some modern concepts of mathematical randomness, which happens to factor in heavily into the plot (q.v., Chums of Chance), but perhaps not in a linear way. I can't imagine too many people would have happened to be up on the some more esoteric philosophical origins of advanced mathematics. Most math people I know could care less about it and most philosophy people could care less about mathematics. Some of the mini-story archs (for lack of a better phrase) are perfect narrative representations of some of the advanced mathematical ideas presented in the book, and one would have to have a deep understanding to get the parallels. Indeed I would think I was just applying such parallels post-hoc if it weren't for Pynchon's clever turn of phrases that are a little wink to the reader that they are not pulling out of their ass.

And you guys all got the Simpsons reference, right? Most accessible my ass though. It almost takes someone who spends an ordinate amount of time watching pop culture, reading high brow academic texts and a deep seated knowledge of history to come up with such a dense text for so many pages.

Also if I'm not too late: If you're reading more than say 100 pages every 3 days you are reading way too fast. No wonder you are putting it down (and someone after page 300? that's just when the story starts, literally). I have no idea how much Adderall it took for the reviewers to crank it out in a couple weeks -- which is why it probably got some of the more negative reviews.

Now if I could only take it out to the bar/coffee shop and read it without getting sneers of people thinking I'm trying to show off (which I solved by putting a book cover on!) or indie girls coming up and trying to talk shop. Hello, ear phones on, taking notes and reading. Not to be rude, but do I need a sign. Sometimes reading at home can get suffocating, need a change of scenery, etc.
posted by geoff. at 5:38 PM on March 31, 2007


Thanks, Geoff. You made me want to read it again.

Fwiw, I had a very similar plan for when I read Gravity's Rainbow back in high school: 10 pages a day. Anyone can do that. Now trying to figure out what the hell is going on ... that's trickier.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:42 PM on April 1, 2007


I have no idea how much Adderall it took for the reviewers to crank it out in a couple weeks -- which is why it probably got some of the more negative reviews.

If you read that James Wood review above, that's one of things he mentions.

Reviewers grudgingly say that it's an "important" or "impressive" book, but no one says anything about it being "enjoyable." Perhaps that's what happens when you try to read it in a week rather than a couple months.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:44 PM on April 1, 2007


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