tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36846592024-03-07T17:57:57.801-08:00pynchonoid...everything connects...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comBlogger315125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-64519506519802218122009-11-09T06:27:00.001-08:002009-11-09T06:27:46.156-08:00"Call it Capitalism" Thomas Jones on Pynchon's Inherent Vice<blockquote>Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 04:50:58 -0600<br />
From: Dave Monroe <<span class="Object" id="OBJ_PREFIX_DWT359"><span class="Object" id="OBJ_PREFIX_DWT360">against.the.dave@gmail.com</span></span>><br />
Subject: Call it Capitalism<br />
<br />
Call It Capitalism<br />
Thomas Jones<br />
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon<br />
Cape, 369 pp, £18.99, August 2009, ISBN 978 0 224 08948 7<br />
<br />
<br />
When Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award in 1974, its<br />
famously reclusive author surprised everyone by turning up at the<br />
ceremony to collect the prize. Except that the rambling, shambling<br />
figure at the podium wasn’t Thomas Pynchon at all, but a comedian and<br />
actor, ‘Professor’ Irwin Corey, who had been hired by Pynchon’s<br />
publisher to impersonate the novelist. The audience gradually got the<br />
joke as Corey, who was once described by Kenneth Tynan as a ‘travesty<br />
of all that our civilisation holds dear and one of the funniest<br />
grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard<br />
Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our<br />
very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described<br />
Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since<br />
there are over three and a half billion people in the world today: 218<br />
million of them live in the United States, which is a very, very small<br />
amount compared to those that are dying elsewhere.’<br />
<br />
What part Pynchon played behind the scenes of Corey’s performance is<br />
unclear, but he probably played some because he has always kept a<br />
tight rein on his public persona, mostly by not having one – apart<br />
from a couple of guest appearances on The Simpsons in 2004 (he’s<br />
depicted with a paper bag over his head). When a CNN camera crew<br />
caught him on film in 1997, he phoned the network to ask them not to<br />
air the footage. They took the opportunity to quiz him about his<br />
reclusiveness. ‘My belief is that “recluse” is a codeword generated by<br />
journalists,’ he replied, ‘meaning: “doesn’t like to talk to<br />
reporters”.’ Authorised by Pynchon or not, Corey’s surrogate<br />
acceptance speech touched on many of the persistent themes and<br />
anxieties of his novels: that America is not, and has never been, the<br />
benign force it would like to pretend to be; that the lines between<br />
fiction and reality are uncomfortably blurred; that it’s hard ever to<br />
be sure that anyone is who they claim to be; and that many of the<br />
things people are inclined to take seriously – literary prizes, global<br />
conspiracies, life – may turn out to be someone’s idea of a great big<br />
joke.<br />
<br />
Gravity’s Rainbow was written during the Vietnam War and published a<br />
year after the Watergate break-in. But it is set 30 years earlier,<br />
during the last war that the US engaged in as one of the unambiguous<br />
good guys. It opens with the flight of a V2 rocket launched from The<br />
Hague over the North Sea one December morning in 1944 – ‘A screaming<br />
comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to<br />
compare it to now’ – and ends a literal moment, ‘the last delta-t’,<br />
before the single most devastating V2 attack of the war, which killed<br />
567 people in a cinema in Antwerp on the afternoon of Saturday, 16<br />
December 1944. Over the course of the intervening 750 pages the<br />
narrative loops nine months ahead to encompass the occupation of<br />
Germany, the fall of Berlin and the bombing of Hiroshima.<br />
<br />
From the V2 to the atom bomb, Gravity’s Rainbow pursues the<br />
continuities between Nazi Germany and Cold War America. Pynchon<br />
learned a fair amount of what he knows about Nazi rocket technology<br />
from working at Boeing in the early 1960s. The novel’s first epigraph<br />
is attributed to Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V2 and later<br />
director of Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The I.G. Farben<br />
conglomerate, which owned the patent for Zyklon B, is a malign<br />
presence throughout the book. Though Farben was officially broken up<br />
in 1951 on account of its war crimes, various of its constituent parts<br />
– Agfa, BASF, Bayer – still exist, and Farben itself was listed on the<br />
Frankfurt Stock Exchange until 2003 as a trust company with various<br />
real estate assets. The reach, power and longevity of international<br />
corporations far surpass those of any individual or government.<br />
<br />
The various structural underpinnings of Gravity’s Rainbow – the<br />
parabolic flight of a missile (one explanation for its title),<br />
differential calculus, the Christian calendar, Kabbalah, astrology,<br />
numerology, Tarot – have been relentlessly documented in books and on<br />
fansites, and are more or less interesting depending on your tastes.<br />
But what they all have in common is a tendency, or a desire, if not to<br />
impose order on chaos then at least to see patterns in it – a tendency<br />
shared, though rarely so explicitly or exhaustively, by all readers<br />
and writers of stories. More fully perhaps than any other novelist,<br />
including Don DeLillo, with whom he is so often (and so oddly) paired,<br />
Pynchon has explored and exposed the overlap between paranoia and<br />
fiction, between the plots imagined or unearthed by conspiracy<br />
theorists and the plots of novels, not least because both are<br />
concerned with what’s excluded from the historical record. The<br />
paranoid’s worst fear is that the conspiracy they see everywhere is<br />
their own invention, or a hoax dreamed up at their expense by someone<br />
out of reach.<br />
<br />
In The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), the ‘true paranoid’ is defined as<br />
someone ‘for whom all is organised in spheres joyful or threatening<br />
about the central pulse of himself’. The description could apply just<br />
as well to the protagonist of a novel, the person whose story it<br />
arbitrarily is, as if they were somehow of greater cosmic significance<br />
than anyone else. One of the many startling – and potentially<br />
off-putting – things about Gravity’s Rainbow is the way that a<br />
succession of implausibly named characters about each of whom you<br />
think, first time through, ‘Oh, so this guy must be the hero’ (Pirate<br />
Prentice, Tyrone Slothrop, Seaman Bodine), drop out of the narrative.<br />
It’s a picaresque tale without a picaro.<br />
<br />
Slothrop, who has the strongest claim of the vast cast of characters<br />
to be the novel’s centre of gravity, is last seen, nearly a hundred<br />
pages before the end, sitting on a curbstone in occupied Germany,<br />
watching the sun come up. For a while Slothrop has been stumbling<br />
round Berlin in the guise of Rocketman, an ineffectual parody of a<br />
superhero, like an X-rated version of Sesame Street’s Super Grover.<br />
Later, there’s an explanation of sorts for his disappearance: ‘“We<br />
were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop,” a spokesman for<br />
the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with the Wall<br />
Street Journal.’ Seaman Bodine is ‘one of the few who can still see<br />
Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more’: see him, that is,<br />
in the way that we’re supposed to see other people if we’re to keep a<br />
grip on our sense of their, and consequently our own, humanity. Though<br />
the use of the word ‘creature’ suggests that Slothrop and Bodine – and<br />
the writer and reader with them – may have slipped a link or two down<br />
the chain of being.<br />
<br />
The idea of humanity, Gravity’s Rainbow implies, is a paranoid<br />
fantasy. But strip it away and all you have left are death, sex and<br />
the laws of physics. The place where they intersect is the black hole<br />
at the novel’s core, around which the plots and the paranoia orbit in<br />
a centripetal swirl. (At least, that’s one relatively respectable<br />
explanation for all the high-tech sadomasochism that saturates the<br />
novel.) Gravity’s Rainbow acknowledges that to see patterns in the<br />
chaos is to be deluded, but at the same time demonstrates the<br />
necessity of the delusion.<br />
<br />
This isn’t to say that the patterns we project onto the world, the<br />
lines we draw on the earth, are any less real, or any less<br />
conseq-uential, for being imaginary. One reason for the Second World<br />
War was widespread disagreement about where the edges of Germany were.<br />
In Mason & Dixon (1997), Pynchon tells the story – or rather, a great<br />
many stories – of the surveying of the boundary line that separates<br />
Pennsylvania and Delaware from Maryland and West Virginia. The<br />
location of the unnaturally straight line was arbitrarily (or at least<br />
abstractly) chosen, and Pynchon’s characters get into all kinds of<br />
scrapes as a result of the incongruity between the imaginary line<br />
they’re plotting and the physical land they’re plotting it on.<br />
<br />
The business of surveying it was a good deal messier and more chaotic<br />
than you’d guess from seeing it on a map. The finished line is a<br />
joined-up series of tangents to the many circuitous expeditions that<br />
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon undertook between 1763 and 1767. When<br />
their work was completed, the fantasy of the men who’d hired them was<br />
stamped on the earth, and the battlelines of the Civil War that was to<br />
come a century later were already set in stone, literally: the line<br />
was marked out every mile with stones shipped out from England.<br />
<br />
