Podcasts about Pynchon

As the year winds down and the calendar flips over, we're ringing in the New Year with a special bonus episode dedicated to one of our favorite—and most elusive—writers: Thomas Pynchon. In this New Year's Eve edition of Ticket Stubs, we gather to talk about what Pynchon's work has meant to us over the years, why his voice remains so singular in modern literature, and how his obsessions with paranoia, the past, and slapstick continue to resonate. From there, we dive into One Battle After Another, the recent adaptation of Vineland from director Paul Thomas Anderson, another favorite of ours. Then, we share our thoughts on Pynchon's long-awaited new novel, Shadow Ticket, before closing things out by putting our cards on the table with our own personal rankings of his novels. Whether you're a longtime Pynchon devotee, a curious newcomer, or just looking to close out the year with a little chaos and conspiratorial joy, we hope you'll spend what's left of 2025, or perhaps even the earliest part of 2026...or actually anytime in the foreseeable (or not?) future...with us. Any and all digressions are welcome when it comes to discussing this artist and his work. And believe me, we take digressions aplenty! As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you listen. Got thoughts or questions? Email us at huffmanbrothersproductions@gmail.com.

Happy (almost) New Year! We're closing out our Thomas Pynchon mini-revue with his latest novel, "Shadow Ticket". Along for the ride is friend of the pod, author TJ Martinson! Topics of discussion include Pynchon's relationship to pop culture, the use of alternate history in literature, and whether Pynchon offers us as readers an 'out' to our present circumstances.As always, we hope you enjoy the conversation!Check out TJ's books here!

Czy książka wydana 50 lat temu, która opowiada o końcu II wojny światowej i poszukiwaniu tajnej broni Hitlera, czyli rakiet V2, może być książką na nasze czasy? Książką na XXI wiek? Spróbuję odpowiedzieć na to pytanie mówiąc o “Tęczy grawitacji” Thomasa Pynchona.  Opowiem wam też, jak sam przypadkiem, znalazłem w pewnej podlaskiej wsi rakietę V2 oraz o brawurowej akcji Armii Krajowej, która mogłaby znaleźć się w “Tęczy grawitacji”, gdyby Pynchon podrążył pewne wątki swojej książki jeszcze głębiej. A poniżej linki, które wam obiecałem:Czym jest domknięcie poznawcze? Link tutaj: https://psyche.academy/psychologia-osobowosci/teoria-domkniecia-poznawczego/Link do wpisu na mojej stronie, w którym opisuję, jak znalazłem rakietę V2: https://rafalhetman.pl/rakieta-v2-ktorej-szukal-slothrop/Miłego!

It's the end of the year, so we decided to talk about some books we read in 2025 that weren't Pynchon. Of course, we decided to do this after we finished recording a 4+ hour episode for Against the Day, so we were admittedly all a bit spacey. Anyway, hopefully you'll recognize some of these books or come away with some new stuff to add to your never-ending TBR pile.If you like what we're doing and want to support the show, please consider making a donation on Ko-Fi. Funds we receive will be used to upgrade equipment, pay hosting fees, and help make the show better.https://ko-fi.com/mappingthezoneIf you enjoyed our discussion, please check out the following media that relates to these chapters:As always, thanks so much for listening!Email: ⁠mappingthezonepod@gmail.com⁠Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mappingthezone.bsky.socialTwitter: https://twitter.com/pynchonpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mappingthezonepodcast/Merch: mapping-the-zone.myspreadshop.comShow art by Brad Wetzel: @bradspersecond (on IG and Reddit)bradspersecond.com

En este nuevo encuentro en el café de Mendel, ⁠⁠⁠⁠José Carlos Rodrigo⁠⁠⁠⁠ y ⁠⁠⁠⁠Jan Arimany⁠⁠⁠⁠ hablan de premios como el Planeta, el Nobel y el Cervantes, de sus lecturas y hasta de la lista de El País. Seas de café solo o de los que se alargan describiendo todos los ingredientes añadidos que desean, ¡no te olvides de acompañarlo con una buena lectura!

ab 0:26 Min. - Harald Jähner: Wunderland - Die Gründerzeit der Bundesrepublik 1955-1967 | Gelesen von Alexander Gamnitzer | 12 Std. 53 Min. | Argon Verlag || ab 10:46 Min. - Thomas Pynchon: Schattennummer | Übersetzt von Nikolaus Stingl und Dirk van Gunsteren | Gelesen von Julian Mehne | 11 Std. 49 Min.| Argon Verlag || ab 17:56 Min. - Über Autorinnen- und Autorenlesungen anlässlich der Parallelveröffentlichung von Caroline Wahl: „Die Assistentin“ Autorenlesung und nun neu als Lesung mit Chantal Busse 8 Std. 36 Min. | Argon Verlag || ab 24:26 Min. - Benedict Mirow: Joshua Jackelby - Hörspiel | Mit Jona Mues, Lennart Hillmann, Malte Wetzel, Janina Brückbauer, Larissa Bader, Sebastian Mirow u.v.a.| 8 Std. 2 Min. | Ab 10 Jahre | DAV

This week, we jump forward over 50 years into Thomas Pychon's career (and over all his most read books) to discuss 2013's "Bleeding Edge"! Along for the ride through Y2K is friend of the pod, Dan.Topics of discussion include reading the 2010s through the 2000s, the role of technology and espionage in Pynchon's works, and 9/11.As always, we hope you enjoy the conversations.

