CHRISTMAS EVE, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he’d look in on the Sailor’s Grave, his old tin can’s tavern on East Main Street. He got there by way of the Arcade, at the East Main end of which sat an old street singer with a guitar and an empty Sterno can for donations. Out in the street a chief yeoman was trying to urinate in the gas tank of a ‘54 Packard Patrician and five or six seamen apprentice were standing around giving encouragement. The old man was singing, in a fine, firm baritone:

Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main,

Sailors and their sweethearts all agree.

Neon signs of red and green

Shine upon the friendly scene,

Welcoming you in from off the sea.

Santa’s bag is filled with all your dreams come true:

Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne,

Barmaids who all love to screw,

All of them reminding you

It’s Christmas Eve on old East Main.

"Yay chief," yelled a seaman deuce. Profane rounded the corner. With its usual lack of warning, East Main was on him.

Since his discharge from the Navy Profane had been road-laboring and when there wasn’t work just traveling, up and down the east coast like a yo-yo; and this had been going on for maybe a year and a half. After that long of more named pavements than he’d care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They had in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon he would have nightmares about: East Main, a ghetto for Drunken Sailors nobody knew what to Do With, sprang on your nerves with all the abruptness of a normal night’s dream turning to nightmare. Dog into wolf, light into twilight, emptiness into waiting presence, here were your underage Marine barfing in the street, barmaid with a ship’s propeller tattooed on each buttock, one potential berserk studying the best technique for jumping through a plate glass window (when to scream Geronimo? before or after the glass breaks?), a drunken deck ape crying back in the alley because last time the SP’s caught him like this they put him in a strait jacket. Underfoot, now and again, came vibration in the sidewalk from an SP streetlights away, beating out a Hey Rube with his night stick; overhead, turning everybody’s face green and ugly, shone mercury-vapor lamps, receding in an asymmetric V to the east where it’s dark and there are no more bars.

—V. (1963)

ONE summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put per­haps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million collars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work. She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she’d always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he’d died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wist-full, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by somebody named Metzger. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they’d only just now found the will. Metzger was to act as co-executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation. Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago. She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorum re­cording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, read­ing of book reviews in the latest Scientific American, into the layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, into the mixing of the twilight’s whiskey sours against the arrival of her husband, Wendell ("Mucho") Maas from work, she wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn’t she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer’s deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye. It took her till the mid­dle of Huntley and Brinkley to remember that last year at three or so one morning there had come this long-distance call, from where she would never know (unless now he’d left a diary) by a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones as second secretary at the Transyl-vanian Consulate, looking for an escaped bat; modu­lated to comic-Negro, then on into hostile Pachuco dialect, full of chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo officer asking her in shrieks did she have relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice, the one he’d talked in all the way down to Mazatlan. "Pierce, please," she’d managed to get in, "I thought we had—"

"But Margo," earnestly, "I’ve just come from Commissioner Weston, and that old man in the fun house was murdered by the same blowgun that killed Professor Quackenbush," or something.

—The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)

A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city.

They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into—they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go … ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard. . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.

—Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody’s truck radio. Zoyd was out of smokes. On the table in the kitchen, next to the Count Chocula box, which turned out to be empty, he found a note from Prairie. "Dad, they changed my shift again, so I rode in with Thapsia. You got a call from Channel 86, they said urgent, I said, you try waking him up sometime. Love anyway, Prairie."

"Froot Loops again I guess," he muttered at the note. With enough Nestle’s Quik on top, they weren’t all that bad, and various ashtrays yielded half a dozen smokable butts. After taking as much time as he could in the bathroom, he finally got around to locating the phone and calling the local TV station to recite to them this year’s press release. But — "You’d better check again, Mr. Wheeler. Word we have is that you’ve been rescheduled." "Check with who, I’m the one’s doin’ it, ain’t I?" "We’re all supposed to be at the Cucumber Lounge." "Well I won’t, I’ll be up at the Log Jam in Del Norte." What was the matter with these people? Zoyd had been planning this for weeks.