The opening of Mason & Dixon, ‘SnowBalls have flown their Arcs,’ is a<br />
softer echo of that first sentence of Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘A screaming<br />
comes across the sky.’ Flying bombs have been transmogrified into a<br />
children’s game. Looking back to the decades before Independence is<br />
one version of the quest for the chimera of America’s lost innocence.<br />
But it requires a shift in tense: the bombs are present, the snowballs<br />
are past. The quest for innocence is doomed to failure: however far<br />
back you go, the elusive quarry has always somehow retreated even<br />
further into the past. Innocence can never be written about in the<br />
present tense. Besides, with hindsight, the snowballs can be seen to<br />
prefigure the bombs: the trajectories and hostilities have always<br />
existed; it’s just a question of waiting for the technology to catch<br />
up.<br />
<br />
If it wasn’t already apparent enough in his earlier novels, Pynchon’s<br />
18th-century sensibility was fully unveiled in Mason & Dixon. Forget<br />
DeLillo; the Anglophone novelist whom Pynchon most closely resembles –<br />
with his delight in silly names, scatological jokes, wild digressions<br />
and impromptu outbursts of song lyrics, his disregard for distinctions<br />
between fact and fiction, his scientific background, his belief in the<br />
randomness of the world and fascination with the patterns that appear<br />
in the chaos – is Tobias Smollett. Perhaps the most striking of<br />
Pynchon’s reactions against the legacy of the Victorian novelists is<br />
his treatment of children, especially in Gravity’s Rainbow. He doesn’t<br />
merely defetishise them as vessels of mystical innocence; he<br />
refetishises them as irresistible sex objects. There is a satirical<br />
edge to all the spanking and fucking of children: it can be read as an<br />
exposé of the sexual component latent in the lingering Victorian<br />
ideal, or as an attack on the hypocritical prurience of moralising<br />
media crusades against paedophiles, or as an illustration of the<br />
brutalising effects of war, or as a more general allegory of the abuse<br />
of innocence. Or maybe it’s just porn – an uncomfortable doubt that<br />
maintains the edginess of the satire.<br />
<br />
Something that people who don’t like Pynchon often complain about is<br />
that his ‘characters’ aren’t really characters, in the sense that<br />
developed over the course of the 19th century: basically, there’s<br />
never anyone to sympathise with. For his fans, there’s always enough<br />
else going on for this not to be a problem. But it’s also the case<br />
that Pynchon’s fiction reveals something bogus, even sinister, about<br />
the very idea of ‘sympathetic characters’. As readers we may rely on<br />
our liberal humanist ability to ‘empathise’ with immaterial strangers,<br />
but we can still tolerate with bland equanimity the manifold suffering<br />
of the wretched of the earth when we put down our novels and turn on<br />
the evening news. That’s OK: if we couldn’t, we’d all be suicide<br />
bombers. Still, in this respect, Pynchon’s alienating novels are<br />
altogether more ‘realistic’ than any number of finely wrought<br />
explorations of individual consciousness.<br />
<br />
Once certain stories have been made up about the way the world is –<br />
that there’s something called the Mason-Dixon Line, for example, or<br />
childhood innocence, or novelistic character – it’s impossible to go<br />
back to a world in which those stories haven’t yet been told. The<br />
epigraph to Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s latest novel, is a translation of<br />
the famous piece of Parisian graffiti from May 1968: ‘Sous les pavés,<br />
la plage!’ But just because the paving stones were laid on top of the<br />
beach, that doesn’t mean that the beach will still be there if you rip<br />
up the paving stones. On the contrary, perhaps the beach is only still<br />
there beneath the paving stones so long as you don’t rip them up. But<br />
then, what good is a buried beach?<br />
<br />
That’s the kind of dumb-serious question – ‘Anybody understand why<br />
they call it “real” estate?’ is an actual example – that it might<br />
occur to one of the novel’s perpetually stoned characters to ask. The<br />
protagonist, Doc Sportello, is a diminutive private eye – ‘What I lack<br />
in al-titude . . . I make up for in at-titude’ – with a serious dope<br />
habit and an office in Gordita Beach, a fictional suburb of Los<br />
Angeles last seen in Vineland and based on Manhattan Beach, where<br />
Pynchon probably lived in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Inherent<br />
Vice is set in 1970: Nixon’s in the White House, Reagan is governor of<br />
California, and Charles Manson and his groupies are about to go on<br />
trial for mass murder. Whichever way you look at it, the 1960s are<br />
over, though Doc doesn’t seem to have noticed.<br />
<br />
The novel’s title is taken from the world of marine insurance. ‘It’s<br />
what you can’t avoid,’ explains Doc’s lawyer, Sauncho Smilax, who<br />
specialises, not very helpfully for Doc, in maritime law. ‘Stuff<br />
marine policies don’t like to cover. Usually applies to cargo – like<br />
eggs break – but sometimes it’s also the vessel carrying it. Like why<br />
bilges have to be pumped out?’ Doc, when he first hears the phrase,<br />
asks if it’s ‘like original sin’, but it’s more like ‘double<br />
indemnity’. The novel begins with Doc’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay<br />
Hepworth, coming ‘along the alley and up the back steps the way she<br />
always used to’ – the nostalgia seeps out of the page – with a story<br />
about how her new lover, a phenomenonally rich property developer<br />
called Mickey Wolfmann, is at risk from his wife and her lover:<br />
they’re ‘working together on some creepy little scheme’ to do away<br />
with him and take his money.<br />
<br />
It’s complicated, and it gets more complicated still when a guy called<br />
Tariq Khalil turns up (‘black folks were occasionally spotted west of<br />
the Harbor Freeway, but to see one this far out of the usual range,<br />
practically by the ocean, was pretty rare’) asking Doc to track down a<br />
member of the Aryan Brotherhood he knew in prison, who owes him money<br />
and who also just happens to be one of Mickey Wolfmann’s bodyguards.<br />
And then Wolfmann is kidnapped, the bodyguard is killed and Doc is<br />
framed for his murder. At this point we’re not even 25 pages in, and<br />
Doc hasn’t yet been contacted by the widow of Coy Harlingen, who used<br />
to play the saxophone in an experimental surf band called the Boards,<br />
and who may not in fact have died of a heroin overdose, as everybody<br />
supposed, but be working as a counter-revolutionary triple agent for<br />
the FBI or some other, even more secret government – or possibly<br />
supra-governmental – agency. Phew.<br />
<br />
The experience of reading the novel is probably as close to getting<br />
stoned as reading a novel can be. It brings on fits of the giggles and<br />
paranoia jags, and badly messes with your short-term memory: the plot,<br />
as ever with Pynchon, is bewilderingly hard to follow, the plethora of<br />
characters almost impossible to keep track of without taking notes (as<br />
it happens, Doc’s a bit of a compulsive notetaker, to help compensate<br />
for his doper’s memory). It doesn’t, however, make you fall asleep or,<br />
despite the many descriptions of the consumption of every conceivable<br />
variety of fast food, give you the munchies.<br />
<br />
Amid all the shenanigans, Pynchon finds time to acknowledge the rise<br />
of the world wide web – one of Doc’s contacts has hacked into ARPAnet,<br />
the precursor of the internet established by the Department of Defense<br />
and various West Coast universities – and to take a few sideswipes at<br />
the war on terror (‘these days . . . most of the energy in this office<br />
[the FBI] is going into investigating Black Nationalist Hate Groups’)<br />
and the credit crunch: ‘It isn’t new money exactly . . . more like new<br />
debt. Everything they own, including their sailboats, they’ve bought<br />
on credit cards from institutions in places like South Dakota that you<br />
send away for by filling out the back of a match cover.’<br />
<br />
And, inevitably, there’s a vast and secretive organisation with<br />
tentacles that appear to be busily squirming in every dark corner that<br />
Doc pokes his nose into. It’s called the Golden Fang and, unlike<br />
Farben, it’s undocumented anywhere outside the fiction of Thomas<br />
Pynchon. When Doc warns someone that ‘this is the Golden Fang you’re<br />
about to rip off here, man,’ he gets the dismissive reply: ‘That’s<br />
according to your own delusional system.’ But ditch the silly name and<br />
the comic-book headquarters, and it’s hard not to agree that a system<br />
like the Golden Fang exists, only most people call it, more<br />
prosaically, capitalism. And it’s everywhere:<br />
<br />
The Golden Fang operatives were cleverly disguised tonight as a<br />
wholesome blond California family in a ’53 Buick Estate Wagon . . . a<br />
nostalgic advertisement for the sort of suburban consensus that [the<br />
Golden Fang] prayed for day and night to settle over the Southland,<br />
with all non-homeowning infidels sent off to some crowded exile far<br />
away, where they could be safely forgotten. The boy was six and<br />
already looked like a Marine.<br />
<br />
The ideological antithesis to the Golden Fang is the lost continent of<br />
Lemuria, submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean, which the hippies and<br />
surfers imagine as an anarchist utopia, more or less accessible<br />
depending on how much acid you happen to have taken. Utopias are what<br />
the paranoid imagine when they’re on a good trip. The trouble is, it’s<br />
not always straightforward to disentangle the positive paranoia from<br />
the negative, and impossible to know which side everyone – including<br />
yourself – is really on. The more closely you scrutinise the struggle<br />
