Blogging Pynchon

Manifest

2007-01-29T10:27:00.000-06:00

Like all recovering academics, I know how to write a thesis statement. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten why, or maybe when. So one month in, what is it I think I’m doing here? This is my New Year’s project: blogging my way through Against the Day, at a rate of about 3 pages a day, a blog every other day, or so. And today isn’t any other day, you know: a slightly possessed Chicago reminder, and warning! Steal this at your peril (and that would be the peril of appearing exceedingly dull indeed, the living correlate of the null hypothesis.)

Traversing the web to post irregular illuminations to Pynchon’s text.

webs that when the early daylight was right could cause you to stand there just stupefied. (p.76)

I like the image of the literary crow-- raucous, social, sharp-eyed creature of a certain subversive intelligence and particular tastes, drawn to shiny things.

Our first example of a hermetic project is taken from "fault tree" analysis of nuclear reactors to determine their safety.

I am especially keen on scientists caught in unguarded Pynchonian moments of camaraderie and geeky enthusiasm, the kind of passionate individualists Gary Larson drew and Errol Morris delights in drawing out. The web in all its crosscurrents and blind corners is natural habitat for these rarae aves.

In summary, we consider the following aspects of hermetic projects: (1) the null hypothesis h0; (2) the application of the null hypothesis to problems (the "problem-solving" meaning of paradigm); (3) the application of more general considerations (the "sociological" or paradigmatic hypothesis H0) to the revision of the null hypothesis; (4) the rejection of apparent anomalies as experimental error or as "resolvable in due course"; (5) psychological investment of the participants in the project; and (6) sociological support by the community of participants for the project.

Hey look, it’s the sociology of science. I was laughing about this just the other day. Other constructs that I stumble across again and again in these wanderings: giant squid; sausage making, literal and figurative; Victorian dinosaur pioneers Waterhouse Hawkins and Richard Owen, prototypical Pynchon protagonists par excellence.

Two mysteries:

Following his success with the Crystal Palace Exhibition, Hawkins came to New York City… he set up a studio (shown at left) on what is now the site of the American Museum of Natural History on the upper West Side of Manhattan, and began to assemble a new menagerie of sculptured dinosaurs. The plan was to set them up in a "Paleozoic Museum" in Central Park, which was then being landscaped under the direction of Frederick Law Olmstead…

However, in 1871, before either the park or the dinosaurs were finished, New York City politics intervened. The corrupt Tammany Hall-Boss Tweed machine took control of city politics, and Hawkins and his dinosaurs were out. Those models that had been made were broken up and buried in the south end of the park, and Hawkins left New York a greatly embittered man. Although Central Park has been modified in the years since its inception, including the construction of the 8th Ave subway line which runs up the west side of the park, the remains of Hawkins' dinosaurs have never been found. They still rest somewhere under the sod of Central Park, probably not far from Umpire Rock and the Heckscher ballfields (see picture and Central Park map at left). Could one of the pitchers' mounds really be a small embankment covering the severed head of Megalosaurus? Who knows, maybe so.

Could that explain the Yankees?

and

Why, in the nine billion name of the deity, does the Microsoft spellchecker not recognize the forms of the verb, to blog? I blog, you blog, he blogs…

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to

Cowboy's Christmas

2007-01-27T09:28:00.000-06:00

Meanwhile, in Colorado mining country, with Pynchon's Against the Day.

Yes, Virginia there is an Amalgamator. It’s the newsletter of the Milwaukee section of the American Chemical Society. Don’t miss their upcoming talk, “Love, Pain and Chocolate: Musings of a Structural Scientist on the true Meaning of Valentine’s Day.” Sounds like an Almodóvar film, no?

The Chemical Cartoons alone are worth the price of admission. Remember, ardent chemists, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

Oh Thurn and Taxis

2007-01-26T10:23:00.000-06:00

Eclectic annotations on Pynchon's Against the Day.

A Pynchonian grace note passes between Webb Traverse and blasting buddy Veikko, the mad Finn. Webb notices Veikko “reading over and over to himself a withered postcard from Finland” (p.84)

“Look, these aren’t real stamps here,” Veikko said.” “They are pictures of stamps. The Russians no longer allow Finnish stamps, we have to use Russian ones. These postmarks? They’re not real either. Pictures of postmarks. …

“So this is a postcard with a picture of what a postcard used to look like before the Russians. That’s what minneskort means?”