Desmond was out on the porch, hanging around his dish, which was always empty because of the blue jays who came screaming down out of the redwoods and carried off the food in it piece by piece. After a while this dog-food diet had begun to give the birds an attitude, some being known to chase cars and pickups for miles down the road and bite anybody who didn’t like it. As Zoyd came out, Desmond gave him an inquiring look. "Just dig yourself," shaking his head at the chocolate crumbs on the dog’s face, "I know she fed you, Desmond, and I know what she fed you too." Desmond followed him as far as the firewood, tail going back and forth to show no hard feelings, and watched Zoyd backing all the way down to the lane before he turned and got on with his day.

—Vineland (1990)

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. Here have come to rest a long scarr’d sawbuck table, with two mismatch’d side-benches, from the Lancaster County branch of the family,— some Second-Street Chippen­dale, including an interpretation of the fam’d Chinese Sofa, with a high canopy of yards of purple Stuff that might be drawn all ’round to make a snug, dim tent,— a few odd Chairs sent from England before the War,— mostly Pine and Cherry about, nor much Mahogany, excepting a sinister and wonderful Card Table which exhibits the cheaper sinu­soidal Grain known in the Trade as Wand’ring Heart, causing an illu­sion of Depth into which for years children have gaz’d as into the illustrated Pages of Books…along with so many hinges, sliding Mor­tises, hidden catches, and secret compartments that neither the Twins nor their Sister can say they have been to the end of it. Upon the Wall, banish’d to this Den of Parlor Apes for its Remembrance of a Time bet­ter forgotten, reflecting most of the Room,— the Carpet and Drapes a little fray’d, Whiskers the Cat stalking beneath the furniture, looking out with eyes finely reflexive to anything suggesting Food,— hangs a Mirror in an inscrib’d Frame, commemorating the "Mischianza," that memorable farewell Ball stag’d in ‘77 by the British who’d been Occu­pying the City, just before their Withdrawal from Philadelphia.

This Christmastide of 1786, with the War settl’d and the Nation bick­ering itself into Fragments, wounds bodily and ghostly, great and small, go aching on, not ev’ry one commemorated,— nor, too often, even recounted. Snow lies upon all Philadelphia, from River to River, whose further shores have so vanish’d behind curtains of ice-fog that the City today might be an Isle upon an Ocean. Ponds and Creeks are frozen over, and the Trees a-glare to the last slightest Twig,— Nerve-Lines of con­centrated Light. Hammers and Saws have fallen still, bricks lie in snow-cover’d Heaps, City-Sparrows, in speckl’d Outbursts, hop in and out of what Shelter there may be,— the nightward Sky, Clouds blown to Chalk-smears, stretches above the Northern Liberties, Spring Garden and Ger-mantown, its early moon pale as the Snow-Drifts,— smoke ascends from Chimney-Pots, Sledging-Parties adjourn indoors, Taverns bustle,— freshly infus’d Coffee flows ev’ryplace, borne about thro’ Rooms front and back, whilst Madeira, which has ever fuel’d Association in these Parts, is deploy’d nowadays like an ancient Elixir upon the seething Pot of Politics,— for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the Distance to a Star.

—Mason & Dixon (1997)

"Now single up all lines!"

"Cheerly now … handsomely … very well! Prepare to cast her off!"

"Windy City, here we come!"

"Hurrah! Up we go!"

It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconve­nience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew be­longing to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind.

When the ship reached cruising altitude, those features left behind on the ground having now dwindled to all but microscopic size, Randolph St. Cosmo, the ship commander, announced, "Now secure the Special Sky De­tail," and the boys, each dressed neatly in the summer uniform of red-and-­white-striped blazer and trousers of sky blue, spiritedly complied.

They were bound this day for the city of Chicago, and the World’s Columbian Exposition recently opened there. Since their orders had come through, the "scuttlebutt" among the excited and curious crew had been of little besides the fabled "White City," its great Ferris wheel, alabaster temples of commerce and industry, sparkling lagoons, and the thousand more such wonders, of both a scientific and an artistic nature, which awaited them there.