between anarchist utopia and totalitarian capitalism – also one of the<br />
threads in Against the Day (2006) – the more interdependent they seem<br />
to be.<br />
<br />
Just look at the drugs: an ineffectual pimp informs Doc that the<br />
Golden Fang is an ‘Indochinese heroin cartel. A vertical package. They<br />
finance it, grow it, process it, bring it in, step on it, move it, run<br />
Stateside networks of local street dealers, take a separate percentage<br />
off of each operation. Brilliant.’ Obviously no single organisation<br />
has this kind of reach. But global capital does. And the drug trade is<br />
as good an example as there is of what the invisible hand of<br />
unfettered capitalism might look like. The pimp’s tongue has been<br />
loosened by ‘a joint of Colombian commercial proven effective at<br />
stimulating conversation’. Indochina and Colombia: the sites of two of<br />
the lengthiest and most disastrous US interventions of the 20th<br />
century. The drug-dependent fantasy of the beach (Lemuria) can only be<br />
sustained as long as the paving stones (capitalism) remain in place:<br />
the people dreaming about the beach are inadvertently paying for the<br />
upkeep of the paving stones.<br />
<br />
This might look like a mutually sustaining cold war between the values<br />
of the 1960s and those of the 1980s, an apparent antagonism that<br />
Pynchon also investigated in Vineland (1990). But actually all the<br />
elements of the conflict were already there in the 1960s. If von Braun<br />
is the malign spirit hovering over Gravity’s Rainbow, in Inherent Vice<br />
it’s Charles Manson, the white racist advocate of black power. He<br />
embodies the contradictions of the decade: he was into free love,<br />
getting stoned, the Beatles and the Beach Boys; he believed in the<br />
coming revolution; and he ordered his followers to go into other<br />
people’s homes and maim and kill in the service of a fugitive idea –<br />
just as Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon did. Manson’s in jail because he<br />
brought the slaughter home to California instead of exporting it to<br />
Central America or South-East Asia; he’s widely recognised as a nutjob<br />
because he preached about the coming of Helter Skelter instead of the<br />
menace of Communism and the domino effect, taking the Beatles’ ‘White<br />
Album’ for his bible instead of the Truman Doctrine.<br />
<br />
Inherent Vice is heaving with references to pop culture, not just<br />
music and drugs but films and television too. Zombies and vampires of<br />
indeterminate metaphorical status stalk the streets of Los Angeles.<br />
Sauncho is often too freaked out by what he’s just caught on the tube<br />
– seeing The Wizard of Oz on a colour set for the first time, he<br />
wonders what the Technicolor of Munchkinland must look like to Dorothy<br />
– to pay much attention to what Doc’s trying to tell him. When Doc’s<br />
neighbour finds a huge stash of heroin in a cardboard box that once<br />
held a colour TV, he spends many baffled hours staring at it, trying<br />
to figure out what the programme is.<br />
<br />
Both shorter and easier to read than any of Pynchon’s previous novels<br />
apart from The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice gives the impression of<br />
having been easier to write, too. It’s less than three years since<br />
Against the Day was published, compared to the 17 that passed between<br />
Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland. That may be one reason why,<br />
characteristically hilarious and thought-provoking though it is,<br />
Inherent Vice lacks much of the menace and the passion of its<br />
predecessors.<br />
<br />
Then again, perhaps this flattening of affect is deliberate, analogous<br />
to seeing the world through a haze of cannabis smoke, or entirely<br />
mediated through TV. It’s not that the conspiracies and the paranoia<br />
aren’t there any more; it’s just that these days, as he looks back at<br />
California in 1970, it’s hard for Pynchon not to see it all as a bit<br />
of a joke. But there’s something profoundly bleak about the inability<br />
to take anything seriously. Since the conspiracy is inescapable,<br />
there’s nothing to do except laugh at it. Squint the right way, and<br />
what looked like wry indulgence morphs into nihilism.<br />
<br />
Possibly the weirdest thing of all about Inherent Vice, however, a<br />
perverse bright spot in the smog of despair, is the thought that<br />
somewhere out there in one of the beach towns of LA County, never very<br />
far away from wherever Doc is carrying out his desultory<br />
investigations, somewhere among the dopers and the surfers and the<br />
hippie chicks, among the dentists and lawyers and loan sharks, among<br />
the voters who put Nixon in the White House and Reagan in the<br />
Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento, Thomas Pynchon is secluded at his<br />
typewriter, at work on Gravity’s Rainbow.<br />
<br />
Vol. 31 No. 17 · 10 September 2009 » Thomas Jones » Call It Capitalism<br />
Pages 9-10 | 3928 words<br />
<br />
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
Letters<br />
Vol. 31 No. 21 · 5 November 2009<br />
<br />
From James Wood<br />
<br />
Thomas Jones, in his review of Inherent Vice (LRB, 10 September),<br />
asserts that those who haven’t liked the last Pynchon books ‘often<br />
complain’ that his characters are not proper characters, ‘in the sense<br />
that developed over the course of the 19th century: basically, there’s<br />
never anyone to sympathise with.’ When? I haven’t seen this complaint<br />
in two recent negative reviews by Louis Menand (in the New Yorker) and<br />
by Sam Anderson (in New York magazine). Speaking for myself, as a<br />
hostile reviewer of Against the Day, the question has nothing to do<br />
with whether you consider Pynchon’s characters fully rounded in a<br />
19th-century sense (19th-century characters not being all that<br />
rounded, anyway, in the end); or whether you ‘sympathise’ with them:<br />
does one ‘sympathise’ with, say, Peter Verkhovensky, or Stavrogin, or<br />
Verloc, or any of the people in a Michel Houellebecq novel? Surely the<br />
issue is not what a novel’s characters are (round, flat, major, minor,<br />
caricature, sketch etc) but what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with<br />
them: what is seriously at stake in the entire novel of which they<br />
form the fabric. And what Pynchon does with his characters,<br />
increasingly, is juvenile vaudeville. If you like that, fine. But in<br />
his review, Jones unwittingly gives two reasons why one might not:<br />
reading Pynchon’s new novel, he writes, ‘is probably as close to<br />
getting stoned as reading a novel can be’ (which he takes as high<br />
praise); and – apropos of Pynchon’s relentlessly jokey treatment of<br />
1970s California – ‘But there’s something profoundly bleak about the<br />
inability to take anything seriously’ (which he also envisages as a<br />
compliment, of sorts).<br />
<br />
James Wood<br />
Cambridge, Massachusetts<br />
<br />
<span class="Object" id="OBJ_PREFIX_DWT361"><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n17/thomas-jones/call-it-capitalism" target="_blank">http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n17/thomas-jones/call-it-capitalism</a></span><br />
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</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-2431014262823910842008-12-17T07:51:00.000-08:002008-12-17T07:53:13.591-08:00magazine cover by Chums of Chance-related Harry Grant Dart<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3060/2725730679_af4eceb74c_b.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 726px; height: 1024px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3060/2725730679_af4eceb74c_b.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><img src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Edougmillison/editmeimageurl.jpg" /><br /><br /><blockquote><i></i></blockquote>posted @ <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/2725730679/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/2725730679/</a> with the following caption:<br /><br /><blockquote>Magazine cover for "The All-Story" by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Grant_Dart" rel="nofollow">Harry Grant Dart</a>, taken between 1900 and 1910. Dart was an illustrator and comic artist who also created the <a href="http://www.barnaclepress.com/list.php?directory=Explorigator" rel="nofollow">short-lived</a> cartoon <a href="http://lambiek.net/artists/d/dart_harry_grant.htm" rel="nofollow">"The Explorigator"</a>, on which the "Chums of Chance" from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Day" rel="nofollow">Against the Day</a> might be modeled, making this my <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/tags/thomaspynchon/">second</a> (speculative) Pynchon reference in a few days. Note that Harry had no problems with women steering!<br /><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-18318850348570807162008-12-17T06:51:00.001-08:002008-12-17T07:12:53.668-08:00from John Carvill @ Pynchon-l, re TRP autographed letter<blockquote>Has this been seen on the p-list before? Apologies, as usual, if so.<br /><br />A listing (now defunct I think) for a very interesting sounding Pynchon letter. I'll post the entire text here in case the link dies. Essential reading I would say. Sorry for the lack of paragraphs, that's, um, inherent to the listing itself. Definitely worth the effort to read, I promise.<br /><br /><br />334. PYNCHON, Thomas. Autograph Letter Signed. January 21, 1974.