Page 1: What kind of madness is this?? Oh My God. I'm tingly. No, this is not erotica. I don't think. I don't know what it is. But I think I like it. A lot. Dear God. Is the whole thing like this? I can't tell if I love it or hate it. If it goes on this way till the end I may come to loathe it.

Page 773: Yes. This (thus far) lovely torture is intended to continue. And yes. I read the last page. What of it? With writing like this I'm unlikely to remember it more than seven hundred pages from now anyway.

First sentence, I kid you not:

Snow-balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware, - the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar, - the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

I am speechless.

It's something of a commonplace that we look to find ourselves in art, and value the feeling of recognition when we do: the idea that there's a kindred spirit, that we're not so weird after all. We tend to think things that we understand — things that are close to our own experiences, thoughts, beings — are "good," and those that aren't are "bad" (if we bother with them at all).

I'm no exception here, although I wouldn't consciously say that this kind of feeling is anywhere near the top of the list of reasons why I love to read. But there are a handful of books where I've experienced such an overwhelming rush of recognition that the feeling was almost appalling. Although it does involve recognition of self in deeper ways, as well, mostly it's been such a similarity to something I've actually written, or at least an idea I've been playing around with, that there are mingled sensations of pride, envy, horror, and yes, kinship. (The short list, off the top of my head, for the curious: American Gods, House of Leaves, White Noise, a number of Bradbury stories.)

And now there's The Raw Shark Texts. Lordy, what a first act; what a first 90 pages. I'm going to try to be even more cryptic than usual, because, frankly, you (yes, you, three people who read this blog, you, dammit) need to read this book. It's awesome and brilliant. I mean, do conceptual sharks cruising communicative waterways for the chum of human memory and identity strike you as interesting? Come on. It's irresistible.

(Actually, now that I think about this, you shouldn't be reading this.

I shouldn't be writing this.

Shit. There was even a warning about the internet.

Forget I said anything. No one reads this. Nice sharky.)

So I'll just babble a little about four things I loved in Part One:

-Chapter 4, "The Light Bulb Fragment (Part One)," is almost unbearably poignant and touching and eerily familiar (not in the writerly ways, in the personal ones). Scary good. A DFW-level observation of a relationship, only it's a great relationship, and we know he's not into those.

-On p. 57-58, there are these two cool representations of a TV screen with something like (but then, very unlike) concrete poetry on their "screens." A kind of creature made of typography, barely perceptible in the static (so the text tells us; the representation of the screen is just a blank rectangle with this typography-creature). The book has been fairly cinematic, so far — I mean, it's extremely lucid writing, very visual, and intentionally so. But there has also been a lot of wrangling with "concept" versus "reality," or the tangible, at any rate — the physical, the solid. (Brilliantly handled wrangling, I might add.) It made me wonder how this would be handled in (the inevitable, if there's any justice) film adaptation, because it would be easy enough to just picture this creature as a creature, and it's certainly a powerful enough image just as a creature, rather than a creature made of these words, this jumble of different-sized type. This is cool, after my late experiences with the "TV fiction" of Bear v. Shark and Vineland: finally, the screen makes it onto the page, only to be filled by words, letters, concepts.

-Letter #4 is awesome. This whole sequence of letters is like if Memento and The Matrix had a baby and The Crying of Lot 49 and "The Library of Babel" had a baby and those babies... well, you get the idea. (Yes, I loved Pineapple Express, too.) At any rate, I love the breakdown of the protective powers of "Books of Fact/Books of Fiction," and this little doozy: "I have an old note written by me before I got so vague which says that some of the great and most complicated stories like The Thousand and One Nights are very old protection puzzles, or even idea nets..." If I were more ambitious, I'd found a whole school of satirical criticism based on this passage.

-On p. 86 we get a small passage which set bells a-ringin' in my head: "I learned... how to attach the bracken and lichen of foreign ideas to my scalp and work the mud and grass of another self into and over my skin and clothes until I could become invisible at will, until anyone or anything could be looking straight at me and never see the real me at all."

You may or may not know that I've been working on a piece of writing related to King Lear for a very long time. This passage sounds like Edgar transforming into Tom o' Bedlam, the madman on the heath. And he's doing something very similar: while his mud and grass are real, it is the other self he really is working into his skin, the mannerisms and the rantings of a being completely foreign to him, and that is mainly why he is not recognized.

Tear off your own head

Tear off your own head

It's a doll revolution

-Elvis Costello

This is not an advice column, but I'm going to go ahead and give some anyway: you probably don't need to read this book. But if you're interested in Pynchon, you might want to take a look at his introduction sometime. (Mine is a 1983 Penguin paperback, which I believe is the first with the intro.) It's surprisingly heavy on the personal detail, rather tellingly uninterested in much of the book itself, and seems to have been written while Pynchon was writing or at least planning Vineland, since the phrase "karmic adjustment" pops up.

But there are some interesting things in the book — it's overstuffed, is all, and rather pompous — including its use of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is the description of an artwork in a medium different than that artwork (although it's often used for descriptions of books within books, too): in this case, there's the use of jazz rhythms and descriptions of other music, but there are also paintings. I tend to be a sucker for this in literature: it's one of the things I love Paul Auster for (the movies were the best part of The Book of Illusions, for instance). The most important painting here is kept rather cryptic, but in a useful way. And it strikes a strange chord (to engage in ekphrastic metaphor) with the Elvis Costello song quoted above.

It's a mural-sized canvas by Calvin Blacknesse, Gnossos's friend, advisor, and guru. Blacknesse is, apparently, a figurative painter, rather out of step with the art-world trends of his time, even anachronistic, I should think (although there may be a hint of early psychedelia, here). His canvases appear to be heavy on symbolism and mythological imagery. When we first meet him, he's painting "the dark goddess." Here's our first brief description of the painting most important to Gnossos: "That one with the tapestry look, a beheading. Must have it sometime." Gnossos then goes on a very bad mescaline trip in the Blacknesses' house, and is terrified of the painting. "No, I saw him," he says of the figure in the painting. "He cut his head off. All by himself." (This leads to one of the funniest scenes in the book, the tripping Gnossos fleeing to the bathroom to hide all the razor blades to protect the family from themselves.)

Nevertheless, he takes the canvas and installs it over the mantel in his room. Like a lot of ekphrastic devices, it serves, I think, as a kind of compact allegory of the character with which it's identified. Gnossos is, indeed, on a mission to tear off his own head, it would seem: his quest to receive a vision, to get out of his own skin, to remain "Exempt": from death, societal convention, and ordinary consciousness. In another funny touch, the canvas nearly falls on him when the spurned Pamela attacks him with a knife: "the nearly decapitated profile rushed at his own." Funny picture, a man in profile presumably with a knife cut through most of his throat, with the medieval look of a tapestry.

Some more lines from "Tear Off Your Own Head":

What's that sound?