Starting 01 February 2026, Cody and Kate will be (kinda) deep-diving into another book. What's the twist? It's not a Pynchon book (cue "shocking" sound bite). If you want to know what we're going to be covering in a monthly 10-part series within our series, give this brief explainer episode a listen!If you like what we're doing and want to support the show, please consider making a donation on Ko-Fi. Funds we receive will be used to upgrade equipment, pay hosting fees, and help make the show better.https://ko-fi.com/mappingthezoneAs always, thanks so much for listening!Email: ⁠mappingthezonepod@gmail.com⁠Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mappingthezone.bsky.socialTwitter: https://twitter.com/pynchonpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mappingthezonepodcast/Merch: mapping-the-zone.myspreadshop.comShow art by Brad Wetzel: @bradspersecond (on IG and Reddit) bradspersecond.com

We do have our favorite but surely wouldn't mind if Thomas Pynchon won the Nobel Prize too . . . and in Episode 32 we finish off 2025 by considering Shadow Ticket, the noir detective take on the 1930s by a writer who was surely a key influence on the early DeLillo (we read from an unpublished DeLillo letter summarizing that relationship) but who also seems to have been reading works like Running Dog over the years (or so we imagine in unpacking Shadow Ticket scenes invoking Chaplin and a “German Political Celebrity” named Hitler). We try to understand how Pynchon's latest examination of historical and potential fascism works in its 1932 setting, ranging from Milwaukee to Hungary, where reluctant protagonist and “sentimental ape” and “sap” Hicks McTaggart keeps adding on to his P.I. “tickets” in a strange search for a Wisconsin heiress and her Jewish musician lover but also what might ultimately be justice (a far from simple thing). Shadow Ticket is loads of serious fun, where Pynchon manages to examine the direst of turning points amidst scenes of bowling alley and motorcycle lore, dairy strikes, Prohibition's black markets, dance hall and speakeasy glamour, and something called “Radio-Cheez.” Bela Lugosi, vampires, a beautiful pig in a sidecar, and some of the most tasteless lamps in the world also play a role. The real content here for Hicks, though, is the prospect of spiritual and other forms of peace in a world where weapons from clubs to guns and submarines operate according to mysterious laws of “apport” and “asport,” occult material that interweaves with Hicks's strike-breaking past and raises connections to Gravity's Rainbow. Is Hicks's fellow orphan and young protégé Skeet Wheeler the father of Vineland's Zoyd, headed out to California as the novel ends? What's the meaning of Hicks failing to return to his home country, and what does cheese gangster Bruno Airmont's submarine fate have to do with Bleeding Edge? Are Hungary's shifting borders a new kind of “Zone”? What's going on in the novel's many Statue of Liberty references and its anachronistic allusions to a “Face Tube” for flirtation in bars? And how does this always funny writer, now in his late eighties, keep coming up with all these absurd songs (we sing some) and hilarious mock-movies like the one featuring “Squeezita Thickly” swimming in soup pots (Shirley Temple, is that you?)? Teasing out many connections to Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day, and Vineland, this episode makes reference to just about all of Pynchon's other works, including even V. and his earliest short stories. At the same time, you need come to it with nothing but an interest in Pynchon's life and work. We doubt that we get every reference to history or previous Pynchon right or mount interpretations we won't later want to revise, but on this brand-new and captivating late work from a masterful author, we hope in nearly three hours of deep conversation and laughter that we've made a good start on the many critical readings to come. A partial list of references and quotations that we mention or paraphrase in this episode . . . On “prefascist twilight”: “And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began, some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.” (Pynchon, Vineland (1990)) On “second sheep”: “Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in '59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow. There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it.” (Pynchon, “Introduction,” Slow Learner (1984)) The “Sloth essay paragraph” mentioned midway through: “In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and 30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life.” (Pynchon, “Nearer, My Couch, To Thee” (1993)) Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin The Motherland Calls statue, Volgograd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motherland_Calls  Pareidolia defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, "Shadow Ticket," has a lot to say about politics, so Jason Dick checks in with Sean Carswell, the official Pynchon scholar of the Political Theater podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, "Shadow Ticket," has a lot to say about politics, so Jason Dick checks in with Sean Carswell, the official Pynchon scholar of the Political Theater podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema. Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about "PTA" and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things examined by Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in what follows, a very unusual live Recall This Book conversation. Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, a consolidation of the counter-insurgency ("drugs, sacrament of the 60's, Evil of the 80's) state from the post-1960's into the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically everything PTA movie but Hard Eight (1996; despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the over-the-topness of the Christmas Adventurer's Club. Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Although Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, he sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy. Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema. Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about Paul Thomas Anderson and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things that Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in this live-before-a-studio-audience Recall This Book conversation. Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot-point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, who traces what happens to counter-insurgency from the post-1960's when it meets the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically every PTA movie but Hard Eight (despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of centering non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the cartoon supervillainy of the Christmas Adventurer's Club. Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, Ethan sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy. Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema. Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about "PTA" and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things examined by Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in what follows, a very unusual live Recall This Book conversation. Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, a consolidation of the counter-insurgency ("drugs, sacrament of the 60's, Evil of the 80's) state from the post-1960's into the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically everything PTA movie but Hard Eight (1996; despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the over-the-topness of the Christmas Adventurer's Club. Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Although Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, he sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy. Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema. Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about "PTA" and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things examined by Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in what follows, a very unusual live Recall This Book conversation. Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, a consolidation of the counter-insurgency ("drugs, sacrament of the 60's, Evil of the 80's) state from the post-1960's into the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically everything PTA movie but Hard Eight (1996; despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the over-the-topness of the Christmas Adventurer's Club. Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Although Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, he sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy. Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema. Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about "PTA" and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things examined by Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in what follows, a very unusual live Recall This Book conversation. Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, a consolidation of the counter-insurgency ("drugs, sacrament of the 60's, Evil of the 80's) state from the post-1960's into the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically everything PTA movie but Hard Eight (1996; despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the over-the-topness of the Christmas Adventurer's Club. Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Although Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, he sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy. Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second to last installment in our "Shadow Ticket" series is currently only available to subscribers in its entirety. Join the PPM Patreon today:patreon.com/ParaPowerMappingAlso, heads up - because of increasing automated censorship and flagging, I can no longer use music breaks on Spot°fy. To hear eps as originally intended, please listen on the Patreon or Substack.We're picking back up our brief, alternative history of American class violence, the anticommunist apparatus, and anti-syndicalist dynamite false flags, much wider spread than even I would have realized, this time honing in on a number of rhyming, causal & effective deep events rippling down the welded wrought iron links of the anchor chain of history, largely Chicago and Milwaukee concentric sagas of strike action and counterinsurgent reactions by the capitalist powers that be.File today's episode under: the Haymarket Affair; the Bay View Massacre at the North Chicago Rolling Mills steel foundry that left at least seven Polish, German, and Native workers dead the day following the bloodbath in the Windy City; the 8 Hour Work Day movement; the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), precursor to AFL; the snake Samuel Gompers; Milwaukee Central Labor Union socialist Paul Grottkau; Catholic Church Knights of Labor's Robert Shilling; Gov. Rusk; "shoot to kill" orders; Cpt. Treaumer muttering "halt" orders under his breath; the N. Chi Rolling Mills into Illinois Steel Company and then rolled up into US Steel come J.P. Morgan's Carnegie and otherwise monopolistic consolidation; Kosciusko Militia; FOTLU and Gomper's feud with the Knights of Labor; the labor significance of the phrase "amalgamated" (formed of individual craft unions) and what this says about ST protagonist Hicks McTaggart's work as strikebreaking PI for UNamalgamated Ops; Pynchon gets real Hobsbawmian, Gramscian, and Adamic-ian with it; "Haymarket FRAME-UP job"; explicitly references Bay View and Rolling Mills; Debs Rebellion; Pullman Strike; Henry Clay Frick nearly merc-ed by Berkman; the Gov. Steunenberg dynamiting; Big Bill Haywood's framing close shave; James McParland; Harry Orchard's confessions under duress; Pinkerton's; more US Steel; Mine Owners Association; Clarence Darrow; WFM; Wobblies; the McNamara Affair, the LA Times Building Bombing, and brothers J.J. and J.B.; surprise guilty pleas kneecapping the Job Harriman socialist mayoral candidacy in LA; spies catch Darrow bribing jurors?; Propaganda of the Deed comes to Milwaukee... or maybe not; the Italian Evangelical Church; ex-Catholic priest Rev. August Giuliani, MPD and BOI/DOJ informant; rabble rousing in the Third Ward, singing jingoistic songs, proselytizing to Catholics (which they didn't take kindly to from an apostate priest cum Protestant), and offering to pay for any anti-war anarchists or leftists of varying stripes' return tickets to the boot of Italy, all painting a picture of the gadfly pastor acting on behalf of federal law enforcement and local business interests with his troublemaking in the Ward; faced down by anarchists like Maria Nardini; the Bay View Riots, multiple Italian immigrant residents of Cream City killed by officers of the law with false flag violence (Antonio Fornasier and August Marinelli killed in the fray); the Milwaukee Station House Bombing of 1917; the comedy of errors; single deadliest day for law enforcement in American history up until 9/11; the curious lag in MPD response to the bomb's arrival at Giuliani's church; the claim the IMOPIO or infernal machine was anarchist made being sourced from BOI agent Julius Brown and possibly a Milwaukee congressman by way of MPD Capt. John T. Sullivan; the Galleanisti, followers of anarcho-communist Deed-Propagandist and advocate of various nitroglycerin and lead means for affecting change, squarely in the crosshairs; and much much more, breadcrumb trails we'll resume tracing next time.

