di Amedeo Buonanno

Thomas Pynchon, Contro il giorno, Rizzoli, 2009, 1136 pp.

Thomas R. Pynchon è sicuramente uno degli autori americani più interessanti della letteratura contemporanea. La sua riservatezza, diventata leggendaria tanto da farne lo scrittore recluso per antonomasia, insieme ad alcune sue particolarità, come l’invio del comico Irwin Corey a ritirare per lui il prestigioso National Book Award nel 1974 per Gravity’s Rainbow o come il rifiuto della Howells Medal dell’American Academy, sempre per Gravity’s Rainbow, dovuto ad una mancata assegnazione del premio Pulitzer per lo stesso libro, ne fanno un personaggio sui generis ed interessante. Il nostro interesse qui, però, non è rivolto al personaggio Pynchon ma al suo penultimo romanzo, Contro il giorno, pubblicato negli Stati Uniti nel 2006 ma che solo quest’anno, dopo tre anni di lavoro, viene pubblicato da Rizzoli nella traduzione di Massimo Bocchiola. Il libro si presenta imponente già a prima vista con le sue 1127 pagine che rappresentano un deterrente per molti lettori e uno stimolo per gli appassionati. Nella sua mastodontica mole è racchiusa un’infinità di storie e di personaggi che, come spesso capita nei romanzi di Pynchon, sono uniti da fili conduttori che solo durante la lettura vengono man mano messi a fuoco e non necessariamente in modo definitivo.

L’effetto principale della lettura di un’opera di Pynchon è lo straniamento indotto sul lettore che si ritrova catapultato in un mondo complottista, pieno di intrighi, in cui si perdono i punti di riferimento della realtà e della fantasia, in cui il lettore diventa partecipe del senso di smarrimento che gli stessi personaggi di Pynchon sentono sulla propria pelle e che non si risolve nemmeno nel finale (un esempio su tutti è quello di Oedipa Mass ne L’incanto del lotto 49). La conclusione dei romanzi di Pynchon è, infatti, caratterizzata da un’assenza totale di consolazione e, usando le parole di Umberto Eco, “il lettore rimane confrontato con una serie di interrogativi senza risposta” (da Il superuomo di massa). La forte entropia, intesa come quantità smisurata di personaggi, piani narrativi, storie, relazioni, rende la lettura di un romanzo di Pynchon un’impresa non sempre facile perché abituati ad utilizzare le normali categorie di sequenzialità e tempo che puntualmente il Nostro elude per creare un affresco vorticoso che ben rappresenta l’aspetto ciclonico e ipercinetico del mondo consumistico e mediatico in cui viviamo. Tecniche come il pastiche, l’uso delle citazioni e la manipolazione delle fonti, care al postmodernismo, vengono utilizzate da Pynchon con disinvoltura creando collegamenti intertestuali ed extratestuali che rappresentano un ulteriore complicazione al già non semplice quadro narrativo. Pynchon riesce, attraverso la profonda ironia ed il sottile sarcasmo, ad esprimere le contraddizioni insite nel mondo e nei rapporti umani di oggi.

Vediamo quindi come tutte queste caratteristiche si realizzano in Contro il giorno.

Il romanzo si snoda lungo i trent’anni che vanno dall’Esposizione Mondiale di Chicago del 1893 fino agli anni immediatamente successivi la Prima Guerra Mondiale. Il lettore viene condotto in luoghi reali ed immaginari, dal Messico rivoluzionario alla Londra vittoriana di Jack lo Squartatore, dalla Gottinga della celebre facoltà di matematica ai Balcani, da Venezia alle foreste siberiane di Tunguska, dall’utopistica città di Shambala al mondo di Hollywood e del cinema muto. Tutto quello che accade in terra, dalle lotte di classe dei minatori in Colorado al nuovo business della giovane azienda cinematografica hollywoodiana, dall’impatto di un meteorite avvenuto nel 1908 a Tunguska al crollo del campanile di San Marco a Venezia nel 1902, viene osservato dall’equipaggio dell’aeronave Inconvenience, i famosi Compari del Caso (oggetto anche di una fantomatica serie di romanzi di avventura puntualmente nominata da Pynchon lungo tutto il racconto). Il gruppo è così composto: il capitano Dr. Randolph St. Cosmo; il secondo in comando Lindsay Noseworth, autonominato vigilante morale della ciurma; il goffo Miles Blundell con doti paranormali; il mozzo factotum Darby Suckling; l’irriverente Chick Counterfly; Pugnax, un cane parlante che ama la lettura. La truppa dell’Inconvenience si muove da un luogo all’altro del pianeta in esplorazione e talvolta portando soccorso ma rispettando la regola di “non interferire mai con le usanze legali di qualsiasi località terrestre ci capiti toccare” (pag.18). Sembrano contemporaneamente astronauti e creature soprannaturali già dalle prime pagine, dove si inizia a delineare la natura quasi mistica di quello che sarà il loro viaggio/ricerca della mappa dell’itinerario Sfinciuno (una strada alternativa alla Via della Seta che i Compari del Caso hanno avuto il compito di trovare). La mappa può essere letta solo da un complesso apparato di lenti e specchi di Spato d’Islanda (o calcite), il cristallo birifrazionale che ha il potere di raddoppiare la struttura della realtà e aprire varchi verso mondi paralleli.