It will turn you around

It's a doll revolution

They're taking it over

And they're tearing it down

It's a doll revolution...

(Costello wrote this to be recorded by the Bangles, I'm told, and they did so, after his version was released. It's a very sixties song, for a very sixties-sounding group.)  At the end of this book that's exactly what's happening: Alonso Oeuf, Gnossos's nemesis, has successfully led a coup of the university administration with a demonstration of thousands of students who will do pretty much whatever they're told. A doll revolution.  I suspect it's supposed to be read as a microcosm of the university unrest of so much of the sixties, with both its good elements (increased academic freedom, decreased repressive sexual regulations) and its ugly (wankers who play at being revolutionaries following the mob's every whim).

Gnossos has an ambivalent relationship with the real: he wants the mystical "real," as his name implies, the layers of reality behind the mundane. But he's terrified when a vision does strike — it happens to be a death-vision, unpredictable as visions tend to be — and when real death occurs, he's rather unprepared for it. He's a kid, and an unlikeable one at that. Anyone who says "Oh, Thanatos baby, kiss my wicked tongue" as he threatens to jump off the side of a boat for a lost love is not terribly likeable, or prepared for the reality of death.

The Hanging Hills of Meriden: Legend and Geology is the story of an ethereal black dog said to haunt the West Peak of the Hanging Hills of Meriden.  The first person to write about the legend was geologist W.H.C. Pynchon, whose account was published in the Connecticut Quarterly.  Pynchon wrote that “Many have seen him once, a few twice—none have ever told of the third meeting.”  “Men have seen it bark, but have heard no sound; and it leaves no footprint behind it on the dust of summer or the snow of winter.”  Seeing the dog for the third time was supposed to be a harbinger of one's impending death.

The Hanging Hills are a traprock range.  The term traprock comes from the Swedish word trappa, for 'steps' referring to the characteristic shape of the rocks and outcrops that make up the deposits.  Traprock is comprised primarily of basalt, a fine-grained, high-temperature igneous rock with a high iron content.  According to Bowen's reaction series (wow - that makes for a major trip down a collegiate nostalgia lane...), rocks like basalt are highly susceptible to chemical weathering.  The traprock of the Hanging Hills is also highly fractured and faulted and contains small bubble-like openings call vesicles in many areas.  These features make rock prone to physical weathering.  This physical and chemical weathering is so common in traprock that piles of talus at the base of the steep outcrops are one distinguishing characteristic of traprock ranges.

Read Brendan Hanrahan's excellent post about the black dog of the Hanging Hills and the mysterious deaths of Pynchon and his friend, Herbert Marshall.  Decide for yourself whether their deaths were due to the parapsychological effects of a canine apparition -- or to climbing accidents related to rotten rock in the Hanging Hills outcrops.

Either way -- it's a really cool story.  Enjoy!

Reading next: The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall.

Lots of questions with this book. For one: Why am I reading it? (Well, because Fariña was a good friend of Pynchon's when both were at Cornell in the '50s, and I'm in this hippie-lit phase now anyway, and if not now, when?)

For others: is it Beat or Hippie? Does it matter? (Not really, but fun to parse sometimes.) I think it's mostly late-Beat, actually. As Vineland is a kind of post-hippie novel, looking back at the 60s to reclaim its ethos from the greedy 80s, BDSLILLUTM looks back at the Beat heyday, 1958, from crazy 1966. It's ponderous and pretentious (as well as overreaching in the very special way that only first novels from those weaned on the Beats can be), with jazz, Joyce, and multiple layers of mythological allusion involved. (Actual onomatopoetic lines of jazz at some points, I guess to reinforce mood and tone, or at least that's the excuse.) It's also got that Beat frisson of misogyny or at least condescension to women. And everybody embarrassingly calling each other "baby." And Gnossos, our hero, with this retarded self-aggrandizing idea about being a spiritual virgin, claiming he's "laid" like a million women but never "surrendered" himself to any of them. (What a tool, seriously. This is the stupidest thing about this book.)

But I'm being hard on the book. There are some funny slapstick scenes, and some good writing. It's only pretense if you're pretending to be good, as they say, and Fariña definitely has good stuff. (He died, sadly, two days after this was published.) And it does seem to be at least in part about that anxious incessant identity-forming that was so much of the Beat project, and is so much of a part of growing up, getting out of the house and going to college and out on expeditions in hopes of receiving a vision (as Gnossos does, into the American West and the frigid North, before returning to Athene, the stand-in for Ithaca, NY, in the book). Right at the start, there's this interesting passage, as we're plunged into Gnossos's thoughts:

I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to cloud men's minds. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I am the Dracula, look into my eye.

Exemption, immunity: Gnossos is a trickster, or at least fancies himself such. An invisible Mercury, a wandering Odysseus (yes, he's very self-consciously Greek), a fly in the ointment of an uptight 1950s university town. This passage does a nice job of introducing some of the main symbol-systems used in the book: the physics and chemistry of the nuclear age (we learn later that Gnossos witnessed a nuclear test in the Nevada desert), the mass media booming in the '40s and '50s and forming a generation both homogeneous and terrified of homogeneity, the literary and the mythical.

And yet Gnossos also obsessively worries about "the monkey-demon," another trickster figure from Chinese Buddhist legend (and there's a fair amount of Buddhist allusion in the book, making me think this is a Buddhist monkey-demon and not one of the flying monkeys of The Wizard of Oz. 'Course, could be both). He reminds himself again and again to watch out for the monkey-demon. At one point, at a crazy party/orgy, a scary spider monkey actually appears; his owners get him stoned for fun, making the monkey even scarier. Needless to say, Gnossos is freaked out.

The monkey-demon seems to stand for the dark side of the trickster/outsider identity, to Gnossos: the side of chaos, of destructive rather than creative force, the side that turns evil and frightened when its mind is altered. The perspective shifts in this book in tricksy ways, too, Farina often shifting from third to stream-of-consciousness first and back within the same paragraph or sticking to one or the other for pages at a time with a few sentences sprinkled in that could either represent the thoughts of either the narrator or Gnossos. Mentions of "the monkey-demon" or "beware the monkey-demon" are often like this: we can't be sure if it's Gnossos saying this to himself, or the narrator telling us and his eight-years-ago hero-self that danger is afoot. (Clearly part of this shifting perspective is the semi-autobiographical nature of the book, the trickster as the author of his own fictional story and "true" identity, the web-weaver and lie-spinner. The confidence-man. Anansi.) The problem I'm having is with that mention of Dracula, which seems to show awareness, and even an embrace, of the dark side of the identity Gnossos has cultivated.