<br /><br />Two tightly printed pages, on both sides of one sheet of graph paper, written to his friends, authors David [Shetzline] and his wife Mary [M.F. Beal]. Last paragraph written in pencil, including the signature "Love, Tom." A lengthy letter, over 1000 words, to two friends who date back to his college days 15 years earlier. Both Shetzline and Beal were students at Cornell, and a part of the group that came to be known as the "Cornell School" of writers, including Pynchon, <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_0">Richard Fariña</span>, Shetzline and Beal. Shetzline published two novels in the late 1960s -- Heckletooth 3 and DeFord, which is dedicated to the memory of Fariña -- and Pynchon wrote blurbs for both of them. Pynchon also wrote a blurb for M.F. Beal's novel, <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_1">Amazon</span> One, about a group of radical activists of the 1960s. She also wrote what many consider to be the first lesbian/feminist detective novel, Angel Dance. All of these elements come into play in this remarkable letter, which deals with literary matters, poli!<br />tical matters, and the correspondents' longtime friendship. Written four months after <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_2">Gravity's Rainbow</span> was published, the letter sheds light on Pynchon's state of mind in the aftermath of the work of writing that novel. The letter starts out apologizing for writing to them together instead of "one by one but haven't been able to write anything to anybody for a couple years, and will be lucky even to get through this one letter here..." He goes on to tell them that his agent, the legendary Candida Donadio, "turns out to be a closet MF Beal freek [sic] and would really dig to establish contact..." He advises Mary to write to Candida but says "don't ask me what about, though, I can't understand any of this literary stuff" -- a remarkable comment from someone who has just finished writing Gravity's Rainbow. A long paragraph details events in <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_3">New York City</span>, where he is living, including an "Impeachment Rally" in <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_4">Greenwich Village</span>. Pynchon is self-consciously disdainful of this !<br />round of political activism: "Maybe I am wrong not to show up,!<br />after a<br />ll think of all that great neurotic pussy that always shows up at things like -- oh, aww, gee Mary, I'm sorry! I meant 'vagina,' of course! -- like that, and all the biggies who'll be there..." He goes on to describe that he is having "what the CIA calls a 'mid-life crisis,' looking for another hustle, cannot dig to live a 'literary' life no more..." A "lump of hash I lost somewhere in <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_5">Humboldt County</span> 3 years ago" figures into what becomes an increasingly textured, complicated narrative, much the way his fiction does, at the same time that it represents his side of an obviously ongoing dialogue, and elicits further contact from the recipients: in referring to stories of bad LSD circulating, he asks "You might as well tell me. How many times'd you end up sucking on the rug?" A dissection of the general state of mind among the self-proclaimed hip in New York City follows, and he waxes nostalgic for the West a couple of times: "Last fall I rode around on the 'Hound for a while.!<br />Would've dropped by [their place in northern California] except by the time I got in your neighborhood I was bummed out..." Future "master plan" was "to go across the sea, but now I don't know. I've sort of been keying my plans on Geraldine, part of general resolution not to impose shit on her, also cz I'm lazy and can't make decisions... so maybe we will head west, and then again maybe not, but if we do we'll be by your place, OK?" A remarkable letter, exhibiting all of the characteristics for which Pynchon's writing is known, and many of the concerns that he raises in his writings, and addressed to two of his closest and oldest friends. Pynchon even used Shetzline's name in Gravity's Rainbow: Shetzline was credited with having written the "classic study" of "the property of time-modulation peculiar to Oneidine." Folded in twelfths for mailing, else fine in hand-addressed envelope folded in fourths. In content and style, probably the best Pynchon letter we have ever seen.<br /><br /><a href="http://lopezbooks.com/catalog/127/127-10.html" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229525441_6">http://lopezbooks.com/catalog/127/127-10.html</span></a><br /><br />'bout half-ways down the page.<br /><br /><br />I found this link about a week back, browsing pretty much at random on The Fictional Woods. What a find!<br /><br /><br />Cheers<br />JC<br /><br />---<br /><br />Dave Monroe wrote (and see also the recent post on mineral evolution, <a href="http://pynchonoid.blogspot.com/2008/12/mineral-evolution-soul-in-evry-stone.html">http://pynchonoid.blogspot.com/2008/12/mineral-evolution-soul-in-evry-stone.html</a>):<br /><br />> <a href="http://lopezbooks.com/catalog/127/127-10.html" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_3">http://lopezbooks.com/catalog/127/127-10.html</span></a><br /><br />This article appeared in the May 1996 issue of <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_4">Postmodern Culture</span> and<br />is still archived at PMC. If you would like to know why I reposted it<br />at this site, go here.<br /><br />Copyright (c) 1996 Wes Chapman<br /><br />Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_5">Gravity's Rainbow<br />Wes Chapman</span><br /><br /><br />The title of Tania Modleski's Feminism Without Women refers, Modleski<br />explains, to a confluence of two political/intellectual trends: the<br />subsumption of feminism within a "more comprehensive" field of <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_6">gender<br />studies</span>, accompanied by the rise of a "male feminist perspective that<br />excludes women," and the dominance within feminist thought of an<br />"anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term 'woman,'<br />however 'provisionally' it is adopted, is disallowed" (14-15). The two<br />trends are linked, Modleski argues, because "the rise of gender<br />studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the<br />tendendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of<br />identity and the subject" (15). These trends are troubling for<br />Modleski because she fears that, insofar as <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_7">gender studies</span> tend to<br />decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a "new<br />phase" in feminism but rather feminism's "phase-out" (5).<br /><br />My concern in this essay is with male-authored work on gender of the<br />type identified by Modleski, and in particular with its intersections<br />with anti-essentialism....<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />That this politics of discourse may tend to decenter women as the<br />subjects of feminism is suggested by the one direct and I think<br />suggestive reference in the novel to a contemporary feminist, M. F.<br />Beal.8 Felipe, one of the Argentinian exiles, makes "noontime<br />devotionals to the living presence of a certain rock" which, he<br />believes, "embodies . . . an intellectual system, for [Felipe]<br />believes (as do M.F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral<br />consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals"<br />(GR 612). M. F. Beal was (or is) a friend of Pynchon's, author of two<br />novels, Amazon One and Angel Dance, several stories, and <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_8">Safe House</span>: A<br />Casebook of <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_9">Revolutionary</span> Feminism in the 1970's. David Seed, who has<br />written most about the relationship of Pynchon and Beal, explains that<br />the reference to Beal in <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; cursor: pointer; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_10">Gravity's Rainbow</span> refers to a conversation<br />that Pynchon and Beal had about "the limits of sentience" (227): "Beal<br />implicitly humanized the earth's mantle (containing of course <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_11">rocks<br />and minerals</span>) by drawing an analogy with skin. . . . " (32) In effect,<br />Beal was espousing what we would now call a <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_12">Gaia</span> philosophy9; as Seed<br />writes, "[i]f there is such a thing as mineral consciousness then the<br />earth's crust becomes a living mantle and man becomes a part (a small<br />part) of a living continuum instead of being defined against an inert<br />environment" (227). There is a version of this belief in "mineral<br />consciousness" in Safe House:<br /><br />Only recently have a few modern men begun to learn anything about life<br />and what they are learning is that the only difference from the point<br />of view of chemistry between living and non-living substances is their<br />ability to reproduce themselves. (86)<br /><br />As in her discussions with Pynchon, Beal here minimizes the<br />distinction between plants and animals on the one hand and<br />"non-living" beings like minerals; if the "only difference" between<br />them is the ability to reproduce, then in other ways they are the same<br />(so, perhaps, rocks are sentient, as Beal had argued to Pynchon<br />earlier).<br /><br />One tenet of <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_13">Gaia philosophy</span> is that the Earth acts as a conscious<br />organism to protect itself. In Safe House, Beal speculates that one<br />mechanism by which the Earth might be trying to protect itself is what<br />she calls a "strategic retreat" -- the possibility that "adult women<br />given the choice will choose to live without [men] -- to eat, sleep,<br />work, rear children and dwell without them" (87) -- in other words,<br />female separatism. Beal wonders whether the contemporary urge toward<br />separatism might be not just a conscious choice by particular women<br />but a manifestation of some larger biological necessity:<br /><br />Could it be that we are witnessing an unfathomably significant genetic<br />reflex for species survival? Could it be that the DNA code has been<br />triggered by some inscrutable biological alarm system from the threat<br />of male violence and annihilation? Could it be that this is some<br />ancient reoccurring pattern which has activated female response over<br />the millennia to withdraw, to protect and defend themselves and their<br />progeny? (87)<br /><br />For Beal, man has turned away from the earth to "violence and<br />annihilation," just as for Pynchon humanity has turned away from the<br />Titans to the "structures favoring death." But for Beal, this turning<br />away is specifically coded according to gender; the "man" in the<br />previous sentence refers to men, not to humanity. Conversely, women<br />are a key part of the Earth's counter-struggle: the earth is<br />triggering in women, who are open to the message of survival because<br />they "have always known all things are alike and precious," a "genetic<br />reflex for species survival," which consists of a disentanglement from<br />"male violence and annihilation." In Gravity's Rainbow, the<br />genderedness of Beal's vision is lost; the Titans in <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_14">Greek mythology</span><br />were half male and half female.