This week, we start our mini-revue of the works of Thomas Pynchon with his first novel: "V." We discuss our individual relationships with Pynchon's writing, his place in the larger world of contemporary literature, and what we liked and disliked about this strange first novel of his. As always, we hope that you enjoy the conversation!

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Better late than never, we're back with a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's recent critical and box office sensation One Battle After Another. PTA loosely adapts (and updates) Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, setting the story against the backdrop of an indeterminate moment in the 21st century to tell a story of washed-up revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is dragged back into the fray when an old enemy (Sean Penn) resurfaces and threatens his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). The film represents the first time in over 20 years that Anderson has set a story in contemporary times, and he uses the opportunity to examine the current landscape of America, its political fissures, and to lay out his personal vision of a hopeful future staked out by the next generation...But Anderson also readily betrays the limits of his political vision, and his myopic understanding of the circumstances that have produced and perpetuated this country's bigotries and oppressive hierarchies. While One Battle After Another offers countless pleasures as an obeject of undeniable cinematic energy and craftsmanship, it fails to elucidate a coherent sociopolitical ideology, even as it readily co-opts and aestheticizes the langauge and iconography of radical leftwing militancy.We unpack the film's many contradictions, and key in to what makes OBAA a simultaneously riveting and frustrating watch. Then, we discuss the film's treatment of race and the cadre of brilliant Black actresses who mine depth and nuance out of Anderson's elliptical storytelling. Finally, we call for a deeper discourse about the film that makes room for its many contradictions and shortcomings, arguing that these jagged edges make the film a more urgent and enduring work than insistences on its perfection.Read Angelica Jade Bastién, on One Battle After Another at VultureRead Lyvie Scott on One Battle After Another at Inverse....Our Theme Song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Support the show by signing up to our Patreon and get access to the full Weekender episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: ⁠http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast⁠ On this Black Friday Weekender, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman pour a post-Thanksgiving drink and dive headfirst into Paul Thomas Anderson's new film One Battle After Another, a loose adaptation of Pynchon's Vineland that somehow nails our political moment a little too well. The two break down the French 75 as a failed revolutionary underground, Sean Penn's Lockjaw as a walking case study in self-loathing authoritarian masculinity, and the Christmas Adventurers Club as a country club for Nazis who also run everything. They get into how the movie stitches together 60s and 70s radicalism, modern fascism, secret societies, ICE raids, false flags, and Benicio del Toro's quietly perfect sensei, then ask what it all says about living through America's own near future right now. If you care about politics and movies, this one is basically a Muckrake text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 movies and 0 hits: it's been a particularly rough quarter for Hollywood. But as I discuss with the cultural commentator David Masciotra, it's actually been a pretty strong quarter in terms of movie quality. From Paul Thomas Anderson's “One Battle After Another” and Jennifer Lawrence's astonishing performance in “Die My Love” to a glitteringly bald Emma Stone in “Bugonia” and Ethan Coen's “Honey Don't!”, Hollywood is producing high quality, relevant material. One problem, however, is that Gen Z has abandoned cinema. Another is that Hollywood's penchant for movies dominated by memorably uncompromising female leads like Stone and Lawrence might be out of step with a broader culture still imprisoned by a nostalgia for a dominant masculinity. Perhaps that's why “One Battle After Another”, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as a pathetically redundant Sixties radical, is the one hit of the season. And it may also be why the excellent Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere”, featuring a clueless Bruce trying to find himself by recording “Nebraska”, was such a flop. No, men don't matter, either in Hollywood or in life. Even when they do. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) The season's sole commercial success ($70 million) works because it satirizes everyone. DiCaprio's incompetent ‘60s radical provides comic relief, but it's Chase Infinity's cynical Gen Z daughter who steals the film (even if Gen Z'ers have given up going to the movies). Anderson's Pynchon adaptation makes absurdity central to American identity, both then and now—the villainous Christmas Adventures Club in golf attire perfectly capturing MAGA's ridiculousness.Die My Love (Josephine Decker) Jennifer Lawrence delivers an astonishing performance confirming she's among Hollywood's greatest actors. The film died at the box office despite critical praise—perhaps because audiences resistant to female-dominated narratives won't show up even for exceptional work like this. Her assertiveness and complexity highlights exactly what's missing from contemporary male performances.Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) Emma Stone continues her fearless run in this cultish, visually striking film. Her performance demonstrates creative risk-taking unavailable to today's male leads. Jesse Plemons plays the archetypal basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist—masculine id of our internet age. Its commercial failure suggests audiences aren't ready for cinema that interrogates rather than celebrates American mythology.Honey Don't! (Ethan Coen) Coen's lesbian B-movie homage to film noir, which David Masciotra loved, deserved better than its catastrophic box office. Margaret Qualley's detective becomes a feminist hero fighting idiotic patriarchy without losing entertainment value. Set in Bakersfield and focused on religious hypocrisy, it feels both familiar and innovative. Its death proves even clever, relevant films can't entice Gen Z'ers back to the movies.Deliver Me From Nowhere (James Mangold) The season's most revealing failure. The film captures Springsteen's Faustian bargain—trading artistic integrity for superstardom, making “Nebraska” his final serious work before “Born in the USA”'s commercial conquest. It depicts fierce masculine anxiety through Bruce's mentally ill, violent father and his own depression. Yet it bored audiences with its introspective approach—ultimate proof that even films about masculine crisis can't reach audiences imprisoned by nostalgia for an imaginary American masculinity that never existed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Please subscribe to one of the PPM Patreon paid tiers to access the full ep and support our ongoing, interwoven deep political and subtextual analysis of Pynchon. Join the Cork Board Cadre today!patreon.com/ParaPowerMappingWe're resuming our admirably thorough subtextual mapping of Pynchon's Shadow Ticket, and no expense is being spared as we embark on a discursive, brief history of class warfare; the development of the false flag, one of the capitalist class's favored strikebreaking counterinsurgent stratagems; and the erection of the anticommunist surveillance apparatus, systemized forms of domestic political control that bedded in during the 19th century and which serve as historical backdrop to the dialoguing narratives of ST and AtD.Please subscribe to one of the PPM Patreon paid tiers to support our ongoing, interwoven deep political and Pynchonian analysis efforts. Join the Cork Board Cadre today!I will update the liner notes a little later, so this is relatively brief for expediency's sake, but file under:Molly Maguires, Allan Pinkerton, Pinkerton Detective Agency, James McParland, the Baltimore Plot, Philadelphia and Reading Railroad magnate Franklin B. Gowen, social banditry, the widow Molly Maguire, Anti-Landlord Agitators, landlord beatdowns, Anthracite region of PA, the Maguires expulsion from colonized Ireland, Workingmen's Benevolent Association, the first big American anticommunist false flag, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Eugene Debs, Gilded Age, Pinkerton's Masonic meeting w/ Edward Rucker, the Abe assassination dress rehearsal, lady Pinkerton spies Kate Warne and Hattie Lawton, Baltimore secessionists Jerome Bonaparte and Thomas DeKay Winans, Bonaparte's son's overseeing of the BOI's formation, Robert Pinkerton's lobbying for the FBI's creation, Emma Goldman, rhyming McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt assassinations (one successful and one thwarted in Milwaukee), Pinkerton's Secret Service spymaster replacement Lafayette Baker, Edwin Stanton's hand in Lincoln clipping, Knights of Labor, Uriah Stephens, Terrence Powderly, Commonwealth v. Hunt, unions legalized and the slow death of conspiracy charges for collective bargaining, the Great Upheaval, a railroad company insurance scheme / boxcar torching false flag in Pittsburgh, armories installed in industrial cities, early riot control War Department white papers, Propaganda of the Deed, Johann Most, Pisacane, Bakunin, Ravachol, Galleanisti, dynamites arrival, PropDeed and vigilantism psyop parallels today (Mangione, Elias Rodriguez, Boelter), Errico Malatesta, Paris Commune, Nechayev, Narodnaya Volya aka People's Will, Lenin's brother Aleksander Ulyanov's PropDeed, assassinations galore, Tsar Alexander II, French President in '94, Spanish PM in '97, Empress of Austria in '98, King of Italy in 1900, McKinley in 1901... The Milwaukee Station House Bombing of 1917. PropDeed in Against the Day... And lastly, a relatively deep unpacking of false flag whispers, rumors of capitalist paid riot-inciters, at the infamous Haymarket Affair. This is a far-from-exhaustive index, but I think I've hit most of the primary episode beats.Additional sources incorporated into our rabbit hole excavation:Louis Adamic - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in AmericaEric Hobsbawm - BanditsNick Fisher - Spider Web: The Birth of American Anti-CommunismBeau Riffenburgh - Pinkerton's Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParlandThe Return of the Repressed - "Bonus Episode 13" on Molly Maguires and PinkertonsThomas Pynchon - Against the Day(among others)