This circles back to this whole male-spiritual-virginity thing: as "Book the First" ends, Gnossos has fallen in love with a co-ed named Kristin McLeod. "Exemption" means exemption from the rules of society, but it also, apparently, has meant exemption from being required to care about the person on the other side of sex. Is this why the dark trickster figures of monkey and wolf recur here, why Gnossos's boozy Indian neighbors interrupt the consummation with a smile and a warning, "Much caution"? Although Gnossos longs, supposedly, to truly "make love," is this a warning that immunity and exemption are only granted to those who remain outside of love's circle?

In case my scintillating analysis hasn't convinced you to read (or re-read) Vineland, I'm listing below my ten favorite jokes, digressions, fables, and goofs (the majority of the book, really). Print it out, take it with you to the library, enjoy in air-conditioned splendor. (Plus, if you don't check it out, the Feds can't track you and your dangerously socialist borrowing habits!)

In paginated order:

-The first chapter is almost completely detachable, a zany, slapstick, perfect little mini-narrative of lumberjack-themed gay bars, Valley girls, DEA agents, transfenestration, and, of course, the Tube. Read it. Pretend it's a short story.

-The Marquis de Sod commercial, p. 46-47. Please tell me a California landscaping company has co-opted this schtick by now.

-Takeshi's adventures at Wawazume Life and Non-Life, p. 142-48. The inevitable Godzilla subplot.

-Sister Rochelle's alternate version of the Garden of Eden, p. 166. Pretty close to the heart of the book's sex stuff.

-The crazy preacher on p. 213 who interrupts the weather crew. This whole chapter about the People's Republic of Rock and Roll is pretty great, actually.

-Weed's adventures with Dr. Larry Elasmo, p. 225-229. Pynchon does Kafka!

-The Federal Emergency Evacuation Route, p. 248-49. Believable and paranoid.

-Brock on the airplane, p. 277. What the little girl sitting next to him shouts made me laugh harder than anything else in the book, but it's also more than a throwaway. Great paragraph.

-The Noir Center, p. 326. Bubble Indemnity! (The whole interaction of Prairie and Che is great, actually, and I'm deeply impressed by how Pynchon use of Brent Musberger to make maybe his best point about how TV's affected us: our desire to "be the one to frame," to comment on our world and our lives rather than to act, to move.)

-The running gag of biopics starring wildly unusual actors, culminating on p. 370-71. This is a movie that must get made. (Just after this there's a movie about the '83-84 NBA playoffs with the Lakers as heroes, the Celtics as villains, but let me remind you that Pynchon's always commenting on how the Tube distorts events, so I don't think he's necessarily a Lakers fan. Please, God, let it not be so.)

Some of the songs are funny, too, and there's a passage in the last paragraph which might (it's a very qualified might, even) explain the cartoonish sections of the book (more metafiction, if you choose to read it that way).

Reading next: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Farina.

I am surprised. On pages 313 and 314, we get what sure seems to be something like a Central Theme or Mission Statement or My-Point-Is Passage from Pynchon. It's not a very interesting one, actually, but it has some sneaky sentences worth examining.

Zoyd and a certain old friend from The Crying of Lot 49 reminisce about their glory days in the 60s. Pynchon uses this old character in an interesting way; a visitor from another book, he functions as a kind of oracle. He begins the central passage in question by saying, "I guess it's over. We're on into a new world now, it's the Nixon Years, then it'll be the Reagan Years —"

Of course, Zoyd doesn't believe "ol' Raygun" will ever become president. (That's an old joke by 1990, but I do like the Reagan/Raygun interplay: remember Star Wars?) But Zoyd's friend goes on, insisting that soon "they" will want to regulate and legislate "anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all that." They remember a trip on a windowpane of acid; Zoyd recalls how he knew he would never die. "When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one..."

Zoyd insists that he'll always remember what he discovered in that time, and here's the core paragraph:

"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming — just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.

Obviously "they" is a loaded term in any Pynchon novel. "They" here seems to be used in its broadest sense, as meaning Authority writ large; those who set themselves up as "Police" of anything that could please the senses.  I do think this is largely right, of course: most entertainment is in the business of superficial distraction, underlying fear-mongering.  It seems a pretty threadbare raison d'etre for a novel, though: I read all this to be told the mass media is in the business of distraction? It's deeper than that, of course, tapping into the fact that constant reminders of death are a good way to keep people in line, while the 60s Pynchon wants to remember were about trying to overcome a culture of death — but it's a little obvious, isn't it? I mean, hasn't DFW gone light-years beyond this kind of analysis?

What sets the passage apart, for me, are two phrases, one at the beginning, one at the end. Pynchon begins this conversation after a flashback, and reminds us that we are "back in real time" when the present conversation begins. Memory's another other world, isn't it? Another "falsely deathless" arcade? "Back in real time..." It's a self-aware statement on the narrator's part, it jostles one out of the story in a way more conventional transitions would not, and hey, this "real time" isn't actually the present of the main action of the book anyway, right? We're back when Prairie was a baby, here, and Zoyd's just looking for a place to hide from Brock! "Real time" is a euphemism for mediated time — less-fake time. "Real-time video-conferencing." No one calls real time real time. It's just time. (Or Time, occasionally.)

So: a foray into metafictionland, I'm thinking.

Then we get another comment from the narrator at the end of this mini-sermon: "It was the way people used to talk." I love this sentence. Could be Pynchon's poking fun at the hippies, at their paranoia and self-aggrandizement — "they," indeed. (Pynchon poking fun at himself.) But he could also be pointing out the collective lowering of the guard against Authority in 1980s USA, or the cruel disregard for social justice in the same decade, or the lack of much conversation at all in the age of the Tube. It's the kind of shading and complexity I expect from Pynchon, especially after hearing from someone who thinks he knows it all. (Then again, he's right about Reagan, so maybe he does.)

A couple more things about Pynchon's other world and I'll move on.

There are two incredible extended metaphors within six pages of each other that identify the essence of that other world (which I posited as being the filmed world): it is its timelessness, or at least the illusion of same. Here's Frenesi, suffering from post-partum depression and from memories of her fascist lover Brock:

Taken down, she understood, from all the silver and light she'd known and been, brought back to the world like silver recalled grain by grain from the Invisible to form images of what then went on to grow old, go away, get broken and contaminated. She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away....

Frenesi as film, and although I don't really understand the process of developing film very well, I think what's intended here is the idea of silver grains recalled from development to the real world, and by extension the idea of Frenesi terrified that she's given birth to something existing in an unbounded set, something that can "grow old, go away..."

Then there's a metaphor that manages to be both gonzo and haunting: Brock Vond's "erect penis" as a "joystick" with which Frenesi steers through her obstacle-filled world, presented as a "forbidden arcade... closing time never announced... no longer the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter."

Also important is an earlier passage, from the beginning of the previous chapter (p. 218), which I somehow forgot to mention before. Discussing the Thanatoids, it reads:

We are assured by the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the soul newly in transition often doesn't like to admit — indeed will deny quite vehemently — that it's really dead, having slipped so effortlessly into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancing factor in Takeshi's opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, why not mediated deaths?