“Memory card. A memory of a memory.”

See the Thurn und Taxis page from San Narcisco Community College, inspired by The Crying of Lot 49.

Pynchon 2, SteelR 0

2007-01-24T10:40:00.000-06:00

Placing bets on Pynchon's Against the Day

No grand vista (so much for my prediction), but we do get to Colorado, in “wind meaner than any he could remember since Chicago, full of ice crystals and hostile intent,” (p.75) and meet Webb Traverse.

In a moment of felicitous synchronicity Webb tells Merle of a job for a man who knows his way around quicksilver (p.78),

“Little Hellkite they’re lookin for an amalgamator, seein ‘s how with the altitude and breathin in those fumes, the current one’s got it into his head he’s the President.”

“Oh. Of. . . ?”

“Put it this way, he has this nipper with a harmonica foll’n him around everywhere playin Hail to the Chief. Out of tune. Goes off into long speeches nobody can understand, declared war on the state of Colorado last week.”

And to elaborate the theme, this isn’t Pynchon, but it should be: Randy Newman’s anthem for our times.

Goodness, gracious

2007-01-23T14:54:00.000-06:00

Great balls of lightning! --Pynchon’s Against the Day, p. 73

Fine photo from a conspiracy site. (I’m not sure what the conspiracy is, sounds like chemistry to me.)

And an explanation from a New Zealand scientist.

Rolling westward

2007-01-20T12:05:00.000-06:00

With Pynchon in Against the Day

After the closing of the Columbian Fair, once out of Chicago and into the land again, Dally and Merle…

As his characters range far and wide across what many of us snidely refer to as flyover country, and some of us call home, let’s listen to the range of voices in a single paragraph (p.70):

Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to.

The establishing shot, detailed and dramatic as Muir or McPhee, animated by metaphor poetic and precise, wheels within wheels, gears engaging to drive the motion forward, photographer Merle Rideout’s sense of light and shadow washing the scene in grayscale, brings us to a specific technicolor POV (Rideout’s young daughter Dally):

Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wild-crafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew magic uses for.

Anchored by that amazing 123-word sentence, worthy of Proust. I love the introduction/disclaimer “too much to see”, echoed at the end by the “counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet”, which sets up the purely Pynchonian conclusion:

They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

Proust is specifically invoked by the dialog which follows, dialog Proust could never have written (but not because he was at all unfamiliar with the complex and crosswise longings underlying it):

“There. Smell that?”
A sense at the edge of her memory, ghostly as if a presence from a former life had just passed through. . . [her lost mother] Erlys. “Lily of the valley. Sort of.”
“It’s ‘seng. Fetches top dollar, so we’re gonna eat for a while. Look. Little red berries there?”
“Why are we whispering?” Peering up from under her flowered bonnet-brim.
“Chinese believe the root is a small person, who can hear you coming and so forth.”
“We’re Chinese?”
He shrugged as if he wasn’t sure. “Don’t mean it ain’t the truth.”
“And cash crop here or whatever, we still aren’t going to use the money to try and find Mama, are we?”
Should’ve seen that coming. “No.”
“When then?”
“You’ll get your turn, Trooper. Sooner than you think.”
“Promise?”
“Ain’t mine to promise. Just how it works.”
“Well don’t sound so happy about it.”

Reading these two passages together is like finding a Dürer next to a Warhol, in the same hand. Astonishing. I don’t even know how you get those rhythms, but he does. Page by page, day by day. I doubt that Tom was idle, these ten years.

While I can’t place bets with the big dogs who are rounding page 700, I imagine this is tending toward that most American of vistas, heading west: the first glimpse of the Rockies rising improbably, yet undeniably from the endless prairie plain.