"Oh, boy!" cried Darby Suckling, as he leaned over the lifelines to watch the national heartland deeply swung in a whirling blur of green far below, his tow-colored locks streaming in the wind past the gondola like a banner to leeward. (Darby, as my faithful readers will remember, was the "baby" of the crew, and served as both factotum and mascotte, singing as well the difficult treble parts whenever these adolescent aeronaunts found it impossible to con­tain song of some kind.) "I can’t hardly wait!" he exclaimed.

"For which you have just earned five more demerits!" advised a stern voice close to his ear, as he was abruptly seized from behind and lifted clear of the lifelines. "Or shall we say ten? How many times," continued Lindsay Nose­worth, second-in-command here and known for his impatience with all man­ifestations of the slack, "have you been warned, Suckling, against informality of speech?" With the deftness of long habit, he flipped Darby upside down, and held the flyweight lad dangling by the ankles out into empty space—"terra firma" by now being easily half a mile below—proceeding to lecture him on the many evils of looseness in one’s expression, not least among them being the ease with which it may lead to profanity, and worse. As all the while, however, Darby was screaming in terror, it is doubtful how many of the useful sentiments actually found their mark.

—Against The Day (2006)

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.

"To make off with hubby’s fortune, yeah, I think I heard of that happenin once or twice around L.A. And . . . you want me to do what exactly?" He found the paper bag he’d brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight-chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hardon Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did.

—Inherent Vice (2009)

Ok, so this is what I was supposed to write before I got distracted with the post below. Pynchon’s Against the Day (that labyrinthine brick of a novel), Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, and Benjamin’s Arcades Project: what do they have in common? Well, firstly, I am going to pop a disclaimer on the following: I have not actually read any of the Arcades Project, but I have read about the Arcades Project (I shall be reading the Arcades Project in the coming months for those who are doubting whether this will contain anything relevant at all) in the Friedberg book which is one of those delightful academic texts that happens to be eminently readable and contain a large number of pictures. Secondly, this will be continued as a dialectical response to the lack of continuation of other posts further down this blog that have not been continued (so far).

In Adorno’s introduction to Schriften, he writes:

He correctly called the images of his philosophy dialectical: the plan for the book Pariser Passagen envisages as much of a panorama of dialectical images as their theory. The concept of a dialectical image was meant objectively, not psychologically: the preservation of the modern as at once the new, the already past and the ever-same was to have been the work’s central philosophical film and central dialectical image.

The first sentence, regarding the correctly called dialectic of Benjamin’s philosophical image is a softening of Adorno’s stance that Benjamin was not dialectical enough in his work: another fine example being his letter written in response to the second (?) draft of ‘The Work of Art’ essay. However, the key in this Adorno penned quotation, is the latter part, the dialectical image of the ‘new, the already past and the ever-same’.

What ties the Arcades Project and Against the Day together is that they are both studies of modernity. Freidberg, through studying Benjamin, gives a detailed account of the development of a mobilised gaze (structurally coerced gaze towards consumption) that develops through modernity, and capitalist compact at the end of the 19th, and beginning of the 20th centuries. I’m not going to provide a summation at the moment, but I will do in due course. The idea is then, that this development fascinates Benjamin, that the Arcades of Paris, followed by the qualitative evolutionary shift to the department store, are descendants in a lineage that takes into account the World’s Fairs of the 19th century, the mobilisation of women as consumers, and the shift in the gaze (and concurrently consumption) that accompanies the technological developments of the panopticon, through to the cinema. Similarly, Against the Day is concerned with the same period – that spans the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, to the end of the First World War – and the same themes: it’s a study of the development of modern capitalism, of the resistance of the Colorado Anarchists, and the insidious effects of the railroad on global commerce (the man to good transformative).

It becomes increasingly apparent when reading Against the Day that Pynchon has spent a great deal of time familiarising himself with the currents of critical theory. There are a number of references that make this clear through the text (again, more details to come), to the evolutionary development of its broadly Marxist approach, concerned, as it is, with the flow of history towards capital’s first significant destructive telos: that of the First World War.