Now, there does seem to be a clear difference between Pynchon's treatment of TV and his treatment of video games and film. I'm probably simplifying by lumping them all together into Pynchon's other, timeless world, a kind of fool's paradise. I suppose, however, that I should leave the last, blunt word to Sledge Poteet, cutting through layers of b.s.:

"You don't die for no motherfuckin' shadows."

In all of Pynchon's books there seems to be a chapter that totally baffles me on first reading — a chapter I simply can't follow. The last chapter I read, the twelfth (though they aren't numbered), seems to be that chapter for Vineland. It involves, I kid you not: a Friar's Club Roast of the Living Dead, a Luftwaffe officer in charge of eradicating marijuana fields, parrots telling bedtime stories to kids who then engage in communal lucid dreaming, a Kafkaesque dentist's office, a scene which turns out (I think) to be an imaginary idyllic flash-forward of Pynchon's own creation or perhaps of Prairie's (or just through her, as she watches footage?), tiny gangsters playing pinochle on Weed Atman's nose (seriously), the agonizing dissolution of 24fps and the People's Republic of Rock and Roll, Weed Atman's death or staged death, a system of secret highways called the Federal Emergency Evacuation Route, ninja moves, a plot to kill Castro, typical Pynchonian S&M pseudo-erotica, the gorgeous recurring Dream of the Gentle Flood, a trip to Mexico, commentary on Reaganomics, horoscopes about the danger of Pluto, and wiretapping.

There are so many loose ends here, I can't imagine Pynchon tying them all up in 120 pages, though then again all of that only took 50. (I mean, read that list again! Only Pynchon.) It's the chapter in which he's throwing off ideas like sparks, seemingly on a strong cocktail of stimulants. But I think one of the important elements of the chapter is that it is, in large part, mediated: much of it seems to be the story as told to Prairie and/or seen by her on film, although it's hard for me to tell how much is meant to be read this way and how much is simply provoked by that scenario, and meant to be read as the narrator's address to the reader.

This question of mediation is important. In this chapter I think Pynchon reveals that his hints of another world, close to our own and connected to it but also very different, refer to the world created by and existing in film (now video, I suppose I should say), the 24-frames-per-second world. Most important in this regard is the confrontation between Weed and Rex. Frenesi has deliberately set it up to confront Weed with the accusation that he has betrayed the collective to the FBI (when, of course, it's her that's working for Brock Vond — although Weed might have been turned, too, it's hard to say) on film, in the guerrilla style of 24fps. But the cameraman was changing rolls at the time, so the actual shooting is not filmed: there's only sound footage and blurs, which Ditzah presents to Prairie. Here it is in the actual language; note all the complexity here, all the mediation:

Rex screaming, "Don't you walk away from me!" the squeak of a screen door, feet and furniture thumping around, the door again, a starter motor shrieking, an engine catching, as Sledge then moved on out into the alley after them and Frenesi tried to find enough cable to get one of the floods on them and Howie got his new roll in and on his way out offered to switch places with Frenesi, who may have hesitated — her camera, her shot — but must have waved him on, because it was Howie... who emerged into the darkness and, while trying to find the ring to open the aperture, missed the actual moment, although shapes may have moved somewhere in the frame, black on black, like ghosts trying to return to earthly form, but Sledge was right there on them, and the sound of the shot captured by Krishna's tape. Prairie, listening, could hear in its aftermath the slack whisper of the surf against this coast — and when Howie finally got there and Frenesi aimed the light, Weed was on his face with his blood all on the cement, the shirt cloth still burning around the blackly erupted exit, pale flames guttering out, and Rex was staring into the camera, posing, pretending to blow smoke away from the muzzle of the .38....

I mean, for one thing, so far as I can tell Rex was chasing Weed; so why's Weed on his face with the exit wound in his back? For another, Weed's a Thanatoid in the present-day 1984 of the book; either we believe he's an actual ghost or spirit, or this was staged, and Weed escapes into an underground life. (If he's a spirit, the Thanatoid Roast at the start of this chapter takes on a very Beetlejuice feel. And I suspect that the ambiguity might be what's important to Pynchon: this way, he gets to kill Weed with both camera and gun, as well as allowing us to see various levels of conspiracy and intrigue, if we so wish.)

Right before the shooting, we are told that his face (as captured on film) betrayed his understanding of Frenesi's betrayal, and that this was "the moment of his real passing," his spirit actually seeming to leave his body. This ties in with a comment Howie made earlier, that confronting Weed on film would be "takin' his soul, man," a la that idea (is this myth or actually documented?) that some Native tribes believed the camera stole their soul. It might also go a way toward explaining the meaning of the Thanatoids: beings from whom the spirit has been drained, brains operating only on mediated experience, through the Tube. There's also the comparison, recurring throughout the chapter (and book), of camera with gun. Frenesi, at the end of the chapter, says they were fools to think their cameras could stand against the Man's guns.

Pynchon's feelings about all of this remain difficult for me to interpret. He certainly is sympathetic to the aims of 24fps, and would seem to think that the camera is, in fact, just as powerful as the gun, if only we'd believe it. Factoring into all of it is that Kabbalistic myth that's so important in Gravity's Rainbow, of the world as broken vessel, shards of light scattered throughout the darkness. The last words of the chapter are "the spilled, the broken world." DL is equated with Lilith and shadow, Frenesi with Eve and light, and much as in GR light/white is often menacing while shadow protects the good. The "broken world" could be the world broken into countless segments of film which only seem continuous, but the "real" world is what's being talked about here, what's broken. Perhaps the point is that they are parts of each other, just as shadow and light exist because of the other. The broken world of film could also redeem the broken world we live in, perhaps, by recording injustice and forcing outrage at the inhumane. Maybe that's why so much of this book veers between cinematic pastiche, political commentary, and literary genre-play?

But the issue of possession is also troubling, and there's definitely a hint of vampirism in some of Pynchon's filmic references. Brock is in the possession business. He kind of reminds me of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, with that camcorder attached to his eye. (The chapter before this ends with an uber-creepy scene in which Brock is staring at Frenesi in the dark, and starts laughing when she's scared by him.) (And this further reminds me that there's some pretty Lynchian stuff in this chapter; I wonder if Pynchon's a fan?) The sections of this chapter on FEER and the surveillance of the ex-24fps'ers seem downright prescient, now. Brock abducts the dangerous elements from the People's Republic and hides them in his secret camp, for reeducation or blackmail or torture, but uses cameras and those media outlets who will play along to remake this story into the story of radicals "going underground," a "rapture below." Bad puns. (Those who ask inconvenient questions are summarily removed from the press pool.)

