person:thomas pynchon

21 Books You Don’t Have to Read | GQ
▻https://www.gq.com/story/21-books-you-dont-have-to-read

C’est bone liste pour la Californie. Et pour la France, l’talie, le Sénégal, le Cameroun, le Congo, l’Égyte, la Russie, l’Inde et la Chine ? Et pour l’Allemagne ?
Une fois ces listes réunis je me prends un an de vacances avec des amis et on se traduit et s’explique mutuellement le pour et le contre des livres.
On commence là sur #Seenthis ?

We’ve been told all our lives that we can only call ourselves well-read once we’ve read the Great Books. We tried. We got halfway through Infinite Jest and halfway through the SparkNotes on Finnegans Wake. But a few pages into Bleak House, we realized that not all the Great Books have aged well. Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring. So we—and a group of un-boring writers—give you permission to strike these books from the canon. Here’s what you should read instead.
...

1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Instead: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

2. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Instead: Olivia: A Novel by Dorothy Strachey

3. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
Instead: Dispatches by Michael Herr

4. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Instead: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

5. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Instead: Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

6. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Instead: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

7. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Instead: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

8. John Adams by David McCullough
Instead: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

9 & 10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Instead: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Fredrick Douglass
Instead: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis

11. The Ambassadors by Henry James
Instead: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

12. The Bible
Instead: The Notebook by Agota Kristof

13. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Instead: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

14. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Instead: Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin

15. Dracula by Bram Stoker
Instead: Angels by Denis Johnson

16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Instead: The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi

17. Life by Keith Richards
Instead: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

18. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Instead: Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

19. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Instead: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

20. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Instead: Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

21. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Instead: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

#USA #littérature #société

En 1984 Thomas Pynchon demandait : « Is it OK to be a Luddite ? »
►http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.
(...) The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening — it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. (...)
It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death.

#science-fiction #technologie #littérature
traduit en 1990 par la revue Alliage mais qui n’est pas en ligne bien que scanné chez ►http://books.google.fr/books?hl=fr&id=-OgoAQAAIAAJ&q=pynchon

On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+ - TechnoSocial
►http://www.marrowbones.com/commons/technosocial/2011/07/on_pseudonymity_privacy_and_re.html

....

People confuse two concepts: anonymity (no one knows who you are at all, no persistence over time, the most prolific author of all time is Anonymous) and pseudonymity (no one knows who you are, but there’s a persistent identity over time like a pen name, think: Mark Twain, George Sand, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, John Wayne, or Stalin). No one doubts who John Wayne was, but then again, no one reading Thomas Pynchon’s books seriously doubts they are by the same author (well, maybe, but really...) even though no one but perhaps his editor has seen him (or her?).

If people use pseudonyms, I won’t be able to track down a stalker
If you have a legal complaint, then Google will reply to a subpoena with all the information they have, which at least includes IP addresses and any linked accounts, and perhaps the number of the phone used during verification. The process of tracking a real “John Smith” to an originating computer is not going to be any different from tracking down “Demosthenes” to that same computer. Since Google isn’t verifying every address, they have no more information about “John Smith” than they do about “Demosthenes”.

démonstration par la police de Montréal

MONTRÉAL - Le jeune homme de 21 ans qui aurait menacé et harcelé à de nombreuses reprises plusieurs vedettes québécoises par l’entremise du site de réseautage social Twitter restera détenu au moins jusqu’à jeudi.

►http://fr.canoe.ca/infos/societe/archives/2011/03/20110330-085731.html

ou encore le cas Anders Behring Breivik , traqué par un fafwatcher anglais sur les forums de L’#EDL

Meet #EDL member No. 3614. Sigurd Jorsalfare. Better known as Anders Behring Breivik.

►http://twitpic.com/5wtk6i

Who Needs a Pseudonym?

Iran
When the attempted revolution broke out in Iran, I had in-laws there, I had information about what was happening that I wanted to share online with people who were interested in the situation. I wanted to educate them about what was happening. But I couldn’t do that under my real name, because the Iranian government was actively searching Twitter for posts about Iran, and they could easily have connected me to my wife and her relatives.

Marriage
My marriage was on the rocks. I was sleeping on the couch, drinking too much, and not focused on my consulting business. I initially talked about some of this online on Twitter, and started to meet people with similar problems who had advice and support, but then my children got Twitter accounts. Creating a separate account allowed me to talk about those issues without identifying and embarrassing my family; not to mention my consulting clients. Those conversations, under my pseudonym, were absolutely critical for my finding a new network of friends, hiring a personal assistant, finding housing, moving out of my home, getting new jobs, and in general, getting my feet back on the ground. I made real friends, many of whom I have met offline, and now know by their real names, under that account. It was critical for getting my life back together.

Teenagers
I have two teen girls. Sometimes (especially since my wife and I separated, and the kids are off at boarding school) I just want to talk to people about the issues that come up when you have teenagers. Publicly posting (with no names, of course, that’s the point of a pseudonym) about issues online has generated a flood of support and similar stories. I regularly share the ups and downs of my parenting life with other people, and they with me. Do I know their names? No. Do I need to? No. Would I have found that support if I’d only posted to my closed circles? No.

LGBT
He’s gay…he’s bi…she used to be a guy…he used to be a girl…he’s still in the closet and doesn’t know anybody like him. They aren’t looking for a forum to talk about their sexuality, there are plenty of those. They’re looking for a forum where they can talk about all the stuff the rest of us take for granted; politics, technology, society, world news… They just want to do it as themselves, not as someone pretending to be someone they aren’t.

The Everyday Activist
And finally there’s the simple desire to not conflate your primary online activity with something secondary that might detract from it.+Lauren Weinstein talks about it in his excellent article “Google+, Privacy, and Balancing Identity” (►http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000882.html)

People don’t really need to hide
I hope the earlier set of examples has put this argument to rest, but in the end, this is no business of anybody except the person who wishes to have some privacy. This isn’t about hiding. It’s about privacy and control of the key that gives every stranger access to my doorstep; my name.

You only need a pseudonym if you’re bad
Mark Zuckerberg is famous for having said, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”. (Okay, that’s not theonly reason he’s famous.) So speaks a man who has never had to work for someone else and never had children. He also said “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” (►http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-having-two-identities-for-yourself-is-an-example)
It’s pretty clear that Facebook is doing its best to make this true, it’s not so clear that people want it to be true. But some people take this even further. For instance, +James Stallings II said in a comment on Google+,

It’s dangerous
A number of the examples I’ve given, as to why someone might want a pseudonym, involve personal danger. All of them at least involve potential embarrassment. This argument says that there’s no way to be private on the Internet, and therefore you shouldn’t share anything that you don’t want anyone to know. They claim this is “security by obscurity”. +Robert Scoble makes this argument in a comment,

“If you are Chinese and you want to avoid government action you should advise people to keep their opinions off of the Internet. Period.”

#google+ #anonymat
super longue diatribe sur google + et l’anonymat ou plutôt l’identité numérique, la liberté qu’elle permet aussi bien politique que personnelle, bref décryptage