I’m going to stop there for now. So, what I then propose to try and structure is some account of the broad structural similarities of the two projects towards the dialectical image of the whole that Adorno outlines. Whether Benjamin prefigures postmodernism with the Arcades Project? What can be derived from the shared thematic preoccupations of developmental modernity?

When Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarism, in 2006, for including in his book, Atonement,  details he read in a nurse’s wartime autobiography, he received a tremendous amount of support from fellow novelists, including a letter from Thomas Pynchon, who wrote, “Oddly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy.”

Pynchon as historical novelist? Of course, I guess. He has to set his wild digressions and plot permutations somewhere. His characters have to begin their restless, paranoia-induced quests from someplace.  It’s usually not here, and usually not now, not even close. That is, except for a few of his books, like Vineland, released in 1990, and his new novel, Inherent Vice, published earlier this year. Both are set in times we can relate to without too much trouble. Inherent Vice even follows the well-known form of the detective story.

Though he might not rely on reams of research to create the world in which it’s set, Inherent Vice carries forward questions about the nature of historical fiction that Pynchon addressed most urgently in Against the Day: How does the past feel like as it’s being lived, why doesn’t the future ever turn out the way it looks like from the present, and what’s it like to be a historical novelist?

Doc Sportello is a detective living in Gordita Beach, Southern California, Pynchon’s fictional town that some say is suspiciously like Manhattan Beach. It’s 1970. The story begins with the request from his old girlfriend, Shasta, to stop the possible kidnapping of her lover, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, by Wolfmann’s wife and her boyfriend. When Wolfmann and Shasta both disappear, Doc is jumps into the mystery.

Set in the golden world of hazy, smoggy South Bay sunsets (or is that just the reflection of light through all that pot smoke?), Doc juggles cases and clients, alliances and enemies, without messing up his sandals or hurting his friends. But the interesting thing is that he’s on a serious case, with real clues and victims and dead bodies. Doc might not be too bright, or tall, and he’s stoned most of the time, but he’s not a pushover. He interviews suspects and follows leads. Sometimes the clues take him nowhere. Sometimes the alibis overlap: “Being the continuation of a long story Doc had forgotten, or maybe missed, the beginning of.” But Doc, like all true detectives, recreates history, and solves a crime, by assembling a story from bits of the past he rescues from oblivion.

Against the Day, the massive, heartfelt, amazing, ingenious, and exhausting historical epic, seems to have at its center, or one of its centers, strong ideas about historical fiction and the nature of its writing. (At 1,085 pages it might have at its heart a comment about its own length, but it doesn’t; about three Inherent Vices could fit in its trunk.)

The characters here are all in a sense creating history, actually creating it just as surely as Pynchon recreates it on the page. But instead of playing it straight, or straighter than he has in his other historical epics, he loosens the threads a bit and creates something more—history simultaneously made in the present and remembered in the future, history as it could have been, as it might have been, If only….the messy and mostly tragic reality of time didn’t march on and trample it down. Lost possibilities, as surely at the idealistic 60s lost out to the 70s, and the innocent world one century ago was crushed by World War I.

Set during the run-up to the first World War, but before the war was inevitable or even comprehendible, the characters are free to dream about other worlds to create and lives to live. Some of the great poignancy in the book comes from us knowing the terrible toll that the terrible war was about to take. Some of the characters do, too, after being visited by beings from the future (our present). The impact is dependent on our own knowledge of this war’s devastation, and it’s one of the novel’s weaknesses: World War I is held out as a tragedy so profound that it isn’t even worth describing. It’s as if Pynchon takes for granted that we, his readers, will know deep in our bones just how horrible it is, or was, or could be. If we don’t, we miss some of the emotional impact. (He is much better at evoking a more recent tragedy: 9/11. In a 15-page set-piece that seems almost dropped into the book, Pynchon describes with intensity and horror the picture of “the great city brought to sorrow and ruin.”)