PS: One more stylistic quirk I've noticed popping up more and more in this book. Pynchon makes a point of using an apostrophe at the beginning of 'suckers, though the word had clearly lost the connotation that this implies in ordinary usage by the time he's writing in and of. I think it's a way for him to reinforce the crazed sexual desire, perversity, and brutality simmering beneath the surface of everyday life, politics as usual in the good ol' USA.

"And here came Frenesi Gates's reverse shot. Prairie felt the two women shift in their seats. Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a defiance of blue unfadable. 'Never,' was her answer, 'because too many of us are learning how to pay attention.'"

I'm writing this on a laptop from a room on the University of Virginia's Lawn, in a building designed by Thomas Jefferson. I'm here for the week at Rare Book School, learning about "The American Book in the Industrial Era, 1820-1940" from Michael Winship, Mr. American Book in the Industrial Era himself. And things have come together: the key, he's told us, is being interested and then paying attention to what interests you.

Then Peter Stallybrass, a prof at Penn, gave a talk tonight on the reuse and recycling of woodcuts in the 16th-18th centuries. It was incredible in a number of ways, but it built to this incredible crescendo in which he found that a particular woodcut initial letter was used a number of times in the 1570 Bishop's Bible, seemingly whenever an "I" or "J" was called for, only a small and crude figure intended to represent either Christ or God was excised from the initial when it was used to begin a chapter in Isaiah interpreted as a prophecy of Christ: the purely functional and formal become meaningful, political, ideological, if only to the compositor.

Looking close, paying attention. It's something of a paradox in Vineland, with its seeming scorn for those who look too much at the Tube. And the quote above comes from Prairie, Frenesi's daughter, watching a film of her mother, another of Pynchon's tricks with flashback and the intrusion of past into present. (It's another tour de force chapter, actually, and another great piece of film-writing from the guy who seemingly perfected the form.) But the fact remains that I think Pynchon's sympathies (and perhaps pity, too) lie with those who pay attention. It sometimes drives them mad, and Frenesi was clearly wrong (she's responding, it seems, to a question from a local TV news reporter about the dangers of her work in 24fps, a guerrilla film collective documenting injustice; she's saying, I think, that they will never stop, that people are waking up, when of course, if they were, they went back to sleep, or faded into living death, a la the Thanatoids), but paying attention still seems to be the only way Pynchon sees to break the system.

For all his theological concern, I've never been sure what Pynchon makes of Jesus. His concern is primarily with the lost and outcast — all of us, or damn close — and not with the saved and saving.

But one of the most surprising elements of JC's teaching is his emphasis on love and his deemphasis of guilt. He talks to prostitutes and Samaritans, recruits tax collectors and peasants, asks forgiveness for his punishers. A revolution of personal orientation toward the world: doing good not because you've done bad and feel bad about it, but doing good because you love your neighbors and your God.

Of course Christianity has very little to do with Christ.  (Did it ever?)  But I do think Pynchon addresses himself in the long chapter covering pages 130-191 to the lack of love in our contemporary discourse, and the preponderance of guilt.

The startling passage that got me thinking on these lines occurs as we meet a Thanatoid, one of Pynchon's underground people. Thanatoids are ambiguous beings, creatures of entropy. They "watch a lot of Tube," living in ghostly communities like Shade Creek, where DL and Takeshi (the "Karmic Adjuster" almost accidentally killed by DL thinking she was killing Brock Vond with the ninjic "Vibrating Palm" — is anything harder to summarize than a Pynchon plot?) meet Ortho Bob Dulang, their first Thanatoid. They "limit themselves... to emotions helpful in setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into the condition of death... the most common by far was resentment..."

After a cool exchange in which Takeshi is revealed as a kind of anti-Thanatoid, "trying to go — the opposite way! Back to life!" from his dead-man-walking condition as DL's victim, we get this doozy, as Ortho Bob comments on the arrangement by which DL is assisting Takeshi for a year and a day to atone for her, you know, killing him slowly with her ninja moves: "My mom would love this. She watches all these shows where, you got love, is always winnin' out, over death? Adult fantasy kind of stories. So you guys, it's like guilt against death? Hey — very Thanatoid thing to be doin', and good luck."

He's right: very Thanatoid thing to be doin'. But what does that mean? The Thanatoids are still quite slippery, Pynchon keeping their meaning ambiguous: sometimes they seem to stand for American culture as a whole, a culture glued to the TV and losing the will to do just about anything else; sometimes they seem to be presented as victims of Vietnam or the reactionary elite, made half-ghostly by their inability to overcome their desire for revenge; sometimes they seem simply a way of presenting the human condition: always moving towards death. But it's the way Ortho Bob frames his argument, his sarcastic, typically Thanatoid comment that there's no way that guilt (much less love!) could ever overcome death, that's interesting.

Because the Thanatoids do practically nothing but watch TV, the idea of "love winning out over death" strikes him as an "adult fantasy." In the arrangement before him, he doesn't see love as entering into the equation at all: guilt is the emotion he sees, incapable of believing that DL could possibly have any other motivation. But of course, I think the point of the whole exercise from the SKA's point of view is to move her past guilt, to a desire to operate in the world out of something more than rage and resentment. And it works, maybe — she's still with Takeshi an undetermined number of years later, in a presumably platonic relationship that seems to bear many of the marks of love.

It's a very cool, dense passage. It reminds me a helluva lot of DFW, with those extra commas, that broken grammar, the filtering through TV. And also in the way that love is dismissed from the discourse, as something too often exaggerated and mediated and sold to possibly be a real opportunity for salvation. And that does seem to me a Pynchonian commentary on the 1980s, in the time's utter repudiation of something like "love" — say, concern for fellow citizens and humans, a desire to live peacefully and simply.

One more note here. We saw The Dark Knight last Sunday, and I was struck by what a strange movie it was, so very different from so much else that's been released in recent years. What made it strange, I think, was its attempt to move past our societal obsession with blame and guilt — if only we can identify and punish the "evildoers," surely everything will be all right — and its amazingly old-fashioned climax, a fascinating variation on the "prisoner's dilemma" of game theory set up by the Joker (and seriously, it's not just hype: Heath Ledger is really unbelievably good as the Joker). It's hardly a Batman movie at all: it's a movie about wanting a man, a city, a country to move past guilt, towards decency, regard for fellow humans, something like love.

She drifted thence into issues of modular arithmetic, and its relation to the Riemann problem, and eventually to the beginnings of a roulette system which would someday see her past landlords and sommeliers and other kinds of lupine liminality, and become the wonder and despair of casino managers across the Continent.

Liminality:the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process. Anthropology: the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks social status or rank, remains anonymous, shows obedience and humility, and follows prescribed forms of conduct, dress, etc.