In ogni romanzo di Pynchon, caratterizzato da una ipernarrazione famelica (Marino Sinibaldi, Paranoia e parodia: Thomas Pynchon e la complessità – in La dissoluzione onesta), convivono sempre diverse tracce narrative in cui una però percorre tutta l’opera per divenire così la spina dorsale dell’impianto narrativo. Nel caso di Contro il giorno, fermo restando la presenza “ultraterrena” dell’Inconvenience e delle sue gesta che permea tutto il racconto, la traccia narrativa predominante è rappresentata dalla storia della famiglia Traverse (gli antenati di Frenesi e Prairie del romanzo Vineland). Webb Traverse è il simbolo della lotta dei minatori contro i potenti ed arroganti capitalisti, rappresentati dal magnate privo di scrupoli Scarsdale Vibe che vede nella sua azione prevaricatrice ed annientatrice del proletariato addirittura un’investitura divina:

“Questi comunardi parlano un’insalata di lingue straniere, ma i loro eserciti sono i maledetti sindacati dei lavoratori, la loro artiglieria è la dinamite, assassinano i nostri grandi uomini e bombardano le nostre città e il loro scopo è privarci dei beni che abbiamo conquistato con il sudore, di dividere e suddividere fra le loro orde le nostre terre e le nostre case, tutto quello che amiamo, fino a renderle sordide e lerce come le loro. O Cristo, Tu che ci hai detto di amarli, quale prova dello spirito è questa, quale tenebra è stata gettata sul nostro senno, che non sappiamo più riconoscere la mano del Maligno? [...]Davanti a queste maree saremo sommersi. Dov’è il nostro Cristo, il nostro Agnello? La Promessa?”

Vedendo la sua angoscia Foley pensò soltanto a consolarlo “Nelle nostre preghiere…”

“Foley, questo risparmiamelo, quanto ci occorre è cominciare a ucciderli in quantità rilevanti, perché nient’altro ha avuto effetto. Tutta questa finzione – di ‘uguaglianza’, di ‘negoziato’ – è stata una farsa crudele, crudele per ambo le parti. Quando il popolo del Signore è in pericolo, tu sai cosa Egli richieda”

“Di colpire”

“Colpire presto e spesso”

“Spero che nessuno ci stia ascoltando”

“Dio ascolta. Quanto agli uomini, non mi vergogno di quello che deve’essere fatto”

(pagg. 352-353)

Per mano di due sicari (Deuce e Sloat) inviati da Vibe, Webb viene ucciso e la sua famiglia, formata dalla moglie Mayva, dai figli Frank, Reef, Kit e dalla figlia Lake, si divide ed ogni componente prende la propria strada.

Kit studierà matematica a Yale, sovvenzionato dallo stesso Vibe, diventando un vettorista (esperto di vettori) per poi perfezionare le sue conoscenze alla celebre facoltà di Gottinga. Verrà poi assunto in una società aerospaziale torinese e sposerà Dahlia Rideout (“Dally”), figlia di Merle, un fotografo incontrato all’inizio del racconto dai Compari del Caso ed abbandonata piccola dalla madre Erlys innamoratasi del mago italiano Luca Zombini.

Frank diventerà esperto di metallurgia andando a lavorare anche in Messico dove infine, spinto da una sorta di eredità morale trasmessa dal padre, aiuterà i gruppi rivoluzionari del luogo. Si innamorerà della bellissima Yashmeen Halfcourt, una brillante matematica protetta dalla società segreta neopitagorica dei V.A.T.I., con cui avrà una figlia, Ljubica.