The novel isn’t counterfactual, as if a piece of history didn’t happen, or something strange did (like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle). It’s just well, different, a narrative with  multiple realities, supporting the possibility of multiple futures, about characters navigating multiple worlds, caught in the past and trying to make their own futures. “…there must now and then appear one compassionate time-machine story, time travel in the name of love, with no expectation, of success, let alone reward,” says one character near the end of the story.

It’s exhausting work, living in a world in which choices reverberate both forwards and backwards, impacting your world and the worlds that never were, and readers might feel a bit like one character does, near the end of the novel, who gets on and off trains “bound for destinations he was less and less sure of.” “It was like the convergence of a complex function. He would come to for brief intervals, and then go back inside a regime of starvation and hallucination and mental absence. He didn’t always know where he was, or—especially unsettling for an old Vectorial hand—which direction he was going. He might drift into consciousness to find he was traveling up the Danube, through the Iron Gates, at the rail of a bouncing little steamer gazing up at the rock walls of the Defile of Kzan, taken inside the roaring of the rapids, as the riven, beaten to mist, rose to encompass him, like a god’s protective cloak—another time he might all at once be seeing Lake Baikal, or facing some chill boundary at least that pure and uncompromising.”

Now back to Inherent Vice, definitely a “compassionate time-machine story” but one set in the recent past, and not too far away: 1970 (but about as far away from the present as Gravity’s Rainbow was to World War II at the time of its publication). Instead of creating the counter-fictional poignancy of characters trying vainly to live in a future which some of them already know will never happen, there’s Doc Sportello, trying to keep alive a little bit of the spirit of the 60s while bad cops, rogue real estate agents, and Charlie Manson in the hills, totally wreck his buzz.

It’s a lonely task: “…and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find his way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…how a certain hand might reach out of the darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.”

Doc’s moral choices, the detective’s choices, seem to embody the theme of the almost-future, the future we could have had if we didn’t fuck it up. As Sauncho, Doc’s pal, says near the end of the book, “…yet there was no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live now and forever.”

The “almost” here is the key. It’s the myriad almost-futures in Against the Day, and the ideal future that almost took place in Gordita Beach. But we grow old, and Doc Sportello’s on the case, driving down the coast, lost in the fog, looking for the next exit, in another gorgeous ending, a series of beautiful, haunting last images (similar to the beauty of the last few paragraphs of Vineland) that shows just how much  heart Pynchon truly has.

And for fun, here’s Pynchon himself, narrating a little promotional film for the book.

]]> http://ficciones.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/inherent-vice/ Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:22:05 +0000 basileios http://ficciones.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/inherent-vice/

Ένα νέο βιβλίο από τον Thomas Pynchon είναι γιά μένα τμήμα μιας τελετουργίας ανάγνωσης που λίγο-πολύ με αποκόβει από τον υπόλοιπο κόσμο. Η λατρεία της ανάγνωσης των κειμένων του είναι αρκετή να με κάνει εντελώς αντικοινωνικό – περισσότερο από όσο συνήθως εννοώ. Η κάθε λέξη και κάθε φράση που διαβάζω για πρώτη φορά από ένα βιβλίο του αντιμετωπίζεται σαν να είμαι ο Μωυσής που για πρώη φορά διαβάζει τις δέκα εντολές…

Είχα την χαρά στην ζωή μου να διαβάσω δύο βιβλία του την στιγμή που εκδόθηκαν – το Mason & Dixon και το Against the Day – και χθες ξεκίνησα το Inherent Vice. Αν και έχω πολύ γλυκά αισθήματα για το Mason & Dixon νομίζω πως μου λείπει η αίσθηση της ΄πρώτης ανάγνωσής του, μια που ποτέ δεν κράτησα σημειώσεις γι’ αυτό. Για το Against the Day πριν τρία χρόνια το blog που κρατούσα στο http://againsttheday.wordpress.com ίσως ήταν από τους σημαντικότερους παράγοντες που με βοήθησαν στην – κατ’ εμέ – κατανόηση ενός δύσκολου βιβλίου.