Da ist er wieder, der große Unbekannte, mittlerweile 88 Jahre alt. Mit einer Hommage an die schwarzen Krimis. Milwaukee, 1932: Ein Privatdetektiv sucht die Erbin einer Käsefabrik und landet in Europa zwischen Nazis und Agenten. Pynchon eben.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PPM PATREON to support the show & access the entire discography of Communoid Hits! Also, I doubly entreat you to visit the Patreon because I only get 4k characters to work with in the Spotify editor and these notes are missing a couple hundred more words of topical, thematic, and character indexing I put together for Read-Alongers:patreon.com/ParaPowerMappingThe Klonny has Returned from his podcast-sabbatical as a motorcycle diarist in Latin America to guide you through a decryption of Pynchon's likely swan song Shadow Ticket, sifting through the subtext to surface the loaded deep political index-names that will help us construct the text-within-the-text (or perhaps ParaPower Map, better yet). In this episode, we synopsize the Milwaukee and Chicago sequences that make up the first half of the novel, zeroing in on the Prohibition era para-parastatal underworld of speakeasies, bootlegger tunnels, and subterranean dynamiter labs and the adjacent rhizome of socialist saloons, Galleanisti anarcho-clubhouses, and union locals in Cream City. We examine how Pynchon's Reformed Detective Shadowing Cheese Heiress mystery is partly a cipher for the ways in which Capone's Chicago Outfit and their Milwaukee Mob affiliates sought to complete “transformismo” and earn assimilation into the white color criminal realm of the ruling elite during the Depression's socioeconomic crisis and contraction, gaining favor through the loyal rendering of anticommunist strikebreaking and labor racketeering services. This tacit deal between the ChiTown upper and underworlds is a minor skeleton key to much of 20th century deep politics by way of the Outfit's Joe Kennedy ties, the JFK assassination, Sam Giancana's involvement in the Fidel Assassination Prank Show, GLADIO, and beyond. We start to coalesce theories for why Pynchon is pointing us in this direction including the blatant 1930s - 2020s encroaching fascism parallels; the less-traveled counterinsurgent history of the Pinkertons, J. Edgar Hoover's early proving of mettle circa Palmer Raids, and the First Red Scare and the way in which there are telling deep event continuities to be traced from the early 1900s to McCarthyism and Cointelpro, early experiments in the strategy of tension playbook; the Bureaus of Investigation and Prohibition and their Wars on Alcohol, Crime, and the Left (including the anti-immigrant and anti-communist targeting of proletarian taverns) and how the Interwar Period gave rise to the modern surveillance and carceral apparatuses; and the secret colonial histories and conflict economies buried inside mundane commodities like cheese and milk. Incomplete List of Sources (may update):Gus Russo - The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in The Shaping of Modern AmericaJames B. Jacobs - Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor MovementTim Weiner - Enemies: A History of the FBILisa McGirr - The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American StateRobert Tanzilo - The Milwaukee Police Station Bomb of 1917Gavin Schmitt - The Milwaukee Mafia: Mobsters in the HeartlandNathan Ward - The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell HammettBryan Burroughs - Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34Alfried Schulte-Bockholt - A Neo-Marxist Explanation of Organized CrimeMusic (ALL COPYRIGHT FREE BC OF PUBLIC DOMAIN, YOU HEAR ME, SPOTIFY? GODAM*T!):| The Ambassadors, Frank Sylvano - “You're the Cream in My Coffee” | | Biltmore Trio - “Love Me or Leave Me” | | Bessie Smith - “Homeless Blues” | | Jack Hylton and His Orchestra - “Happy Feet” | 

THIS WEEK: John and Asher reads through Chapters 10-12 of Vineland, which takes them back in their shared semester at the College of the Surf (John was Asher's RA). We also learn about the scintillating backstory of Frenesi Gates and her love affair with a COP (ew)--the betrayal of all her ostensible values. We also talk Marx, Freud, Lyotard, Thorazine as a bad-trip-killer, cinematic radicalism, the horny monster who lives inside of you and makes you do stuff you shouldn't want to (or even don't want to) do, May '68, the Emerald Triangle, and the Pynchonian figure of the evil dentist.THEN: Asher is joined by Dimitri and Khalid of the Subliminal Jihad podcast to talk about Pynchon's ties (literary and otherwise) to deep state conspiracism, occult machinations, and all things para-political (or as the boys would say it: political). The truth is out there? WRONG AGAIN. The truth is in...here.MUSIC:Kimi-Bogdan Raczynski

Imagino que con las novelas de Pynchon, sin abrir, decoran su ilustre casa muchos de los que desprecian a los lectores, o no lectores, del Planeta.

TENE discuss the new 2025 Paul Thomas Anderson film "One Battle After Another." Music credits: "Algiers November 1, 1954" – Ennio Morricone And Gillo Pontecorvo – Battle Of Algiers - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1967) "Zyklus" – Karlheinz Stockhausen – Cycle For One Percussionist (In Two Different Versions) / Klavierstück No. X (1970) "Mao-Mao" – Claude Channes – La Chinoise (1967) Subscribe to patreon.org/tenepod @tenepod.bsky.social  x.com/tenepod

This week: John and Asher continue reading through and chatting about Vineland, a journey that takes us from California to Ohio to Japan and back again. We mull the novel's conspicuous "Eastern" influences, deep state machinations pitting the mob against the feds, and spend a lot of time with the curious--and amazing!--character Daryl Louise Chastain.Then: we're joined by writer Ana Gavrilovska to talk about D.L., One Battle After Another, Against the Day....and we finally and definitively answer the question: can Pynchon write women?Follow Ana on Twitter and read her Substack, why dontcha!Music in this Episode:Black Flag - "TV Party"Cold Foamers - "Always"

Der neue Pynchon ist da! In „Schattennummer“ entfaltet der Meister erneut ein sprachgewaltiges, schwindelerregendes Universum.

We are joined by Danny Backer to discuss One Battle After Another, Pynchon, post-modernism and other stuff too wouldn't ya know it.Danny's Linkslinktr.ee/danielbackerauthorhttps://www.instagram.com/danielbackerauthor/https://www.tiktok.com/@danielbackerauthorFND's LinksDISCORD - https://discord.gg/pX9JhgenPYPATREON - https://www.patreon.com/c/fndfilmsINSTAGRAM - https://bit.ly/3Txr4IjSupport the show

With a new Pynchon novel and a new PT Anderson movie based on Pynchon's Vineland out, it's probably a good time to let this one out of the vault.