Well, shucks, things have changed. It's still a fun book, but we've gotten into heavy-duty Pynchon territory now. The damned, the paranoid, the radical and the tyrannical. I have this strange feeling that TP started out trying to write a different kind of book but it sucked him in and he let it take him, his obsessions with Calvinism, systems, technology. There are moments when you can feel the sentences pulling him along to his inevitable conclusions. But it's great stuff, and there are passages in here to rival anything in Gravity's Rainbow. (Also, the quirk I remember most from GR, the "a-and" stutter or elongation, has resurfaced here, if only a couple of times. I always liked that, and it always seemed like Pynchon was trying to channel the archetypal overexcited American kid in movies and '50s TV with that extra letter and dash, and it seemed to me like a brilliant condensation of American character. In which case it fits in well in this media-obsessed book, showing how TV has worked its way into our minds and is constantly showing us how to live, how to be. Or it was just supposed to be a longer "a" sound and I got the whole thing wrong. Anyway.)

He's on to computers, for instance. There are no less than three really virtuoso pieces about computers already in the book. Two are in the chapter in which we're shifted to Frenesi's story (a virtuoso chapter overall, really). On page 87, after Frenesi's husband Flash has been talking about how people are disappearing from the government's computer files (and it begins...), their son enters. The kids in this book are really interesting — Pynchon seems to have a lot more invested in them than in previous books, or maybe is just more interested, or is acknowledging the shift toward youth that the culture as a whole took after the 60s — so I might quote a little long just to get in some of the allusive, pitch-perfect, idiosyncratic dialogue:

...Justin came wandering in, cartoons having ended and his parents now become the least objectionable programming around here, for half an hour, anyway — and just as well, too, because the last thing either parent needed right now was an argument, or what passed for one with them, a kind of alien-invasion game in which Flash launched complaints of different sizes at different speeds and Frenesi tried to deflect or neutralize them before her own defenses gave way.

"Say, Justintime, how's 'em Transformers, makin' out OK?"

"And how was everything over at Wallace's?"

The kid put on a genial smile, waved, put his hand to his ear like Reagan going, "Say again?" "How about a few questions," Justin pretending to look around the room, "Mom? You had your hand up?"

"We're just getting you back for all those questions you used to ask us" — Flash adding "Amen!" — "not too long ago."

"I don't remember that," trying not to laugh, because in fact he did, and wanted to be teased.

"Must be gettin' old, man," said Frenesi.

"Nonstop questions nobody could answer," Flash told him, "like, 'What is metal?'"

"'How do you know when you're dreaming and when you're not?'" Frenesi recalled, "That was my favorite."

Isn't that great, that subtle shift, incorporating the computer-game metaphor into the already-established TV theme? And this idea itself, of parental arguments being seen as a video game? I'm always fascinated by Pynchon's narrators, how they manage to shift their voices so rapidly and convincingly without actually shifting point of view: the idea of Flash and Frenesi's arguments being like a giant game of Space Invaders would not have occurred without Justin's point of view, in addition to the metaphor being important to Pynchon's overriding concerns. (I love Justin impersonating Reagan, too, and "I don't remember that" — just like Reagan, forgetful whenever convenient, and playing his coy game with the media, wanting to be teased.) Plus there's Frenesi's remembrance of young Justin asking about dreams; we'll later see DL asking similar questions, wondering if she'd become "finally lost in a great edge-to-edge delusion."

So this leads to the end of the chapter, as F&F's nightmare is coming to pass and they've apparently been erased from the system they were living on the edge of, as independent contractors on shady governmental missions.

...it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name... We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

Overblown? Maybe you could say that. But mind-blowing, too, and I wonder what Pynchon makes of the fact that a lot of the people in the world are now busy adding to their "computer records" pictures, profiles of friends and acquaintances, weird literary blogs? (2.0 apps as path to acknowledgment by the hacker-God, and as handy guides to governmental intrusion.)

Then there's Prairie, looking at her mom's file on an apparently magic computer (it plays "Wake Up, Little Susie," and it politely says goodnight to Prairie when she shuts it off — it's maybe the worst line I've ever seen Pynchon write, actually, right there on p. 115). But this is a great paragraph, an enrichment of the theme:

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost. She already knew how literal computers could be — even spaces between characters mattered. She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied?... But to be of any use, to be "real," a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending....

After that we get Prairie finding out some things, but transported by a picture of her mom with DL (the asskicking Ninjette) in the 60s. There's a great transcript of what Prairie imagines they're talking about in the photo, and then, once Prairie has shut the machine off, in his inimitable Pynchonian fashion, the narrator takes us back into those "quiescent ones and zeros" and shows us (apparently) the true story behind the picture, and we get a nice long flashback, and flashbacks to flashbacks, and the ghosts become as real as ghosts in a machine can. (Realer, maybe.)

For my own faulty memory, here are a few quick notes on Pynchon's usual bunch of stylistic quirks ("usual" in that there's always a bunch, although they seem to change at least slightly from book to book):

-Most typically for him, language (and especially dialogue) is tortured into weird conjunctions. Some of the time they make sense as a way of capturing speech, but sometimes they just seem perverse, and impossible to actually capture in voice. He likes jamming a bunch of consonants together, and I can't speculate on a reason why. Perhaps he really does think it captures the spoken word, which — let's face it — would be unreadable if actually transcribed.

-A related point, his consistent use of the misspelling "didt'n" instead of "didn't." I suspect this is Pynchon's way of pointing out that yes, in fact, people do often drop the "t" at the end, pronouncing more like "did'n," although the "t" sound does seem to slip in there somewhere just before the "n."

-He's also using accent marks in the dialogue of Hector Zuniga, Zoyd's pursuer, to capture the Hispanic pronunciation of ultimate syllables (like "in" in "complainin"). Surprised I haven't seen this done before, actually.

Now we come to the quirks that actually seem important thematically, the media-related quirks:

-"the Tube." That's the dominant term for TV here, and it's always capitalized. It's a character and a presence. I have to keep reminding myself that this was published in 1990: Pynchon was fairly unusual, I think, in persisting in writing about the medium in such monolithic terms. I'm sure we'll get some gonzo descriptions of the content of the feedings from said Tube later, but for now it seems a weirdly trite way of discussing the fact that, yes, we're addicted to TV as a culture.

-Whenever a movie is mentioned in this book (and it happens a lot), the year in which it was released is placed after it, in brackets if the mention takes place in dialogue, in parentheses if not. This is, obviously, a weird thing to do in a work of fiction. Even weirder, Pynchon does not do this if he's making up a movie (like "Pat Sajak in The Frank Gorshin Story," which is funny not only because it's stupid, but funny because Frank Gorshin played the Riddler on the campy old Batman show and Sajak hosts America's favorite pointless campy show about riddles, Wheel of Fortune. And, while we're here, that seems to be a semi-important illustration of Pynchon's concern with television and media saturation in general: he obviously knows all of the backstory of Gorshin and Sajak, and he's constructed the little joke to allow us to catch it, too, and I think, given the context of the book as a whole, that's meant to give us pause: this over-familiarity with not even just purely escapist entertainment, but entertainment willfully constructed to be as dumb and campy and unimportant).