Τo Inherent Vice είναι κατά γενική ομολογία ένα σχετικά ελαφρύ βιβλίο – που συγκρίνεται από κριτικούς με το Vineland ή το Crying of Lot 49 (αν και έχω σοβαρές αιτίες να αμφιβάλω για την ελαφρύτητα αυτών των βιβλίων). Παρ’ όλη την ελαφρύτητα όμως αποφάσισα να κάνω το ίδιο με το Against the Day και ακόμη και να το επεκτείνω λίγο:

Κατά την διάρκεια της ανάγνωσης τις επόμενες εβδομάδες θα λειτουργεί σε έντονο ρυθμό το blog Inherent Vice στην διεύθυνση:

http://inherentvice.wordpress.com

αλλά ανά πάσα στιγμή θα ‘τουιτάρω’ τις μικρο-σκέψεις μου στο twitter στην διεύθυνση:

http://twitter.com/viceinherent

Όσοι πιστοί, προσέλθετε!

Oh if I could just get to Poland…

Of Pynchon And Vice: America’s Inherent Other (International Pynchon Week), June 09-12, 2010, Lublin, Poland

It has only been two and a half years since the publication of Pynchon’s last output, the monolithic Against the Day, but as of today the writer has a new novel on the shelves. Inherent Vice,  the story of a stoner private eye investigating the disappearance of a rich Nazi sympathizer, clocks in at just over 400 pages and appears to be a little more accessible than some of his more celebrated works. Which is great news for us, who like to laugh but sometimes aren’t smart or focused enough to keep a mental tally of hundreds of characters popping up across thousands of pages.

Here is the synposis, probably written by Pynchon himself:

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

Apparently there are already discussions underway about turning the novel into a movie, which would be a first , and judging by the synopsis, probably end up pretty similar to The Big Lebowski. And, in a super bizarre move for a writer who has shunned publicity for his entire career, a promo video was released today with Pynchon himself narrating.

You can order the novel here. Also, Pynchon fans might take interest in this map published in the latest issue of Wired.

I learned from the all-knowing Google that today is Nikola Tesla’s 115th birthday.

Surprisingly, this scientist has appeared in at least three recent works of fiction. (Links will take you to the BookPage reviews.)

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (who doesn’t appear in that book?)

Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else

And Toni Jordan’s Addition—but just as a photo on the wall.

Anyone have other Tesla spottings in literature?

Ormai alcuni anni fa ho letto L’incanto del lotto 49 di Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. rimanendone fortemente impressionato. Un romanzo breve dalle mille sfaccettature, un vero e proprio diamante, in cui una giovane casalinga Oedipa Maas - e con lei il lettore – si trova suo malgrado invischiata sempre più in un complotto inestricabile. Successivamente ho preso a informarmi su questo curioso autore e sulla letteratura così detta postmoderna. Alla fine ho deciso di iniziare una lettura “totale” della sua opera in attesa di Against the Day (Contro il giorno a breve in Italia, dire che in patria è stato «stroncato» è quasi un «understatement») e Inherent Vice. 

I suoi racconti giovanili sono ora raccolti in Un lento apprendistato, celebre per l’introduzione dell’autore stesso. 

Trenta pagine di puro Pynchon-su-Pynchon in testa alle 200 che inanellano cinque short stories scritte in formidabile crescendo dal ‘58 (Pioggerella) al ‘64 (L’ integrazione segreta certamente il migliore del lotto, non a caso il più tardo). Vergate nell’ 84, quasi vent’ anni dopo il folgorante debutto con V. e quasi dieci dopo la consacrazione (National Book Award) con L’ arcobaleno della gravità, misero in riga tanto i critici avversi che i pynchoniani troppo entusiasti. Lui prendeva entrambi in contropiede, auto accusandosi beffardo di mancanza d’ orecchio, ingenuità, approssimazione scientifica, e poi razzismo, confusione, scarso uso del dizionario, plagio di vecchie guide Baedecker. I rilievi di Pynchon risultano forse più interessanti dei racconti. Per alcuni, come Entropia, la sofisticazione dell’umorismo e dell’intreccio è senz’altro un pregio invidiabile, per altri sembrerebbe scadere in un vuoto formalismo. D’altronde nel mettere in mostra un apprendistato sono più le debolezze e gli errori quelli che vengono a galla. I Trilobiti di Breece D’ J Pancake (Breece Dexter John Pancake) sono distanti anni luce. O meglio ere geologiche.