Nada menos que Gonzalo Maza llega al podcast para comentar con Villalobos la nueva película de Paul Thomas Anderson. Hablan de los trabajos anteriores del director, de la figura de DiCaprio y de la idea de Pynchon de Estados Unidos como un país formado por sectas y sociedades secretas. 

Send us a textIn this solo episode of The Fixate & Binge Podcast, host Joe Curdy dives headfirst into ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER — Paul Thomas Anderson's most politically charged and urgent film to date. (And, on a personal note, Joe also pulls back the curtain to reveal two major reasons why he is usually very positive about rating films!)Based on Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, Anderson's latest work unfolds as a sprawling and provocative look at revolution, authoritarianism, and the fight for human dignity in a fractured America. Through Joe's lens, this episode explores how Anderson translates Pynchon's chaos and satire into a modern reflection of the world today — where undocumented immigrants are hunted and forcibly deported by a draconian U.S. government under Donald J. Trump's leadership.With spoilers throughout, Joe shares his Letterboxd review and a deeply personal reflection on the film's themes, visual style, and political relevance. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER isn't just another PTA epic — it's a call to look at the moral decay beneath the surface of American life, and a cinematic act of resistance against the “New American Order.”Whether you're a longtime Paul Thomas Anderson devotee or simply curious how cinema can mirror our modern political reality, this episode offers a raw, unfiltered deep dive into a film that's bound to spark conversation.⚠️ Spoiler Disclaimer:This episode contains major spoilers for ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. If you haven't seen the film yet, you may want to watch it first before listening.Thank you for listening! You can find and follow us with the links below!Read our Letterboxd reviews at:https://letterboxd.com/fixateandbinge/Follow us on Instagram at:https://www.instagram.com/fixateandbingepodcast/?hl=msFollow us on TikTok at:https://www.tiktok.com/@fixateandbingepodcast

We begin our read-through of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland in earnest, covering Chapters 1-5.John and Asher discuss the amateurishness of opening a novel with a character waking up, the perils of transfenestration, the ersatzness of Hawaiian holidays, and whether Billy Barf and the Vomitones are a heavy metal band or a hardcore band. Was there D-beat before the band Discharge? We'll never know...Also! We welcome author, broadcaster and podcaster Jesse Jarnow to talk about the legacy of the '60s hippie counterculture and help situate Pynchon's novel, culturally. Jesse is the author of arguably the chronicle of the hippie underground, Heads (among other wonderful volumes), host of The Frow Show on the mighty WFMU in Jersey, also the co-host of The Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast. Follow Jesse on Bluesky, why dontcha?Here's John's article (that Asher helped edit) in Rolling Stone, about the history of LSD manufacture, that comes up in this episode.Music in this Episode:The Last Poets - "When the Revolution Comes" (1970)The Watts Prophets - "Public Enemy Number One" (1996)Jane Birkin - "Ex-fan des sixties" (1978)

Storia e temi della letteratura postmoderna, caratteristiche e autori della corrente letteraria che si sviluppa dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale.

Un exrevolucionario, ahora drogadicto y alcohólico, debe rescatar a su hija de las manos de un militar corrupto. Basado en la novela "Vineland" de Thomas Pynchon, el nuevo largometraje de Paul Thomas Anderson ha superado las expectativas de la crítica y el público en sus primeros días en cartelera. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn y Benicio del Toro lideran un reparto lleno de estrellas de la pantalla grande que relucen bajo la dirección de PTA. Ya disponible en salas de cine.

Nicodemus, Katja www.deutschlandfunk.de, Kultur heute

Per completare la nostra monografia chiacchierata di Paul Thomas Anderson mancava solamente il lisergico Inherent Vice, uno dei film preferiti di Simone che si presta molto bene a essere accoppiato a The Long Goodbye di Robert Altman. Entrambi Detective Story sui generis, la combinazione permette anche di evidenziare cambiamenti nell'autorialità hollywoodiana, i collegamenti fra i due registi e ci permette di esaminare un altro legame estremamente importante nella seconda parte della filmografia di PTA, quello con lo scrittore americano Thomas Pynchon, dal cui libro Inherent Vice è tratto il film e che ha ispirato con il suo Vineland l'ultima opera del regista, One Battle After Another. Con Federico Allocca e Simone CortiRiprese Gianlorenzo Bernabò Di NegroMusica e sound design DEMONA alias Andrea Evangelista e Delio GallmannAnimazione sigla Ida CortiLogo design Chiara QuagliarellaPost-produzione audio Matteo FusiCon il sostegno di Associazione La Terza Via e SidereusUn grazie a Raffaele Allocca, Elisabetta Marrocco, Riccardo Romano, Andrea Sestu

Support the show at patreon.com/leftreckoning What is going on with Your Party? Matt and David dive in the fallout from the Corbyn v. Sultana feud and what it means for what felt like a promising start for the UK left. Plus, Democratic socialism, the people like it. New poll show Democratic socialism is now mainstream. - https://jacobin.com/2025/09/new-poll-democratic-socialism-mainstream/Agree? you can join DSA here: https://act.dsausa.org/donate/membership/JOIN MATT & DAVE DSA's Phonebank! http://dsausa.us/LRPBMatt Lech and Devin Thomas O'Shea delve into the works of Thomas Pynchon, particularly focusing on 'Vineland'. They explore Pynchon's unique narrative style, his historical context, and the political themes embedded in his literature. They dive into the relevance of Pynchon's themes in today's political landscape and concludes with reflections on his literary legacy.