<br /><br />Safe House was published in 1976, three years after Gravity's Rainbow,<br />so it is impossible to be certain whether Beal had in fact worked out<br />within a specifically feminist framework the belief in "mineral<br />consciousness" which Pynchon attributes to her. But it seems to me<br />likely that she had, or at least likely that Beal was a feminist by<br />that point, and that that feminism was part of her discussions with<br />Pynchon. If the critique of masculinism in Gravity's Rainbow was<br />influenced by Beal, then we can see the novel a kind of appropriation<br />and recentering of feminism; Pynchon subordinates his critique of<br />masculinism to a critique of militarism, and in so doing defuses the<br />genderedness of his subject. Within the play of pluralized discourses<br />in the novel, none of them privileged, none of them untainted by the<br />structures of power, the issue of gender is subsumed within the issue<br />of gender discourses. But if everyone is trapped within masculinist<br />discourse, then masculinism is not a problem of men at all; it is a<br />role one takes on or steps out of, as Greta Erdmann steps so easily<br />out of the role of masochist in Alpdrücken and into the role of sadist<br />with Bianca.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Works Cited<br /><br />Beal, M.F., and friends. Safe House: A Casebook of Revolutionary<br />Feminism in the 1970's. Eugene, OR: Northwest Matrix, 1976.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br /><a href="http://titan.iwu.edu/%7Ewchapman/pynchon.html" target="_blank"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1229526399_15">http://titan.iwu.edu/~wchapman/pynchon.html</span></a><br /><br />---<br /><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-92068004296135086342008-12-16T21:12:00.000-08:002008-12-16T21:16:18.103-08:00Remedios Varo born 100 years ago today<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nmwa.org/images/artists/portrait_25526.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 175px; height: 243px;" src="http://www.nmwa.org/images/artists/portrait_25526.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote><i></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />"Photograph of Remedios Varo in her studio painting <i>Farewell</i>, 1958, courtesy of Walter Gruen" from <a href="http://www.nmwa.org/clara/search_artist_detail.asp?artist_id=25526">http://www.nmwa.org/clara/search_artist_detail.asp?artist_id=25526</a><br /><br />More details & links in this Metafilter post:<br /><a href="http://www.metafilter.com/77476/Otherworldly">http://www.metafilter.com/77476/Otherworldly</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-23567009713597859012008-12-16T20:27:00.000-08:002008-12-16T20:28:08.014-08:00from ChinaNews.com<div id="header"> <div id="logoDiv"> <div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: center; margin-top: 3px;"><!--[4,248,1] published at 2008-12-17 00:01:02 from #10 by system--> 2008年12月17日 星期三</div> <img src="http://i5.chinanews.com/images/images1/logo2.gif" alt="中国新闻网" title="中国新闻网" border="0" height="59" width="202" /> </div> <div id="bannerDiv"><iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" bordercolor="#D33B10" src="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/ad/30.html" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;" frameborder="0" height="92" scrolling="no" width="740"></iframe></div> </div> <!-- 页面header(logo,banner) 结束 --> <!-- 主要内容区 开始 --> <!--内容区左侧(正文) 开始--> <div id="location"> <span>本页位置:</span><span style="color:#ffffff;"><a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/home.shtml"><span style="color:#ffffff;">首页</span></a> → <a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/index.shtml"><span style="color:#ffffff;">新闻中心</span></a> → </span><a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/wenhua.shtml"><span style="color:#ffffff;">文化新闻</span></a> </div> <div id="pageOp">【<a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/cul/news/2008/12-11/1482503.shtml#" onclick="ad0.style.fontSize='20px';">放大字体</a>】【<a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/cul/news/2008/12-11/1482503.shtml#" onclick="ad0.style.fontSize='12px';">缩小字体</a>】</div> <div class="title0">20世纪美国头号奇书《万有引力之虹》中译本出版</div> <hr /> <div>2008年12月11日 09:12 来源:东方早报 <span class="style3"><a href="http://comment.chinanews.com.cn/comments/comments.php?newsid=1482503" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/fileftp/2007/12/2007-12-13/U31P4T47D7993F967DT20071213101145.gif" border="0" height="14" width="14" /> <span class="style3">发表评论 </span></a></span> </div> <hr /> <div id="content" class="cStyle0"> <img src="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/cul/news/2008/12-11/U136P4T8D1482503F107DT20081211091238.jpg" border="1" /><br /> <!--Yc94EUEtAn4YSUKCaSOM --> <div align="right"><a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/photo/index.shtml">点击查看其它图片</a></div> </div> <div id="ad0" class="font16Style"><p> <em> 核心提示:在中国翻译家和出版商多年的共同努力下,35年来不停搅动美国文坛,以晦涩、庞杂著称,但又对大众文化影响巨大的后现代经典小说《万有引力之虹》(Gravity's Rainbow),终于由译林出版社推出了中文版。 </em></p> <p> 在中国翻译家和出版商多年的共同努力下,35年来不停搅动美国文坛,以晦涩、庞杂著称,但又对大众文化影响巨大的后现代经典小说《万有引力之虹》(Gravity's Rainbow),终于由译林出版社推出了中文版。</p> <p><strong> 大隐士品钦</strong></p><div id="adhzh" name="hzh"> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0" height="250" width="300"> <param name="quality" value="high"> <param name="SRC" value="http://i8.chinanews.com/gg/081218/121804.swf"> <embed src="http://i8.chinanews.com/gg/081218/121804.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="250" width="300"></embed> </object></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </div> <p> 仅就翻译的难度和出版商的决心而言,厚达800余页、77万余字的中译《万有引力之虹》都足以被称作2008年外国文学出版的一大成就。</p> <p> 奇书背后必有奇人。《万有引力之虹》的作者托马斯·品钦(Thomas Pynchon)在隐居术方面的修习,与JD.塞林格几乎不相上下。除了小说,他几乎将自己在这个世界上存在过的所有物证统统湮灭,外界能够看到的品钦照 片大概只有两张,其中一张还是他二战从军时模模糊糊的黑白戎装照。</p> <p> 1973年,《万有引力之虹》在美国出版,大为轰动,孰料引发次年普利策小说奖的大地震。三人评委会支持给品钦授奖,但11位理事推翻了评委的 决定,裁定此书“无法卒读,浮夸,滥施笔墨,淫亵”。1974年的普利策小说奖因此空缺。而数月后,美国国家图书奖坚持表彰了《万有引力之虹》,没想到品 先生拒绝受奖,最终找他人代领了事。</p> <p> 1999年,电影《骇客帝国》中尼奥吞下红色药丸的情节,被公认为导演沃卓斯基兄弟在向《万有引力之虹》致意。</p> <p> 小说分四个部分,“零之下”、“戈林赌场的休假”、“在占领区”和“反作用力”。故事发生在1944年圣诞节到1945年9月期间,主要情节是 盟军追查德国人正在制造的威力惊人的导弹,美国中尉泰荣·斯洛索普的一张“性交地图”却出人意料地屡次与德国导弹的轰炸地点吻合。寻找,寻找,所有的人都 在不停地寻找。</p> <p><strong> 很有难度的阅读</strong></p> <p> 至少在七八年前,坊间已传言译林将推出此书中译本,但在2003年叶华年译品钦的另一部小说《V》出版之后,中国读者又苦等了五年,才有了今天这个文学历险或“阅读自虐”的机会。</p> <p> “自虐”的说法决不算夸张,但这世上知难而上的品钦迷、甚至野心勃勃的品钦本人,必以之为赞辞。厦门大学外文学院副教授刘雪岚曾援引英国批评家托尼·坦纳(Tony Tanner)的话说:“《万有引力之虹》的深奥与恢弘拒绝任何归纳和概括。”</p> <p> 刘女士这样形容此书:“它的内容从文艺学、社会学、历史学、心理学到数学、化学、物理学、弹道学、军事学,几乎无所不包;它的文体从哲学沉思、 历史百科、间谍侦探到滑稽喜剧、歌曲民谣乃至戏仿反讽,仿佛无所不能。小说包括73个场景,400多个人物,发生的故事遍及南北美洲、非洲、中亚、东欧和 西欧。涉及的社会阶层包括盟军和轴心国的将军和士兵、科学家、政治家、持工、妓女乃至非洲土人。使用的语言包括英、法、德、拉丁和意大利语等等。”(《美 国全国图书奖获奖小说评论集》,吴冰,郭棲庆主编,外语教学与研究出版社,2001年)</p> <p> 喜欢自虐的还有翻译家。本书主力译者、同样出身厦门大学的张文宇硕士哀叹,为译《万有引力之虹》,41岁的他花去整整三年,丢了博士学位,失去了评职称的机会,“个中艰辛只有自己知道。”他说。</p> <p> 但愿这一切都是值得的。</p> <p> 康慨</p></div> <div id="editor">【<span style="color:#cc0000;">编辑:</span>张中江】</div> <div id="feeling"><iframe id="moodiframe" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://app1.chinanews.com.cn/newsHeart/mood.html" frameborder="0" height="103" scrolling="no" width="100%"></iframe></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-52070292541978338562008-12-16T20:24:00.000-08:002008-12-16T20:26:49.698-08:00"I am embarrassed to admit that I have read a book"<blockquote>[…] it's not often that new work from the fascist genocidal dictator comes to light, which is why military historians and creepy Nazi memorabilia collectors who live in basement apartments are so excited by <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1093499/Hitlers-pub-dart-bomb-The-secret-Nazi-weapon-drawn-terrorise-Britain.html" target="_blank">the discovery of an aircraft concept</a> designed by Nazi engineers near the end of World War II, a design which smacks of exactly the pants-shitting desperation you'd expect Nazis to be feeling at that point in the war:<br /><br /><span class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img alt="dart glider.png" src="http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/dart%20glider.png" class="mt-image-none" style="" height="488" width="400" /></span><br /><br />Here's the desperately insane idea: Dart-shaped gliders equipped with pilots and 1,000 pound bombs would be carried by conventional planes into allied airspace and dropped. The glider pilot would steer the bomb toward its high-priority target -- a factory that printed posters warning G.I.'s about the dangers of venereal disease, for instance -- and at the last minute, release the bomb and activate a balloon which would explode out of the tail and lift the glider to safety, all of which bears a creepy resemblance to certain details in Thomas Pynchon's big, fat novel <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>. WHOOPS, sorry for the inexcusable lapse into Fancy Ladism, y'all, I am embarrassed to admit that I have read a book. But if the indignant comments occasionally left by Ayn Rand enthusiasts on certain Daily Briefs posts can be believed, I probably didn't understand it, and am also completely retarded, and anyway probably didn't even read it in the first place. […]<br /><br />from: <a href="http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2008/12/daily_briefs_europe_the_forgot.php">http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2008/12/daily_briefs_europe_the_forgot.php</a><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-39051504701493680742008-12-16T20:21:00.000-08:002008-12-16T20:22:57.550-08:00"I don’t expect to encounter things that will frustrate the reading process, the way I might in the work of Pynchon"<blockquote><br />[…] I suppose I approach a title that I know has been labelled as Y.A. thinking that it’s going to be a more relaxing reading experience—maybe relaxing isn’t the right word, but more pleasurable, perhaps—because I don’t expect to encounter things that will frustrate the reading process, the way I might in the work of Pynchon, say. This isn’t to say that Y.A. fiction can’t be highly cerebral or experimental, just that I presume the author wants to cultivate a relationship with the reader that is more welcoming and, yes, probably more emotional. […]<br /><br /><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2008/12/book-bench-read-1.html">http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2008/12/book-bench-read-1.html</a></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-53702247676124197642008-12-16T20:05:00.000-08:002008-12-16T20:09:15.667-08:00mineral evolution & "a Soul in ev'ry stone. . . ."