Why do this? The fact that he "cites" real movies and not the fake ones could be a metafictional device, a reminder that it's all a big fiction (and there are moments when Pynchon telegraphs that it is to be read, intermittently, as fiction of an especially wacky and cartoonish sort, if not exactly campy). From another metafictional angle, it could be a weird glimpse at the narrator/author, at his obsessive cataloging of cultural objects like old movies and B-sides real and imaginary, at our culture's addiction to the Tube and allied pastimes. While a lot of movies are mentioned so far, they're almost all being watched on TV. This all reminds me very much of Infinite Jest (although really IJ, and really a lot of DFW's oeuvre, should've reminded me of this book, which seems very much like one of DFW's true touchstones), with its addicts, its isolated entertainment junkies, its killer videotape.

Waiters conversed in undertones which only just managed to be polite, in which the word cazzo occurred often.

Cazzo, dick.

They were up in the grand dining room at the Bauer-Grunwald eating roast tenderloin lof lamb and guzzling Pommery. The room was busy with eaters whose supply of cash far exceeded any degree of hunger they could remember or imagine. Waiters conversed in undertones which only just managed to be polite, in which the word cazzo occurred often. Chandeliers whose crystalline arrangements were set to exquisitely fine clearances, shivered and chimed as if able to sense each negligible settling of the building in the primeval Venetian ooze beneath.

The chandeliers are perhaps to be compared to the well-heeled diners themselves, for whom the complaints and upheavals of the underclasses (the cursing waiters, the "primeval ooze") register as a mild chiming of their crystalline arrangements, incapable of imagining hunger [?] The description doesn't give us walls, floors, dimensions, table arrangements, decorations: just the quality of the diners, the temperament of the waiters, the chandeliers, "busy", and the ooze beneath.... Don't know what this means exactly but it seems worth noting that while rooms can't exist without walls or floors, descriptions of rooms can exist without their walls and floors being described: -- what mainly drives the description of this room is less the listing of its parts than the depiction of its occupants-- we understand on the basis of who they are that this must be a very posh room.

*
The Bauer-Griswald is a famous Venetian hotel, whose year of construction I've seen given as 1880... Something about Pynchon's usage of "clearance" suggested to me that the word has a special meaning with respect to chandeliers, but dictionary.com and the O.E.D don't mention one.

... who hoped to define here among the dueling clubs of Gottingen a "control group" for examining theh deeper meanings of facial inscription, especially as practiced among northern tribes of the Andaman Islands

Island chain in the Bay of Bengal, maps, wiki.

So now I'm started on Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which I'm finding very underwhelming given Roth's immense status (this is the first book of his I've read). Admittedly, part of it comes from the book being so Jewy. I'm not being anti-Semetic here, but much of the book so far is about the difficulties of growing up Jewish in America before World War II, which I really have no way to relate to. It's reading a little like one long Jewish stereotype joke, which were never really that funny to us goyim in the first place.

I also read Kerouac's The Dharma Bums a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it, so I'm probably going to pick up On The Road after I finish Roth; I tried to read it in high school and didn't like it for some reason, but maybe now it'll click with me after being exposed to Kerouac. After that, I'm going to try and read some David Foster Wallace, since he's apparently similar to Pynchon. I have Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, which should last me at least the rest of the summer since the latter weighs in at over 1000 pages.

Unless, of course, you guys have anything more interesting to recommend me. What have you been reading, Squad?

First, a tiny bit more on the (already overextended) More Is Less. The cliche has been echoed once more (although, maddeningly, I can't find the reference now — I think it's in Zoyd's conversation with Hector in ch. 3), and reminded me that the other, non-literary reference the phrase conjures up might be the Reagan era and its policies of dismantling government. Reagan was, indeed, the president of more government equals less government, and vice versa. You'd think Pynchon would be behind this idea, but then the "more" that was being lessened was never military spending, covert tinkering with Latin American governments, or other CIA ops.

Second, the Marquis de Sod commercials (p. 46-47) are super-hilarious. Go to the library or bookstore and read about them right now. Now, the jokes are jokes with Pynchon, but they're also often meaningful, and embedded in this wackiness is another interesting comment on the development of TV advertising, the ramping up of production values, and the weird investments of massive effort and money into incredibly absurd and unnecessary "micromovies" to convince us all to, say, whip our lawns into shape."

Third, and mostly: Pynchon has escaped the hippie-writer label that Brautigan never did (he's a much less limited writer: more of a mimic, less of a monolithic voice, more of a satirist and craftsman, less of a bard and mythologizer — a genius, not a dreamer), but Vineland is (already) clearly his look back at the Sixties and their legacy (or lack thereof). Zoyd's a self-described "old hippie that's gone sour." (His interactions with his daughter, Prairie, remind me an awful lot of the hippie parents in Valley Girl.) Writing about this through the lens of the decade that dismantled the hippie ethos is interesting, and would be unavoidable in a book set in northern California even if it wasn't what interested the author: we've already seen the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, complete with deliriously bad organic pizza and a "Pizzic Mandala" stained-glass window, and met Prairie's boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four, the mohawked member of the punk (or does Pynchon mean metal?) band Billy Barf and the Vomitones, who has a bank interested in financing "a chain of violence centers."

Pynchon, as always, is genius enough that this is not annoying in the manner of so much boomer-self-involvement: he seems to be exploring the overreaction to, not "lifestyles" or stupid fads (which he's happy enough to make fun of along with everyone else), but the goals and ideas of the time (granted, only a small minority actually understood or really cared about said goals and ideas). The idea that because hippies don't shower or they like terrible music or are self-involved, "peace and love" must be horrible ideas worthy of ridicule, and protest of unjust and tyrannical government must be whiny and the by-product of too many drugs. The idea that getting "welfare queens" (and Zoyd's kind of a welfare king, come to think of it) off the government dole is more important than changing the conditions that lead to the necessity of welfare in the first place. Etc etc.

All the same, he does seem more involved personally than in previous books: there seem to be more passages of authorial interpretation than previously, more moments of non-wacky retrospection. There's the really interesting discussion between Hector and Zoyd on "who was saved" by the sixties (the inevitable preterition theme), and the stunning paragraph following (seemingly in the narrator's own voice, for the most part) on Hector's self-pity for his own state of being fallen (p. 28-30). There're also Zoyd's reflections on his relationship with his ex-wife Frenesi (Spanish for "frenzy," apparently, and the name of a jazz standard, sez Wikipedia).

Here's a gorgeous paragraph on their wedding. I love how it combines obvious (but nevertheless funny) satire on hippieness with emphasis on the importance of the moment. I love its ambiguous attention to the vagaries of memory, the way it never actually disproves that greeting card "soft-focus" it acknowledges, and its strange and disquieting (for Pynchon) certitude about the character of the "Mellow Sixties." And the complexity of those last two sentences!