Itinerant technicals

2007-01-17T10:29:00.000-06:00

Merle rides out:
(Pynchon's Against the Day, p.66)

Just like that, as if some period of youthful folly had expired, it seemed time to move on—

Huckleberry Finn, last sentence:

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

Lights Out for the Territory, first line:

The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city,

"Iain Sinclair walks the streets of London compulsively, and reads the hidden language of the city like no other writer. Lights Out for the Territory transforms our sense of Britain, as Sinclair's strange connections between places and people remake the crazed pattern of urban life, from pitbulls to spooks, from gangsters to Lord Archer. This book is what literature should be about: intensity of language, humane wisdom and controlled anger." Granta

Executive Summary
Lighting Out for the Terascale:

Particle physicists are about to light out for a vast new scientific terra incognita. When they do, later in this decade, they will encounter a territory of discovery that many of them have theorized and dreamed about all their lives. This unexplored country is the Terascale, named for the Teravolts of particle accelerator energy that will open it up for scientific discovery. The next generation of particle accelerators are physicists' tickets to the Terascale and the mysteries that it harbors about the nature of the physical laws that govern the universe. Once they've seen the Terascale, physicists believe, the universe will never look the same.

Including a fantastic link for postcards from the edge of the universe, the frontiers of technology, the bounds of the beyond.

Putting the Mass in Mass Culture

2007-01-16T14:45:00.000-06:00

The first (and for many folk, apparently, the last) thing you hear about Pynchon’s Against the Day is that it’s a formidable doorstop.

As Jay Parini says of another generously-proportioned volume,

This book would have been ideal for travel, had it been fitted with little wheels and a retractable handle. It's more than eleven hundred pages in length, and weighs as much as a block of cinder.

When did gross displacement become an aesthetic? Is this literary criticism or the battle of Midway? (a name with polyphonic resonance in Chicago)

What’s Against the Day about? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? The canonical punch lines are the most fitting: 1085 pages; Practice.

What is Finnegans Wake about? What is Kind of Blue about? Where are the Snowdons of yesteryear?

Rumors say Pynchon's text is scattered and difficult, a game not worth the candle.

What I know so far (70 pages in):

This is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers, in full control of his material. Look at the elegiac ending of the “Chicago Fair” section,

Later, after closing day, as autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, (p.55)

the precise and luminous language, the carefully modulated touching of all the right notes (Colorado Mining Camp, debris, drifters, descent, hell-raisers, fires, excursions, miles aloft, invisibly, season of miracle, substance of wonder, run of the fair) and the way this thematic statement flows into the next section, where “Merle Rideout dreamed he was in a great museum.” The Midway having closed (the rides all out) the only surviving remnant of the Fair is The Museum of Science and Industry, a vast and various collection like the catalog Merle enumerates.

The lovely notion of Merle’s wallet as “a sort of museum, on a smaller scale-- a museum of his life, overstuffed with old ticket stubs, receipts, notes to himself…” Boxes within boxes, like something by Cornell (Pynchon’s alma mater). For a gem of an illustrated essay, rich in Pynchonian themes and literary allusions, see Joseph Cornell’s Virtual Reality.

At this juncture (p.57) the bookish “boys own adventure” narration drops out and we continue in the voice Merle Rideout, reg'lar guy (as we say in Chicago):

He had already heard in some dim way about the AEther, though being on the more practical side of things, he couldn’t see much use for it. Exists, doesn’t exist, what’s that got to do with the price of turnips basically.

Also, he hates Columbus, Ohio. So what’s not to like?

Closing Time

2007-01-10T15:06:00.000-06:00

The Fair has run its course. You can almost hear the dying strains of “After the Ball”,

Many a heart was aching, if you could read them all,
Many a hope that has vanished, after the ball.

or the resonant ending of Joyce’s “Araby”, the epiphany that launched a thousand New Yorker stories.

Gumshoe Lew gets transferred to Colorado and the Chums get orders to ship out.

Frederick Jackson Turner delivers his frontier thesis. “The single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history” goes unremarked.

Later, after closing day, as autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, (p.55)

The Windhover is sighted. This magnificent poem that Hopkins called “the best thing I ever wrote,” will sit in a drawer for twenty years.

The hungry and homeless, the invisible army of want “who had always been there” move in, and will burn the White City down, trying to keep warm.

The Dark of the Matinée

2007-01-09T15:11:00.000-06:00

Eclectic annotations on Pynchon’s Against the Day.