<img src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Edougmillison/editmeimageurl.jpg" />Kevin Kelly offers an interesting take on "mineral evolution" & links to a recent paper, that may shed some light on a sermon in every stone:<br /><br />"The theory of "mineral evolution" -- the idea that the Earth's rocks are dynamic "species" which emerged over time, sometimes in concert with living things -- is a radical new idea…"<br /><br />continues:<br /><a href="http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/12/technology_a_ge.php">http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/12/technology_a_ge.php</a><br /><br /><blockquote><i></i></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-11861475320135926832008-12-16T16:22:00.000-08:002008-12-16T16:24:06.490-08:00back in the saddle againIt's official. I re-subscribed to Pynchon-l, I'm reading Pynchon (working through Against the Day and enjoying it), and looking forward to the new novel next year. Maybe I'll start updating this blog.<br /><br /><img src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Edougmillison/editmeimageurl.jpg" /><br /><br /><blockquote><i></i></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-39226445335864189932008-08-20T07:20:00.000-07:002008-08-20T07:57:13.455-07:00signed copy of ATD…from <a href="http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=j5vjg6gygvtjxs4pgtc9y8qbykr8dfty">Chronicle of Higher Education</a>:<br /><br />M.H. Abrams: A Life in Criticism<br />By JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS<br /><br />In literary studies, M.H. Abrams is an iconic name. It appeared as "general editor" for 40 years on nearly nine million copies of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and has also, in a detail that only scholars would know, led the indexes of many a critical book for a half-century. (In fact, one scholar I know cited "Aarlef" just to avoid that custom.) In addition, Abrams, now 95, stamped the study of Romantic literature: His book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1953) was ranked 25th in the Modern Library's list of the 100 most important nonfiction books of the 20th century, and he was a prime participant in debates over literary theory, especially deconstruction, during the 1970s and 80s.<br /><br />Last summer I interviewed Abrams — Meyer Howard, but he goes by Mike — at his home in Ithaca, N.Y., up the road from Cornell University, where he has been a professor since 1945 and still goes to his office in Goldwin Smith Hall. Colleagues at Cornell had held a birthday celebration for him, and among the gifts was an inscribed copy of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel. Pynchon had been a student of Abrams's in the 1950s and sent it on. Abrams has the book on the coffee table in his living room.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-55194492286895991892008-06-27T06:24:00.000-07:002008-06-27T06:26:29.018-07:00"ad the Metro’s owners carted off the decorations that had lodged within the imagination of young Pynchon"<p>…from today's New York <a href="http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/mopeds-horsemeat-and-pynchon-on-malta/index.html?ref=travel">Times</a>:<br /><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Then we combed Valletta, marching up and down the hills looking for evidence of the now-sleepy city’s illustrious past and marveling at the cute Victorian-style balconies. On Strait Street in the heart of the Gut, the entertainment district once frequented by visiting sailors, I was hoping to find the Metro Bar, where a key scene of Pynchon’s unsummarizable “V” takes place. We asked old-timers and were directed to a doorway filled with cinderblocks. The Metro Bar was no more. </p> <p>Like the New Life Music Hall, the Smiling Prince and the Blue Peter — whose faded signs hung over locked and cobwebbed doors — the Metro had shut down sometime after 1979, when the British naval base closed, and I was left to wonder what lay within. Did it still look, as Pynchon wrote, “like a nobleman’s pied-a-terre applied to mean purposes”? Did “statues of Knights, ladies and Turks” still line the “wide curving flight of marble steps” that led to the second-story dance floor? Or had the Metro’s owners carted off the decorations that had lodged within the imagination of young Pynchon (who presumably visited Valletta during his 1955-57 stint in the Navy)? </p> <p>Today, all that remains of the Gut’s glory days is a 90-year-old tattoo parlor and a few graybeards who remember the noise and chaos and fun. “But now it’s too quiet here, too quiet,” one of them told us. “If you come at Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, you can bring shotgun and you can shoot and nobody, nobody take notice.”</p> His nostalgia was palpable, and another Pynchon line seemed apt: “Monuments, buildings, plaques were remembrances only; but in Valletta remembrances seemed almost to live.”<br /><em><br /></em><br /><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-68430077772644174902007-01-18T10:49:00.000-08:002007-01-18T10:50:25.021-08:00call to action!<blockquote><br />Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:20:26 -0500 (EST)<br />From: "John M. Krafft" <krafftjm@muohio.edu><br />Subject: Help wanted<br /><br /><br />I've been stumped--brain dysfunction or something--by a request<br />for help that runs as follows:<br /><br />"on the first page of Eleanor Cook's _Enigmas and Riddles in<br />Literature_, she writes: 'Literary studies of the riddle are<br />few and far between. There are studies of the remarkable Old<br />English riddles. There are studies of riddles in specific<br />authors: Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce,<br />Pynchon...' Apparently there is at least one study of<br />Pynchon's use of the riddle out there. Do you know of it?"<br /><br />Of course I should, but nothing comes immediately to mind, and<br />a first, superficial search of my bibliography didn't turn up<br />anything obvious. Can anyone help?<br /><br />Thanks.<br /><br />jmk<br /><br /><br />- --<br />John M. Krafft<br />Miami UniversityHamilton / 1601 University Blvd. / Hamilton,<br />OH 45011-3399<br />Tel: 513.785.3031 or 513.868.2330<br />Fax: 513.785.3145<br />krafftjm@muohio.edu<br />http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm<br /><br /><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1168914954360354292007-01-15T18:31:00.000-08:002007-01-15T18:35:55.353-08:00Zak Smith's book arrivesAnd a fine-looking tome it is, even with the rather substantial title, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gravitys/dp/0977312798/sr=8-1/qid=1168914716/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1006511-2509652?ie=UTF8&s=books">Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow</a> with an engaging and well-worth reading Introduction by Steve Erickson. <br /><span class="down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);"></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1167255358456391442006-12-27T13:29:00.000-08:002006-12-27T13:37:22.790-08:003 novels of interest to Pynchon readerspynchonoid received a fine after-Xmas package, three novels from <a href="http://www.softskull.com/index.php">Soft Skull Press</a>:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-32-8">The Age of Sinatra</a> by David Ohle<br /><a href="http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-933368-23-3">Electric Flesh</a> by Claro (French translator of Pynchon)<br /><a href="http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-933368-19-5">H2O </a>by Mark Swartz<br /><br />We'll write more about them after reading them. Based on previous experience with Soft Skull Press novels, we're looking forward to it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1165413310530807852006-12-06T05:52:00.000-08:002006-12-06T06:01:35.073-08:00"the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited"Note: the "From Thomas Pynchon" at the top of the typewritten letter appears to be hand-written in block capitals and is partially underlined; Atonement is underlined as well in the original:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>From Thomas Pynchon<br /><br />Given the British genius for coded utterance, this could all be about something else entirely, impossible on this side of the ocean to appreciate in any nuanced way-- but assuming that it really is about who owns the right to describe using gentian violet for ringworm, for heaven's sake, allow me a gentle suggestion. Oddly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy. It is that Ruskin business about "a capacity responsive to the claims of fact, but unoppressed by them." Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the Internet until, with luck, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious acvt-- it is simply what we do. The worst you can call it is a form of primate behavior. Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words. I cannot of course speak for Mr. McEwan's method of proceeding, but should be very surprised indeed if something of the sort, even for brief moments, had not occurred during his research for Atonement- Gentian violet! Come on. Who among us could have resisted that one?<br /><br />Memoirs of the Blitz have borne indispensable witness, and helped later generations know something of the tragedcy and heroism of those days. For Mr. McEwan to have put details from one of them to further creative use, acknowledging this openly and often, and then explaining it clearly and honorably, surely merits not our scolding, but our gratitude.<br /></blockquote><br />from Pynchon-L:<br /><br /><blockquote>Makes the front page of the Telegraph this morning, along with his own<br />section, with sailor suit pic, of the McEwan full page.<br /><br />Front page text:<br /><br />RECLUSE SPEAKS OUT TO DEFEND MCEWAN<br /><br />By Nigel Reynolds<br />Arts Correspondent<br /><br />Thomas Pynchon, who vies with J D Salinger for the title of the<br />world's most secretive author, has broken his strict rules on privacy<br />to join a campaign to clear the British Booker Prize-winning novelist<br />Ian McEwan of charges of plagiarism.<br /><br />In a move described by his British publisher as "unknown", Pynchon, an<br />American who is never seen in public, does not give interviews and<br />whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret, sent a typed letter to<br />his British agent yesterday to say that McEwan "merits not our<br />scolding but our gratitude" for using details from another author's<br />book.<br /><br />McEwan has been under fire for copying several details from the<br />memoirs of a wartime nurse in <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204);" id="lw_1165413391_0">London</span> for his Booker-nominated novel,<br />Atonement.<br /><br />In an extraordinary campaign launched yesterday, many of the world's<br />best known authors rallied around McEwan, complaining that the future<br />of historical novel writing was threatened if they could not copy or<br />borrow details from eyewitnesses to history.<br /><br />Other novelists backing the author include John Updike, Martin Amis,<br />Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally and Zadie Smith.<br /><br />They recite their experiences of taking others' material for their<br />books exclusively in the Daily Telegraph.</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1164998887865732022006-12-01T10:47:00.000-08:002006-12-01T10:54:22.890-08:00climbing the mountain<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Learning that the strange and mysterious, potentially mystical, foreign writing on the cover "seal" of Against the Day translates as "Tibetan Government Chamber of Commerce" (as reported on Pynchon-l) reminds me of one of those cartoons where the guy exhausts himself climbing up the mountain to get to the guru who then gives him some useless advice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I recall the street comedian, used to perform at Venice Beach down south and on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, called himself the X-Swami X, "the answer to the perennial question, Why Swami why? No, X-Swami X!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Savage with hecklers, sometimes he'd have a rocking chair and sit with a big handmade book of jokes and read them, sometimes he was buzzing on something, up and moving around, entertaining the students and others sitting on the steps of the Student Union building, , he was also very adept with hecklers, especially one particular blister-faced psycho who used to stand out there where Telegraph meets Bancroft Way and preach</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> the Gospel, X-Swami X could get that guy wound up pretty tight with his rap about wanting to get "eating pussy on skateboards" adopted as an Olympic sport.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">He was already up in his 60s then - at least 20 years since I saw him - so perhaps he's knocking them dead in another dimension by now, out there in the multiverse...</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1164132474520779942006-11-22T22:06:00.000-08:002006-11-22T07:24:33.803-08:00Random House Against the Day web site & contest...Attention Pynchon readers:<br /><blockquote>Random House <span style="font-style: italic;">Against the Day</span> minisite offers a competition to win<br />a rare advance reading copy proof of <span style="font-style: italic;">Against the Day</span>, one of only 77 produced. Be there or be square!<br /><br /><a href="www.randomhouse.co.uk/thomaspynchon">www.randomhouse.co.uk/thomaspynchon</a><br /><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1164132597513498282006-11-21T10:09:00.000-08:002006-11-21T10:12:37.473-08:00Moe's on Telegraph Ave. ATD geekfest<pre><tt><tt>All you really need to know is that pynchonoid, that's right,<br />won the Pynchon triva contest, just barely edging out<br />fellow traveler Tim Ware, and the two of us left with<br />the trivia contest prizes, a copy of Against the Day<br />each. Then we fucked their girlfriends and stole<br />their lunch money and blew that pop stand, into the<br /><span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;" id="lw_1164132089_0">Berkeley</span> night.<br /></tt></tt><span class="down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);"></span><br /><tt><tt><br />Favorite attendee: the woman with the conceptual V.<br />costume<br /><br />Silliest sight: 4, count 'em, 4 Pynchon lookalikes<br />with paper bags on their heads a la TRP's The Simpsons<br />appearance.<br /><br />Biggest surprise: very few people, outside of<br />Pynchon-l, know that TRP niece, Tristan Taormino is<br />known for her movie about anal sex.<br /><br />Most frequent web site mention: The Modern Word<br /><br />2d most frequent web site mention:<br /><a href="http://pynchonoid.org/" target="_blank">http://pynchonoid.org</a><br /><br />link:<br /><a href="http://www.telegraphbooks.com/monday.htm">http://www.telegraphbooks.com/monday.htm</a><br /></tt></tt></pre>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1163514735807243852006-11-14T06:29:00.000-08:002006-11-21T10:08:25.630-08:00Against the Day extract in Spanish...from a friend overseas, notice of "an extract of <span style="font-style: italic;">Against the Day</span> as translated in Spanish. This was posted on the website of Christophe Claro, French translator of Pynch, Gaddis, Vollmann, etc.<br /><br /><a href="http://backfromoz.blogspot.com/2006/11/pynchon-fragmento.html">http://backfromoz.blogspot.com/2006/11/pynchon-fragmento.html</a><br /><br />The extract comes from here:<br /><br /><a href="http://mierdadescalzo.blogspot.com/2006/10/lo-prometido.html">http://mierdadescalzo.blogspot.com/2006/10/lo-prometido.html</a>"<br /><br />The French translation of <span style="font-style: italic;">Against the Day</span> is expected in 2007.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1163021431056122212006-11-08T13:29:00.000-08:002006-11-08T13:33:28.393-08:00AP re Pynchon fans<blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Fans Still Passionate About Publicity-Shy Thomas Pynchon<br /><br />Nov. 8 - Zak Smith is a painter, a rebel and an Ivy<br />Leaguer, a Yale University graduate with a green<br />mohawk, an apartment of wall-to-wall illustrations and<br />a passion for comics, classic novels -- and Thomas<br />Pynchon.<br /><br />About 10 years ago, Smith had a feeling that he should<br />try Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," an instinct<br />consummated from the very first page. Smith didn't<br />just read the book, he reread it, marked it up and<br />went back to it so many times that his paperback copy<br />is held together by duct tape.<br /><br />He also began seeing the book in pictures, eventually<br />drawing hundreds of mostly expressionist sketches --<br />one for every page of Pynchon's 700-page World War II<br />novel -- that were exhibited at the Whitney Museum in<br />2004, now hang in the permanent collection at the<br />Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will come out as<br />a book this fall.<br /><br />"A lot of the ideas that were in Pynchon were hovering<br />around in my head -- technology and the future and the<br />present, true things and science fiction, and making<br />them into pictures was almost a way to exorcise these<br />ideas," says the 30-year-old Smith, a resident of<br />Brooklyn.<br /><br />Thomas Pynchon doesn't have the readership of Mitch<br />Albom or Danielle Steel, but he is the rare writer who<br />inspires such obsession by words alone. For more than<br />40 years, he has built and sustained a legend through<br />such encyclopedic novels as "V." and "Gravity's<br />Rainbow," avoiding all media contact or even publicity<br />photos. For his new book, the 1,000-page "Against the<br />Day," publisher Penguin Press didn't even issue a<br />formal announcement, but assumed, correctly, that<br />simply including it in the fall catalog would take<br />care of the job.<br /><br />"Pynchon fans tend to take his work seriously I think<br />because, beyond the intrinsically interesting subject<br />matter and intriguing stories, his books are so rich<br />and complex, touching on so many topics," says Pynchon<br />fan Doug Millison, a writer, editor and Web design<br />consultant based in El Cerrito, Calif.<br /><br />Pynchon is now 69, but time, and the Internet, have<br />advanced in his favor. It's been nine years since his<br />previous novel, "Mason & Dixon," came out, and fans<br />have fully digitized their passion, building an online<br />community worthy of an author who as much as anyone<br />brought a high-tech sensibility to literary fiction.<br /><br />Numerous Web sites and a "Pynchon News Service" have<br />been launched, and a team of experts is busy<br />assembling a Wikipedia-like page for "Against the<br />Day."