"Frenesi Margaret, Zoyd Herbert, will you, for real, in trouble or in trippiness, promise to remain always on the groovy high known as Love," and so forth, it may have taken hours or been over in half a minute, there were few if any timepieces among those assembled, and nobody seemed restless, this after all being the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television. It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, the kind to be seen on "sensitivity" greeting cards in another few years. Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace — the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death, all must have been off on some other planet.

I think I can safely say that the first two chapters of Vineland were the most fun I've had with Pynchon since I read Lot 49 in college. Gravity's Rainbow is awesome, but it's exhausting. This is a straight-up blast. Case in point: "More Is Less, a discount store for larger-size women..." Our hero (apparently), Zoyd Wheeler, buys a garish dress there which he wears to better seem insane for his annual jump through a window to keep receiving mental-disability checks.

Nothing's an accident with Pynchon, especially not the jokes, and even more especially not the names. This one got me, made me laugh out loud. And after getting the joke, the store's name made me think of that "less is more" dictum of writers' workshop lore. (Surely no one actually uses this line anymore.) It occurred to me that the star of Raymond Carver, the minimalist's minimalist, Mr. Less-is-More (well, with Gordon Lish's help), had risen and fallen between Pynchon novels: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? came out in 1976, three years after GR, and Carver died in 1988, two years before Vineland.

Pynchon's a maximalist. He's setting his story in the mid-80s, and it's clear from the get-go that part of the point here is going to be mediation, inundation, the sensory saturation that had been kicked up a notch since the 70s. I suspect that Pynchon believes that to trim out the details of modern life to tell intense stories of personal relationship and unspoken tension is a goddam lie. You are not going to get a discussion of how a former dive lumberjack bar has been transformed into an upscale gay bar and restaurant (still named the Log Jam, of course) since Return of the Jedi was filmed nearby in a Raymond Carver story. You are also not going to get brilliant and semi-prescient descriptions (seemingly offhand, like so much important stuff in Pynchon) of TV newscasts and their insatiable appetite for "human interest" fluff, their selective reporting of inconvenient details (choosing not to mention that Zoyd's jump this year was through a window made of candy, and that the media had more or less directed where he would jump rather than reacting to his decision), and their willingness to analyze in absurd detail worthless trivialities while overlooking massive atrocities (here, a panel discusses the development of Zoyd's jumping technique, and I can't help but see this as in part a comment on the rise of the ESPN family of networks).

I don't know that Pynchon cares enough about his contemporary literary milieu to have done this intentionally. But I do think it's interesting that the reigning dictum of 1980s literature has been inverted and put to work as a plus-size ladies' clothing store.

If Wood doesn't "get" the overall trick of an author's writing he tends to dismiss it. This was most evident in his notorious Guardian review (reworked in The Irresponsible Self) of "hysterical realism", a term Wood has coined to sum up the work of a whole slew of contemporary novelists that includes Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.

Is this an issue of not "getting" the works, or of getting them too well and not liking or caring for what they represent? To me, DeLillo and Pynchon in particular have long been overrated. I remember trying to read them in late school and early college and thinking, "why are these awful writers so highly praised?" At the time I didn't realize that they were a reaction against earlier literary trends and that they were trying to be stylistically unusual merely for the sake of being stylistically unusual, or for obscure philosophical points without writing actual philosophy. Paul Graham seems to have had a similar experience with actual philosophy. Wood gets this, and probably better than I do, and I'm not the only one who's noticed the overpraised and under-talented; one thing I very much appreciate about A Reader's Manifesto is its willingness to engage with writing, rather than politics surrounding writing, or whatever propelled DeLillo to fame.

To return to the review:

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to "wake up" a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema) [...]

The problem is that these techniques aren't mimetic: in trying to mimic the supposed techniques that they implicitly criticize, they don't reflect information, but chaos; they aren't hyperreal, but fake. And I'm not convinced modern life is so different in terms of "the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication." Information isn't indiscriminate: I still choose what to read and what to watch most of the time; if I'm exposed to ads, it's because I choose to be. In some essays, Umberto Eco discusses how he sees ideas and battles from the Middle Ages underlying much of everyday life, and the more I read, the more I tend to trace the lineage of intellectual and personal ideas backwards through time. Although our technological and physical world has changed enormously in the last two hundred years, I'm not sure the purposes to which we put technology and power (conquest, sex, etc.) has much. That isn't to say literary style hasn't evolved, as it obviously has, and my preference tends toward novels written after 1900. Ideas have shifted and evolved too. Still, techniques used by modern authors like the hyperrealists just because they can be used doesn't make them an improvement. Furthermore, not all of Wood's loves are mine—I just finished Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady and wouldn't have if I didn't need to. But I have seldom read a stronger argument for the capital-N Novel than I have in How Fiction Works, and even when I sometimes don't find Wood persuasive, the power of his argument and depth of his reading always compels me to think more clearly and deeply about my own positions and thoughts.

Not sure why I like conspiracies but I guess I'm just a sucker for stories about an underground postal service and a secret Presidents' book that contains all of the truth about all the nation's conspiracies. I'm also a sucker for horrible Nicolas Cage flicks. Say what you will about National Treasure 2.. but any movie that can make a trip to the Library of Congress look that hardcore has to be pretty sweet.

Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons:

]]> http://hilbertthm90.wordpress.com/?p=56 Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:10:13 +0000 hilbertthm90 http://hilbertthm90.wordpress.com/?p=56 There are many ways I could go for the next couple of weeks. All are fascinating to me, so I'll let you decide. Vote now!

1. I could lay out in simple terms my favorite Millennium Problem: The Hodge Conjecture. I wrote this up last winter, and it is for all levels. It is conceptual and basically no details rear their ugly head. So if you're interested in what these million dollar prize problems are like vote 1.

2. Several art related things that are well worth analyzing/discussing have come up.
2a. Literature: My Gravity's Rainbow Challenge is well under way or I never really discussed my thoughts on my first Haruki Murakami experience.
2b. Film: I saw my first Pedro Almodovar film. Other directors worth discussing that have come up recently are Harmony Korine, Werner Herzog, Shinya Tsukamoto, and Shyamalan's newest The Happening.
2c. Music: Who has popped up this year as exceptional (Bon Iver, Son Lux, Extra Life, etc) and who has let me down (Death Cab). I have a harsh opinion people don't want to hear.

3. Philosophy: The standard philosophy of mind and language that I've been reading, or some ethical debates (more on Sam Harris maybe?).

4. Choose your own adventure: Anything you've seen or heard of lately pertaining to math, physics, philosophy, or art that you think I may be able to shed some light on. I have an article entitled "Noncommutative Geometry for Pedestrians" that I've been looking for an excuse to read. Also, I have a library system and netflix, so basically any book or film you bring up I should be able to get my hands on.