After the sublimely thematic introduction of Lew Basnight and his excursions into “the everyday uncanny”, in the lovely phrase from Michael Wood’s perceptive Pynchon piece, we are back to the fairly ridiculous (in the fullest sense of that word).

Franz Ferdinand shows up, the “as yet unassassinated Austrian archduke” [Spoiler!], not the Glaswegian rock band.

Police suffer from Kuchenteigs-Verderbtheit, the state of being pastry-deprived.

And the Cubs are, in fact, in the narrative, in their 1893 form. As “the Chicago White Stockings” they get to be part of a yo’ mamma joke. As the actress said to the bishop, as Barrett said to Pierzynski…

Altered Chicago

2007-01-08T22:49:00.000-06:00

The next chapter (pp. 36-44) of Pynchon's Against the Day is all illuminations and illusions, scrutiny and invisibility.

Lew Basnight reports to the Inconvenience for Fair surveillance, and we get his backstory, as through a glass darkly. Lew has been charged with some nameless, unforgivable, unremembered wrong. Unoriginal sinner, victim of bad luck or “Spontaneous Hallucination,” scorned and abandoned he wanders “the urban unmappable” in “a kind of waking swoon”. “Was it still Chicago?” he wonders. The winter, “a sub-zero-degrees version of Hell” says yes.

Winter gives way to spring, and Lew keeps slipping into altered states. Aboard a tramcar, the passing street scene rendered in slo-mo detail worthy of Scorcese,

He entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace.… Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams,… He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed all that he could bear. (p.42)

He had learned to step to the side of the day. (p.44)

As in a Python sketch, Nate Privett shows up to teach Lew the benefits of Not Being Seen. A person with “a keen sympathy for the invisible” is a natural for the agency.

“Working for the Eye,” Lew hones his craft, practicing,

Not exactly invisibility. Excursion. (p.44)

Galloping Gasbags

2007-01-06T17:18:00.000-06:00

We finally get to Tesla, having been properly warned by the only AtD post on the Pynchon forum (what’s that all about?). But first we run into some more characters (thankfully), and nefarious ones at that (thankfully), including the Mahdi Army (p.29) and various war profiteer/ robber baron types, who go about in private trains like The Juggernaut (p.31) and private elevators.

Arrayed against them are Prof. Vanderjuice and colleagues. We have Gibbs, of Free Energy fame, that thermodynamic troublemaker (see this page for a hilarious dialog pitting the forces of ignorance against an instructor who says things like, “No way, no mystery. Let’s give it the full court press – you’ll be amazed at how neat everything comes out (because now that 'fight' between enthalpy and entropy will make sense!”) and Lee De Forest, about whom the IEEE Virtual Museum notes:

Before going to Yale in 1893, De Forest traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair. When he ran out of money soon after arriving, he worked as a strikebreaker for the grounds crew, pushing the wheelchairs of disabled or exhausted tourists. He had little sympathy for either the workers on strike or his customers, whom he overcharged in order to make enough money to prolong his stay. De Forest eventually arrived at Yale and remained there until he received a doctorate in physics for his work on radio waves.

Clearly noble men of science, all.

The conflict shaping up would seem to be free energy vs. the free market. Place your bets (and remember, this is taking place essentially on the University of Chicago campus home of unbridled admiration for unrestrained Capitalism, the first sustained chain reaction, David Brooks, and other disasters).

My favorite exchange, between Scarsdale Vibe (the Mr. Burns/ Dick Cheney type) and Ray Ipsow (the Slothrop/ reader surrogate type) at the Palmer House (of course):

“You are a socialist, sir.”

“As anyone not insulated by wealth from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.” (p.32)

Oh, yeah, and at stake is (cue Michael Stipe)

the end of the world, not just ‘as we know it’ but as anyone knows it. (p.34)

Who you gonna call?

Suggestions for further reading

2007-01-05T18:59:00.000-06:00

Stumbling around the Internet like a clueless Pynchon protagonist, I have come across some great blogs from others making headway through Against the Day, in notes rich with interesting observations, helpful pointers, and just some wild stuff.

Madison Guy in his Jan 4 post to Letter From Here looks over some reviews of the book, and recommends a perceptive and encouraging one by Luc Sante in NYRB. This writer is a welcome discovery for me, and I was glad to follow the other Sante link in the post to learn more.