Sub to the PPM Patreon to hear the entirety of our hour and a half Kirk Clipping spectacle deep dive: patreon.com/ParaPowerMappingI sat down with Tarence Ray from Trillbilly Worker's Party, a true left podcasting wordsmith, to interrogate the Charlie Kirk assassination aka the Killing of the Kirk spectacle aka the Burger Reichstag Fire aka the Martyrdom of Groyp Wessel aka the Night of the Long Gums... I'm referring to the sniping of the Millennial Buckley Jr. esque campus culture warrior at Utah Valley University two days ago. Be mindful that this was recorded early on the 12th of September with smoke still clearing and dust settling, so information and musings contained herein are subject to change and revision considering how erratically the situation has been developing.We explore the ensuing propaganda fracas; the identity of the most recent suspect Tyler Robinson and his possible military uncle and alleged Discord-to-Kill, America First indoctrination; the AmerIsraeli Years of Lead and Eddington parallels; the Epstein Bday Album and Bibi's suspiciously timed "get ahead of Isntreali-triggered deep event" conservative media tour; who stands to benefit?; Mormon Central and the Latter Day Saints in the CIA; backroom Trumpworld power struggles; Peter Thiel, Musk, and Palantir; AI psychosis and the DARPA-machine of Tension; Groyper Wars; some of the positively deranged TikTokslop that has issued forth, like the Polynesian Mormon Eldertiktok character who soyfaced on live immediately after the shooting and expropriated Kirk merch; the prescience of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice; and a whole lot more. I may yet update the liner notes later, but this is all you're getting for now because I stayed up until like 4 AM to get this thing off the ground and airborne.Trillbilly Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/trillbillyworkersparty/Tarence's Twitter: https://x.com/tarencerayMusic and Clips:| Matt Akers - "Replicant" | | Matt Akers - "The Exclusive Theme" | | Charlie Kirk Clipping audio | | Trump eulogy || Polynesian Mormon TikTok Influencer Shooting Bystander Effect Phenom vid - Eldertiktok | | Tucker Carlson Puts Sam Altman on the spot re the likely Suchir Balaji hit | | Nick Fuentes' preemptive disavowal of Groyper Wars violence & reprisals post-Kirk death | | Erica Kirk speaks about the future of Turning Point |

Sub to the Patreon to support the show and access the entire 2nd part of PPM's subtextual analysis of Eddington as soon as it drops: patreon.com/ParaPowerMappingIn which we decode Eddington's subtextual conspiracy themes, endeavoring to argue that the new Ari Aster is perhaps the first major, theatrically released film to have accurately encapsulated the essence of the technocratic AmerIsraeli Years of Lead—in accordance with my personal timeline of the ongoing deep political era that would place its inception around Covid time—and the Silicon Valley capitalist elite's embrace of strategy of tension in the cybernetic service of of updating America's Total Info Awareness 2.0 operating system and the installation of their long planned predictive policing panopticon.We discuss: why the appearance of the globo "Antifa PMCs" isn't actually crypto-MAGA chicanery (seeing as they are Gladio operators); Joaquin Phoenix's turn as Sheriff Joe Cross, a Gen X, mumblecore, adoptive son of Sheriff Joe Arpaio type; Eddington as Nashville esque ensemble comedy cum Coen Brothers Covid Wester with the accompanying masking/social distancing standoffs; diagnosing the alienation and social media siloing of the wokespeak & QAnon brain rot of that hot 2020 summer; the role of calibrated algorithmic control; Sheriff Cross's Israeli Civil Guard pin in the OG script; the unfortunate executive production of Len Blavatnik, the Zio·nist billionaire "philanthropist" tied to Brett Ratner, Weinstein, the Bronfmans, etc, mulling whether he might have vetoed the inclusion of that visual gag on Sheriff Joe's regalia vest; the Solidgoldmagikarp Proposed Hyperscale Data Center project, the underlying Pynchon-esque real estate development and land and water use conspiracy; the schizophrenic drifter character Lodge, who opens the film, and his Homeric oracle qualities, spiritually warning against the onset of the Age of AI-quarius; Mike the One Armed Man from Twin Peaks comparisons; Pynchonian Lodge puns; Chekhov's Cough; Louise Cross, Sheriff Cross's wife, the one other farsighted character, and her haldol prescription, evoking Twin Peaks again; a demonic Mark Zuckerberg hinted at as one of the shadowy backers of the Solidgoldmagikarp Data Center in the earlier draft; Gov. Grisham making it into the film by way of an honorary watch and Covid headlines; the David Dees vibe of the cell towers in the opening sequence and various 5G diatribes; Aster lurking on Twitter; an earlier version of the second scene in which Sheriff Cross wrestles with Officer Butterfly Jimenez over who gets to investigate the self-immolation death of a paraplegic conspiracy Youtuber named Mitchell and the Native school uniforms discovered in his accessible van (evoking Missing Indigenous Children); the film's abiding interest in the neocultures that have cropped up around QAnon & pedo-hunters; borderlands and issues of jurisdiction between the Sevilla Co. Sheriff and the Santa Lupe Pueblo Tribal Officers; Cesar Chavez & Dolores Huerta's (a New Mexican) Hispanic borderlands community union LUPE aka La Union de Pueblo Entero aka The Union of the Whole People; Santa Lupe Pueblo = SLP = Speech Language Pathologist?; the neighboring, colonized tribal peoples, at their slight remove from Eddington and Treatlerite American society moreover, being the observers best prepared to pathologize the alienation and atomization and societal decay taking hold in the town over Covid; in regards Speech Language Pathologists, the ever-present theme of miscommunication and the deterioration of consensus reality caused by social media echo chamber-induced myopia, as well as the specter of LLMs or Large Language Models; "Solidgoldmagikarp" alluding to AI & ChatGPT tokens that cause anomalous or erratic behavior...FULL LINER NOTES ON THE PATREONMusic:| Matt Akers - "Necessary Rhythms" https://matthewakers.bandcamp.com/album/tough-to-kill | | Matt Akers - "Night Drive II (Detroit at 2 AM" |

You know we had to bust out a big one for this episode number. We got lost in the sauce talking about PTA not adapting but translating Pynchon to the cinema. Join us, on a journey through the past. get the full episode at patreon.com/extended_clip

