Sunday 24 January 2016

Deal Me In Short Story- Thomas Pynchon

Entropy by Thomas Pynchon


The Deal Me In
Short Story Challenge
This was the story I picked at random through the Deal Me In Short Story Card Challenge.  I didn't enjoy it much. Probably because I didn't understand it. So after I read it I needed to look in Wikipedia and Google and see if what I thought about it was correct or not. Fortunately I pretty much figured it out without knowing it.

This is the book I choose a story from the
15th of every month.
It was first published in 1960 and it is very much a 60's story from what I remember of the American 60's. The time period in the story is February 1957 and the location is an apartment in Washington DC.

There is a lease breaking party going on. There are several musicians walking around. While they are playing a 54 year old man is chanting about thermodynamics. More university students continue to arrive. It seems like a typical university weekend party in someone's unit.

The main protagonist is holding a baby bird cupped into his hands. This made no sense to me as I doubt he would find a fledgling in February in Washington DC.  The names are Saul and Meatball Mulligan. The dying baby bird stood for several ideas in the story.

You might ask what Entropy means?  I did. According to a dictionary online it is a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message. I imagine people who studied physics would know this.

In this story it is a metaphor for the discussions people are having and also as the evening progresses the baby bird is quietly slipping away. This story is full of metaphors. There are almost too many to bear. But if I remember people of the 60's were really into metaphors.
From Wikipedia

During the party a group of policemen arrive at the door. Instead of saying, "Hey, turn the music down" they walk through to the kitchen and join the party. There are drugs and alcohol and many deep and meaningful conversations happening in every corner of the room. The descriptions make one feel as if they are sitting in a chair in a corner watching everything.

What did I learn from this?  Well if you're having a deep and meaningful conversation while at a party imbibing in drugs and alcohol you are probably going to sound less profound than you think. There will probably be a lot of gaps as your mind struggles to organise itself. Entropic brain I guess.

The themes are the slipping away of many things that come and go in a pop culture and drugs give you quite a different view point of the status quo.  Conversations aren't connected much, life at times seems sporadic in a drug culture. There is also a bit of bad humour but of course the participants don't know it. I picked up on it.

There turns out, as the party progresses to be a complete breakdown of all of the systems of control.

Like I said, it is very sixties.

I liked that I had no idea about anything Thomas Pynchon related and now I have read several documents on the web about him I feel I know a bit more about him.  It was an interesting exercise.




7 comments:

  1. I know I read some Pynchon in college, but I remember nothing. I'm okay with that. ;)

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    Replies
    1. I must say, I am not drawn to any any of his books but if another short story crosses my path I might have a look at it. Thanks for dropping by Katherine.

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  2. i've read "V" and "lot 49" and tried "mason and dixon" but quit the latter in disgust. can't say i think much of him as a writer, both in subject matter and style. brave of you to undertake the challenge. it was in the sixties when i read the first two. i remember thinking they were a cross between interesting and incomprehensible. i think he didn't change much in the intervening years, but i did. i'm much less tolerant that i was and not so accepting of offensive material. he might be trying to say something, but it's not what i am comfortable in listening to. tx for the update, anyway...

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  3. This story wasn't too bad for crasness but I understand when you describe his writing as a cross between interesting and incomprehensible .

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  4. I think I mentioned in a prior comment that I found his "Gravity's Rainbow" largely impenetrable. This in spite of having a book club leader who was something of a "Pynchon scholar" or maybe he was just passing himself off as one... :-)

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  5. I so enjoyed this review. I read this story as part of a physics class in college. It was a physics for poets types class designed for non-science people. Back then, 1983, we took classes in things that interested us, not just in things that would make money someday. Today, I doubt the class would be offered.

    Our professor used it to help explain the idea of entropy in science, which is that energy can only go from a high state to a lower state in a closed system. Since the universe is a closed system, it gets no energy from any outside sources, it will become colder and less energetic on a particle level over time resulting in heat death or entropy. Much the way the party in the story does because it is a closed system.

    We all thought it was a great idea and that we were very clever students for understanding it. The Crying of Lot 49, which we also read for this wonderful physics class, was also about scientific entropy. I am grateful that I read both with a science professor to help me along.

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  6. I so enjoyed this review. I read this story as part of a physics class in college. It was a physics for poets types class designed for non-science people. Back then, 1983, we took classes in things that interested us, not just in things that would make money someday. Today, I doubt the class would be offered.

    Our professor used it to help explain the idea of entropy in science, which is that energy can only go from a high state to a lower state in a closed system. Since the universe is a closed system, it gets no energy from any outside sources, it will become colder and less energetic on a particle level over time resulting in heat death or entropy. Much the way the party in the story does because it is a closed system.

    We all thought it was a great idea and that we were very clever students for understanding it. The Crying of Lot 49, which we also read for this wonderful physics class, was also about scientific entropy. I am grateful that I read both with a science professor to help me along.

    1 February 2016 at 03:16

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