Luc Tuymans
Nog tot 2 augustus in Wiels

(c) Luc Tuymans, Against the day I, 2008 Oil on canvas 231 x 171,5 cm Courtesy : David Zwirner, New York and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

I’m probably behind in finding out about this (stupid grad school), but apparently Pynchon has a new book coming out next year called Inherent Vice.  From the description I found here:

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

Obviously a bit of a switch up from Against the Day, but given the character of Lew Basnight, I can see a certain continuation of theme happening as he goes into a detective novel.

I can’t wait to play spot the Bodine.

I’m now past where I have read before in Against the Day. Only 900 pages to go. Something I think I have noticed so far. I remember reviews saying that ATD is Pynchon’s “most accessible” book. I think I know why. Pynchon’s usual MO is to tell traditional stories in ways that completely obscure their form so that we may see something substantive that form hides. Pynchon is on to something different here. Rather than disguising form, he is forcing several explicit and distinct storytelling forms to coexist in the same narrative. Even though it is still unusual, the explicit tropes of the forms make it feel more familiar in it’s narrative pattern, and thus, more readable.

Thomas Pynchon is now one of my favorite writers. I didn’t know much about him before I received, shortly after it’s release, Against The Day as a Chanukah gift. The book took me nearly one year to finish due to stopping several times. As if I needed to come up for air as if I was nearly drowning in the 1089 pages of details framing the story, world and characters he created. I’ve since read Vineland and I’m about half-way through V. (school is getting in the way to a degree).

Pynchon’s novels are incredibly detailed and present surreal settings. That’s why I enjoyed Against the Day so much. A group in the story flew through the earth in a giant, invisible dirigible. Tesla was credited for creating a communications device the same group used. Some characters have what seemed liked 100 pages dedicated to their backgrounds. I loved it.

I have a friend who is in grad school for a MA in English. She once told me that Pynchon’s novels are read by people who want to pick them apart. To that extend, there is a great resource out there for the Pynchon reader. The Pynchon Wiki tracks characters, events, and pretty much anything else from six of his books. ThomasPynchon.com is an unofficial new type website mostly aggregating links to articles pubilished about the author or his works. To that extent, another fascinating note about Pynchon is that he’s very, very recluse. Although he’s been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and won quite a few awards, he does not grant interviews or make public appearances of any kinds. His awards are accepted on his behalf by colleagues.

Here are some Pynchon links…
- Wikipedia
- ThomasPynchon.com
- The Pynchon Wiki
- Mahalo

Darcy James Argue is a New York based composer that leads the truly sweet Secret Society Big Band which performs in and around NY. He writes all of the material for this 18 piece monster, and with it (said monster), he manages to create an original sound that still leaves plenty of space for monster members to add their own improvised contributions.

Here’s a great video of the monster in action.

In addition, he is a constant blogger of interesting thoughtful content, and was a major influence on me in the creation of this site. Check out his band’s blog here.

1: What got you into creative/improvised music making, and what keeps you there?

What got me into it? I played trumpet in the highschool bigband, but I was a really terrible trumpet player. Piano was a lot less frustrating — you put your finger down on the right key, and the note you want actually comes out. Every time. Not like trumpet. Playing piano also allowed me to listen more to the big picture, to what the whole band was playing. I very quickly got the idea, “Hmm, that doesn’t actually sound all that hard. I bet I could do that.”

What keeps me in it? Believe me, if it was remotely possible for me to do something other with my life than lead an 18-piece bigband, I’d do that. In a heartbeat.

2: Breakthrough album(s) and Why?

One record: Maria Schneider’s Evanescence. Especially the first tune, “Wyrgly.”

Why? Goddamn, just listen to that track, fercrissakes. For better or worse, “Wyrgly” convinced me that bigband wasn’t a dead end. No, more than that — it convinced me that a bigband could express the precise kind of forward-looking jazz I was interested in, and do it better than a smaller ensemble.