<br /><br />"It will, I predict, quickly become a focus of the<br />several hundred reader-researchers worldwide who read<br />Pynchon and write about his works in academic and<br />popular media," Millison says.<br /><br />"The Internet has made it easy for Pynchon's academic<br />critics and lay readers to find each other and sustain<br />an online discussion that's continued now for over a<br />decade."<br /><br />Smith believes that Pynchon readers share a handful of<br />characteristics, presumably not unlike the author's --<br />liberal politics, an interest in technology and a<br />broad and unpredictable range of interests.<br /><br />Fans, who have gathered to talk Pynchon in London,<br />Malta and elsewhere, all have their stories of<br />conversion. Tim Ware, who runs the Web site<br />www.thomaspynchon.com from Oakland, Calif., recalls<br />having a hard time getting through "Gravity's<br />Rainbow," at least the first time around.<br /><br />"I went back and looked again at the first page and<br />everything just sort of snapped into view, and I<br />thought, `This guy is a genius,' like those who walked<br />the Earth in the 19th century," says Ware.<br /><br />"And I got rather messianic about it, and I wanted my<br />wife to read it. I started creating an index of all<br />the characters, because there were so many and it was<br />so hard to keep track of them."<br /><br />Millison also was turned on by "Gravity's Rainbow." He<br />was an Army private -- a company clerk "just like<br />Radar O'Reilly" -- in Korea in the summer of 1973,<br />when he read the novel, which came out that year and<br />won the National Book Award.<br /><br />"`Gravity's Rainbow' hit me hard, especially the parts<br />set in Europe during and just after World War II. I'd<br />never read a writer whose voice on the page came so<br />close to echoing the sound and feel of the Cold War<br />'50s and '60s, hip and angry and complex," he says.<br /><br />"I've read each of the novels at least twice, studying<br />the text closely both times. I also collect first<br />editions of Pynchon's novels, and first editions of<br />the novels for which Pynchon has written endorsements,<br />cover blurbs or support quotes that have been used in<br />advertisements."<br /><br />Charles Hollander, a Baltimore-based "independent<br />scholar" of Pynchon, first read him as an<br />undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. It was<br />1963, the year Pynchon debuted with "V." Joseph<br />Heller's "Catch-22" was becoming a counterculture<br />classic, but Hollander believes that "Catch-22" was<br />more about the veterans of World War II.<br /><br />"Pynchon was the guy who wrote for my generation, so<br />much so I heard people joke at parties that he had a<br />receiver by which he could read others' late-night<br />falling asleep thoughts," he says.<br /><br />"The reason ... (Pynchon) is important to me and his<br />`fans' is he seems a bit ahead of the curve in seeing<br />what is important, and what will become the important<br />issues we are faced with."<br /><br />He is as remote from the general public as J.D.<br />Salinger, but Pynchon experts say they care more about<br />his work than about the man himself, who reportedly<br />lives in New York with his wife and agent, Melanie<br />Jackson. Both Hollander and Ware say they know people<br />friendly with Pynchon who insist he is not "some guy<br />squirreling away in his attic," according to<br />Hollander.<br /><br />"My sources tell me he is pretty social, in his style.<br />I think he avoids the media because he sees the media<br />as an arm of the establishment, a means of social<br />control that he won't be a party to," Hollander says.<br /><br />"I've stayed away from the cult of personality. I<br />don't play in that zone," Ware says.<br /><br />"His reluctance to speak with the press or have his<br />photograph taken kind of plays into the style of the<br />novels. There's a lot of mystery and ambiguity in<br />them, and a lot of mystery and ambiguity about the<br />author. When you know things about the author, you<br />begin to insert those feelings into the books. Not<br />having any information makes the reading experience a<br />little purer."<br /><br />Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.<br />This material may not be published, broadcast,<br />rewritten, or redistributed.<br /><br /><a href="http://us.f347.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?YY=28173&y5beta=yes&y5beta=yes" target="_blank">http://us.f347.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?YY=28173&y5beta=yes&y5beta=yes</a><br /></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1162663689468086812006-11-04T10:07:00.000-08:002006-11-04T10:09:02.366-08:00that Book DescriptionFrom: "Mike Beiderbhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifecke" <beider19@comcast.net><br />To: "trp" <pynchon-l@waste.org><br />Subject: A-and<br />Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 09:09:08 -0600<br /><br />the blurb on Amazon might have been a tad, just a tad, disengenuous.<br /><br />Further regards,<br /><br />Mike<br /><br /><br />***************************** <br /> Just Browsing?<br /><a href="http://home.comcast.net/~beider19">http://home.comcast.net/~beider19</a><br />*****************************Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1162654032548268462006-11-04T07:24:00.000-08:002006-11-04T07:29:40.756-08:00another good report re Against the Day<blockquote>From: "Mike Beiderbecke" <beider19@comcast.net> <br />To: "trp" <pynchon-l@waste.org><br />Subject: Re: Non-spoilerish first impression of AtD on Modern Word site<br />Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 09:01:20 -0600<br /><br />Well,<br /><br />I have read slightly more than twenty-five pages.<br /><br />All the hallmarks of what we (or at least I) have come to love <br />about TRP are there. Weird names, strange songs, frustrating allusions (fact or<br />fiction?), long paragraphs, ellipsis, long shaggy-doggish things that lead to horrible puns, et cetera.<br /><br />Closer in style to GR than his other novels, but at the same time incorporating elements that have appeared in his writing both pre- and post-GR.<br /> <br />Perhaps best summed up, IMHO, as a progressive knotting into.....<br /><br />Regards,<br /><br />Mike</blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1162567107830832162006-11-03T07:16:00.000-08:002006-11-03T07:18:28.406-08:00"the Pynchon we love to read"Apparently you don't have to read much of Against the Day - this guy writes after having read 25 pages - to realize it's good:<br /><br />...sez The Modern Word: <br /><blockquote><br /><i>Publisher’s Weekly</i> <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6384205.html">wrote</a> that the novel “glows,” and I know what they mean: like the cover, the book is just white. Pure writing, pure Pynchon. As Pynchonoid <a href="http://pynchonoid.blogspot.com/2006/10/pynchon-we-love-to-read.html">wrote</a>, this is “the Pynchon we love to read.” And it is.</blockquote><br /><br />Hope they know I was echoing a Salman Rushdie statement re Mason & Dixon.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1162057947730096852006-10-28T10:51:00.000-07:002006-10-28T10:52:28.370-07:00Thanks for Dave Monroe for posting this to Pynchon-l:<br /><pre><tt><tt></tt></tt></pre><blockquote><pre><tt><tt>Surveillance, by Jonathan Raban<br />Clueless in Seattle as the age of paranoia dawns<br />By Pat Kane<br />Published: 27 October 2006<br /><br />In an era where we can access any current affair from<br />a thousand different viewpoints - the blog comment,<br />backed up by the YouTube clip, discovered in the<br />e-mail newsletter that makes it to SkyNews - one feels<br />like cheering wildly for an old-fashioned "social<br />novel" like Surveillance. To sit with an artful,<br />humane narrator like Jonathan Raban, and share his<br />concerned gaze at an America gone nearly mad with<br />paranoia, is time well spent. This is the second in<br />his trilogy of Seattle novels, the first being the<br />dot-boom threnody Waxwings. By now it's clear how<br />Raban wants to filter the maelstrom of this United<br />States of Insecurity.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />... Remember all those paranoid postmodern conspiracy<br />fictions: Pynchon, Ballard, DeLillo? Now, all it takes<br />is a classical realist in Seattle to walk the streets,<br />watch the news, listen to the conversations, and you<br />get the same effect. Surveillance is as useful and<br />eloquent a meditation on the extremism of the present<br />as you would wish to curl up with on a long weekend.<br /><br /><a href="http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article1930755.ece" target="_blank">http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article1930755.ece</a></tt></tt></pre></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684659.post-1161965714854496802006-10-27T09:15:00.000-07:002006-10-27T09:23:02.806-07:00the dragon and the eagleThat's the title of a book just received, of interest perhaps to Mason & Dixon readers, although China is likely to have some place in Against the Day. The author, A.Owen Aldridge, argues that, contrary to previous assumptions that "the image of China did not penetrate North America until after the inauguration of the trade between Canton and the East Coast shortly after the War for Independence came to an end....a lively curiosity about non-Western culture existed in America before the middle of the eighteenth century and that a good deal of accurate information about it was available during the American Revolution aklong with an almost equal amount of myth and legend....The following pages will reveal some extraordinary instances of this relationship: Franklin at the age of thirty-two publishing in his Philadelphia newspaper an analysis of the thought of Confucious, brother-in-law Thomas Paine comparing Confucious and Christ as great moral teachers...."<br /><br />The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the American Enlightenment<br />by A. Owen Aldridge. Wayne State University Press. Detroit, Michigan. 1993.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07862983697040911126noreply@blogger.com