Quotessence
Home / Books / Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge

Book by Thomas Pynchon · 13 quotes · Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, Deep Web

Filter quotes by topic

AllPynchonBleeding EdgeDeep WebInternet9 11AssCocaineCodeColombian CartelDickheadFictionHumorInternet AddictionIrony Of LifeKitchenLifeLiteralismQuantsReality TvScooby Doo

Bleeding Edge Quotes

“Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching Scooby Goes Latin! (1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial. “Hi, Mom.” She wants to enfold him forever. Instead she lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan. The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. “And I would have got away with it, too, he complains, “if it hadn’t been for those Medellín kids!”

HumorCocaineScooby DooColombian Cartel
Book:Bleeding Edge
Create image

“As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.” “Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!” “You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.”

FictionReality Tv9 11Literalism
Book:Bleeding Edge
Create image

“It’s still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonisers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There’s already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web –” “Is that,” Maxine wonders, “like, ‘Ride the Wild Surf’?” “Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything’ll be suburbanised faster than you can say ‘late capitalism.’ Then it’ll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they’ll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom’ll have to saddle up and head somewhere else.”

Deep Web
Book:Bleeding Edge
Create image

“When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there’s one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that’d take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss.” “That’s what you’re looking for?” “Some of us are.” Avatars do not do wistful, but Maxine catches something. “Others are trying to avoid it. Depends what you’re into.”

InternetDeep Web
Book:Bleeding Edge
Create image

“- С двете момчета не е същото - кима Максин, - но понякога се чудя какво би било, ако имах дъщеря. - Ами вземи си роди, още си хлапе. - Да, лошото е, че и Хорст е. Както и всеки друг, с когото съм излизала. - О, де да можеше да видиш бившия ми. Сидни. Нестабилни юноши от цялата страна идваха на поклонение до къщи само за да вдишат от издишания от него цигарен дим и да си сверят настройките. - Той е още... - Жив и здрав. Ако някога умре, ще е доста неприятно изненадан.”

Irony Of LifePynchon
Book:Bleeding Edge
Create image

“Is no revenge of the nerds, you know what, last year when everything collapsed, all it meant was the nerds lost out once again and the jocks won. Same as always ... Some of the quants are smart, but quants come, quants go, they're just nerds for hire with a different fashion sense. The jocks may not know a stochastic crossover if it bites them on the ass, but they have that drive to thrive, they're synced in to them deep market rhythms, and that'll always beat out nerditude no matter how smart it gets.”

AssPynchonQuantsStochastic Crossover
Book:Bleeding Edge
Create image