One of my long-time favorite authors and commentators, Ron Rosenbaum, has some Pynchon views and anecdotes in his Nov 19 post about the NYC “Against the Day” release party (including an answer to the question, why no Rosenbaum review?) I’m sorry I missed the party, but glad I found these notes!

the bedside crow , a London bookseller (all these people make me feel quite pedestrian), is proceeding at a page a day. Like me, he enjoys the “town of Thick Bush” (some things are just universal, alas!) and has rocketing good commentary.

The amazing blog Gravity 7 by Adrian Chan is as deeply-textured and allusive as Pynchon himself, and partakes of the same cracked humor. If I may give a taste of a passage that stopped me dead,

…connected by lines drawn by families, as threads of a narrative, arcs of a plot, or roped together like the drum kit badly beaten by John Bonham of Led Zeppelin (himself a balloonist and ungainly Chum of Chance whose Chance was ended when he choked on his own chum), Against the Day itself blurs the line between fact and fiction.

As did Mellville, I thought, cold mad father. Chum (noun and verb) is bait at sea.

And John Latta's Pynchon Notes on his blog Isola di Rifiuti are just gorgeous, alive with Art and poetry and insight. If Pynchon didn’t exist we would have to invent him, and the great thing I’m learning as I page through these ship’s (b)logs is that collectively we would be up to that task.

Secret Agent Men

2007-01-04T12:38:00.000-06:00

At the end of the third section (p.25) Inconvenience commander Randolph St. Cosmo meets with detective Nate Privett of Windy City Investigations. Devil in the White City, anyone?

“Since the Haymarket bomb,” Nate was explaining, “we’ve had more work than we can handle, and it’s about to get even more hectic, if the Governor decides to pardon that gang of anarchistic murders. … Antiterrorist security now more than ever will be of the essence here.”

The Haymarket labor unrest was over the eight-hour work day, obviously a grave radical threat which should be “rolled back” any time now. The anticonspiracy intrigue might sound familiar, both from today’s headlines, and as the well-trodden ground of the Modern novel.

On p.6 “the ever-alert Lindsay Noseworth” warns of “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism”, which was also at the heart of Conrad’s 1907 The Secret Agent. See this delightful annotation site from a student who admits, “I never actually read the novel.”

On p.19 French balloonists at the Siege of Paris discover “how much the modern state depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege” (original emphasis). This wonderful UH engineering site outlines the story, which sounds like a Pynchon novel in itself.

As for the “confidential assignment in Our Nation’s Capital (see The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit)” (p.5), and their K.K.K. encounter “at the town of Thick Bush” (p.8), I’m sure any resemblance to current precedents or presidents is purely coincidental.

Vagabonds of the Void

2007-01-03T10:48:00.000-06:00

Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alley-ways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. … From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor. (p.10)

This aerial view of Chicago is reminiscent of the moment in Lot 49 when, from a Chevy in the hills, the L.A. city grid is seen as a circuit board.

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. (p.14)

Quite literally world views, each of these descriptions is stunningly apt, technologically appropriate and partakes of the signature paranoic Pynchonian penchant. (Sorry, it’s infectious.) Zeros and ones, cattle gates to logic gates, we shuffle and are sorted.

Pynchon: Against the Day, day 1

2007-01-02T10:12:00.000-06:00

We start aboard the good (sky)ship Inconvenience, heading for Chicago to take in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Ah happy days before the Bears or Cubs… 1893? Well, they wouldn’t have been called the Cubs anyway, they were probably the Gravy Boats or some damn thing. BID (But I digress. I have a feeling it’s going to happen a lot. Caveat lector.)

The first thing that strikes me is the narrative voice. It is not, I think, like the voice of any other Pynchon novel. It seems to be period—it’s not quite like Dickens, and not (though I’m shakier here) like the English picaresques (Smollet, Defoe, Sterne), who always come to mind with TP.

BTW, here’s a great web site on Tristram Shandy.

There is a finicky delicacy to the voice that makes me think of Austen, but that’s not quite right either…

Oh, there’s a dog on p.5 reading “Mr. Henry James”. Of course there is. Mystery solved, more to come.