The juxtaposition of those climbing half-time shuffle figures grinding against the wispy, scattershot double-time stabs (about a minute into the tune) remains one of the most audacious rhythmic conceits I’ve ever heard. And that noise Ben Monder makes during his solo break is everyone’s favorite Ben Monder moment.

3: How do other art disciplines affect your work?

Storytelling is key. The difference between good musicians and great musicians is that great musicians are genius storytellers. Any other art that happens in real time — theatre, film, television, dance, standup comedy, spoken word, performance art — is (or should be) tremendously instructive for the creative musician. But ultimately, everything always comes back to storytelling.

4: Favorite Film(s)?

How long do you have? Okay… limiting myself to a desert island Top 10 list? Citizen Kane for its punkrock badassery (who the hell does that with their first movie?); The Big Sleep for being the definitive noir; Notorious for the camera + Ingrid Bergman; The Third Man for showing everyone how to really introduce a character; Seven Samurai for being the most awesomest epic movie ever; Rififi for merging French existentialism with the cynicism of a casualty of McCarthy, and also for that breathtaking heist scene; The Sweet Smell of Success for being the definitive New York City film (now and forever), and for actually using Chico Hamilton’s band; McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the ecstatic patience, for being filmed in my backyard, and for making Deadwood possible; The Godfather Part II for Fredo; Blue Velvet for Dean Stockwell; and Goodfellas for the obsessive attention to detail. (Yeah, okay, I realize that’s eleven. No, fuck you.)

5: Favorite Film Score(s)?

Oh come now. Okay, fine — I will limit myself to just two:

Psycho and Vertigo.

(See, that was easy.)

6: Favorite Fiction Reading?

Ever? Crime and Punishment, with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest a close second.

Lately? Honestly, I need to find a much healthier balance between online reading/writing and dead-tree reading. The last novel I read that really killed me was Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. At the moment I am (slowly) making my way through Against The Day (god, that one chapter with Webb Traverse and the railroad bridge is effing brilliant).

7: Favorite Non-Fiction Reading?

I am currently enjoying Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which already, in the first 100 pages, contains everything anyone needs to know about contemporary American politics. On deck is Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

8: Favorite Guilty Pleasure Music?

No such thing. Seriously. You might (justifiably) feel guilty about, like, cheating on your spouse, or betting your kid’s college fund on an online poker game. But feeling guilty about enjoying music? Life’s too short, dude.

9: Favorite Under Rated Musician(s)?

Oy. Um… Mary Lou Williams. George Russell. Booker Little. Jimmy Giuffre (still). Late Duke Ellington. Sun Ra and his inner circle. Thad Jones as a cornet player. Bob Brookmeyer as a valve trombone player. Mel Lewis. Lewis Taylor. Post-1970 Gil Evans. Henry Threadgill. Scott Robinson. Andrew D’Angelo.

10: Recommended Artist(s)/Shout Outs?

Sherisse Rogers. Joe Phillips. Matana Roberts. Todd Sickafoose. Corey Dargel. Everyone who has ever played a Secret Society gig or rehearsal.

As told, in one sentence, by Thomas Pynchon:

And before them lay exactly the sort of adventure that was sure to appeal to thier too-often-ill-considered taste for the histrionic yet unprofitable.

Pynchon, Thomas: Against the Day page 435; Penguin, 2007.

Arguably one of the more beautiful pieces of descriptive prose I’ve come across recently:

Later that morning, together with Professor Vanderjuice, they piled into a motorcar to pay a visit to the municipal dump at the edge of town, gray with perpetual smoke, its limits undefined. “Walloping Wellesianism!” cried the Professor, “it’s just a whole junkyard full!” Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the picked-over hulks of failed time machines — Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-98s — broken, defective, sorched by catastrophic flares of of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and built, so hopefully, to prevail….A strewn field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith and bad engineering, expressed in sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler’s alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid, magnalium, and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time thier pilots might have found, so allowing thier craft to avoid such ignominious fates?

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, page 408; Penguin 2007.

Emphasis mine.