It's a pungent bouquet of TED Talks! A blast from the past! Some shots from the aughts! Put on your Pynchon goggles, your Mabeuf plague mask, and your Cuttlefish gloves, because we're opening up this most dracular document of the moment before the long 2014.P.S. The episode art is from the actual cover art of the book in question, and it's tragic that I neglected to discuss it: You there, third-world comprador! Walk on with me, deeper, yes, deeper, into ever darker and more eerie post-apocalyptic tunnels of the English language! Aren't glad you survived the Cull? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Devin O'Shea guides us into the world of acclaimed novelist Thomas Pynchon, whose cryptic, sprawling narratives echo the chaotic info deluge of contemporary digital culture. With Paul Thomas Anderson's newest Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another, hitting theaters in September 2025, and Pynchon himself releasing a fresh novel, Shadow Ticket, in October, it's time to unpack what makes Pynchon uniquely relevant today. From the hippie noir mystery of Inherent Vice to the critically-panned Vineland, we explore why this reclusive author has captivated (and frequently frustrated) readers for decades. Along the way, we discuss the complex relationship his work has with history, conspiracy, technology, and power. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: https://patreon.com/qaa Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

What does the déjà vu allegedly caused by the Airborne Toxic Event have to do with a disease called Jumping Frenchman? How is Jack Gladney's “day of the station wagons” connected to the first female NHL player's longing for quaint hometown holidays? In Episode 24, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by showing listeners all the hidden connections between DeLillo's most famous novel and his most obscure: Cleo Birdwell's Amazons, his pseudonymous 1980 collaboration with Sue Buck, written as a kind of lark but we think absolutely integral to the satiric vision of White Noise five years later. Our discussion suggests all the ways in which DeLillo seems to have used Amazons as a “laboratory” of sorts, developing Cleo's thoughts on ad shoots, celebrity athletes, Americana, and an ex-player in a deathlike suspension into the richer, more in-depth meditations on similar topics in White Noise. Naturally we give major attention to Murray Jay Siskind, a sportswriter in Amazons who's become an Elvis scholar in White Noise, expressing above all our gratitude that DeLillo came back to him and transformed him, reshaping an already very funny snowmobile obsessive into a Mephistophelean wit and one of the darkest, most memorable characters in the corpus. Those who haven't gotten to read Amazons but know other DeLillo will get a ton out of this episode, for we end up drawing surprising connections not just to White Noise but Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Underworld, Zero K, and others. Turns out this prank of a novel in 1980 paid many dividends for DeLillo. Tune in to hear some fun thoughts as well about a prank of our own: an April Fool's post about a brand-new DeLillo novel we put on social media a few weeks ago. Texts and quotations referred to in this episode: “Pynchon Now,” including short essay on Pynchon's example by Don DeLillo, Bookforum (Summer 2005). https://web.archive.org/web/20050729023737/www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).  John N. Duvall, “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise.” In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 432-55. Adolf Hitler, “Long Live Fanatical Nationalism” (text of speech). In James A. Gould and Willis H. Truitt, Political Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 119. Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen, “Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel: A Conversation with Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen,” Library of America, January 17, 2024 (source for Howard's remark that DeLillo's manuscripts need no editing).https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel/

A conversation with Dr. Jo Freer, a leading scholar on the work of American novelist Thomas Pynchon. I'm currently leading our Library's Classics Book Discussion Seminar series on Pynchon's 1973 masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow and Dr. Freer's work has been incredibly helpful for me in understanding this challenging novel and Pynchon's work as a whole. We're thrilled to get Dr. Freer's perspective on this important writer.  Dr. Jo Freer is Senior Lecturer in American and Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which considers Thomas Pynchon as a political philosopher. While Gravity's Rainbow centers around the saga of American Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, stationed in England at the end of WWII, Freer shows how the novel often responds directly to debates within the 1960s counterculture; the different approaches of the New Left, Yippies, The Black Panther Party, the Women's Movement, and the proto-countercultural Beat writers who influenced Pynchon are all game for comparison, revealing Pynchon to be a subtle and profound political thinker. Dr. Freer is also editor of the excellent essay collections The New Pynchon Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019) and co-editor of Thomas Pynchon, Sex and Gender, (Georgia UP, 2018). Our conversation also considers the various ways Pynchon's depictions of gender and sexuality have been interpreted by Freer and others. Famously, the judges of the Pulitzer Prize selected Gravity's Rainbow, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board said the book was “unreadable,” “turgid,” and “obscene” and chose to not award a prize that year. This is a fascinating conversation about form and content and the value of this difficult, challenging, anti-authoritarian reading experience for us today. Like the graffiti that appears in Gravity's Rainbow, Dr. Freer tells us that Pynchon creates texts that are “revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people.”  You can check out books by Dr. Freer, and work by all of our previous podcast guests, here at the library in our Podcast Collection. You can also find Dr. Freer on her University of Exeter page.  We hope you enjoy our 66th interview episode! Each month (or so) we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org.  

We're going to be covering the short stories in Slow Learner after each section of Against the Day, as we are going through that. This episode we discuss The Small Rain, Pynchon's first published short story. What we liked, what we didn't like, and how Pynchon has grown as a writer are all topics of conversation and we hope you'll enjoy listening to our ramblings. We'll return to Against the Day in the next episode.As always, thanks so much for listening!Email: ⁠mappingthezonepod@gmail.com⁠Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mappingthezone.bsky.socialTwitter: https://twitter.com/pynchonpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mappingthezonepodcast/Show art by Brad Wetzel: @bradspersecond (on IG and Reddit) bradspersecond.com

Cassandra Nelson, author of "A Theology of Fiction," joins me to discuss the importance of pursuing Godly truths in a secular culture, as well as the need to provide wisdom through literature. - - -  Today's Sponsor: ExpressVPN - Get 4 months FREE of ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/klavan

After discussing Part One of Against the Day, we spent some time talking with our guest, Johan Harstad, about whatever came to mind—the music of Hüsker Dü, David Foster Wallace, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and so much else.We'll be back in two weeks to discuss The Small Rain, the first short story from Pynchon's Slow Learner collection before diving back into Against the Day.Please check out Johan's work wherever you buy books and follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lacktr/As always, thanks so much for listening!Email: ⁠mappingthezonepod@gmail.com⁠Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mappingthezone.bsky.socialTwitter: https://twitter.com/pynchonpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mappingthezonepodcast/Show art by Brad Wetzel: @bradspersecond (on IG and Reddit) bradspersecond.com