Reef vuole seguire le orme del padre come “bombarolo” (continuando la tradizione del celebre dinamitardo Kieselguhr Kid probabilmente alter ego del padre) e sposerà Estrella Brigs (“Stray”) da cui avrà un figlio, Jesse.

Lake, dopo un trascorso da prostituta, si sposa con Deuce pur sapendo che si tratta dell’omicida del padre e per un primo periodo intavola con il marito e l’amico Sloat Fresno un menage a trois perfettamente consapevole, finché Sloat non decide di andare via (decisione che lo condurrà alla morte per mano di Frank).

Potremmo dire che, fondamentalmente, il romanzo è la storia di una vendetta: quella che i figli dell’ anarchico dinamitardo Webb Traverse vogliono consumare ai danni del mandante dell’assassinio del padre, il plutocrate Scarsdale Vibe. I personaggi rispondono a questa idea di vendetta in modo diverso, mentre Reef e Frank vanno alla ricerca degli assassini, Kit cede a Vibe in cambio del pagamento degli studi universitari, e Lake sposa addirittura uno dei killer.

Con la sua ipernarratività, caratterizzata dal seguire anche le storie che appaiono a prima vista secondarie, Pynchon ci permette di osservare queste quattro vite e la moltitudine di esistenze ad esse collegate, terminando, infine, con una sorta di ritorno all’ovile di alcuni dei protagonisti, interiormente distrutti come lo è il mondo dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale.

Il Tempo “nostro fato, nostro signore, nostro distruttore” (pag. 450) è sicuramente un protagonista principale di quest’opera. Se da un lato vi è un fluire continuo della dimensione temporale che va dal 1893 fino alla fine della Prima Guerra Mondiale, dall’altro si ragiona sulla natura del Tempo e della possibilità di sovvertire il suo normale flusso. I Compari del Caso, verranno infatti a contatto col gruppo degli Sconfinanti, dei veri e propri viaggiatori del tempo il cui emissario Mr. Ace dirà:

“Siamo qui fra di voi in cerca di un asilo dal nostro presente – il vostro futuro – un ‘epoca di carestia mondiale, scorte di carburante esaurite, povertà terminale: la fine dell’esperimento capitalistico. Una volta compresa la semplice verità termodinamica che le risorse della Terra sono limitate, e anzi destinate a esaurirsi presto, l’illusione capitalistica andò a rotoli. Quelli di noi che dissero questa verità ad alta voce furono denunciati come eretici, nemici della fede economica prevalente. Come dei dissenzienti religiosi di un’epoca passata, fummo costretti a emigrare, senz’altra scelta che salpare su quell’oscuro Atlantico quadridimensionale noto come il Tempo.

La maggioranza di coloro che scelsero la Traversata riuscirono, alcuni no. La procedura è ancora rischiosa. I livelli di energia richiesti per quel salto contro la corrente, oltre l’intervallo proibito, qui attualmente non sono disponibili, anche se alcune delle vostre grandi dinamo hanno iniziato ad avvicinarsi al dominio di energia necessario. Abbiamo imparato a vedercela con quel pericolo, ci esercitiamo a tal fine. Quello che non ci aspettavamo era la vostra determinazione a impedire il nostro insediamento qui”

(pag. 437)

Le parole di Mr. Ace rappresentano un monito per il lettore moderno ed una non velata critica alla società in cui viviamo. Tutte le missioni dei Compari del Caso, secondo quanto afferma Mr. Ace erano dirette, a loro insaputa, ad impedire l’ingresso nel loro spazio tempo di questi esseri del futuro e per questo chiede loro di accettare delle commissioni di tanto in tanto anche per conto della Confraternita della Ventura, senza spiegazioni più dettagliate di quante ne ricevano attualmente dalla loro Gerarchia, in cambio ovviamente di un certo compenso: l’eterna giovinezza. Ma i Compari del Caso non si fidano, non accettano il patto e continuano a viaggiare per il mondo affetti però da una logorante paranoia, vedendo in ogni dove possibili traditori e doppiogiochisti.

Altro tema centrale del racconto è sicuramente quello della dualità, del doppio e del contrasto. Oltre al parallelo tra mondo reale e soprannaturale imbastito attraverso l’uso dei tarocchi e al concetto stesso di “bilocazione” che percorre tutto il romanzo, sono presenti nel racconto diverse espressioni concrete della dualità. Quella tra l’aeronave Inconvenience ed il suo corrispettivo russo, la Bolsai Igra che sintetizza il confronto America – Russia. Quella tra i professori Renfrew di Cambridge e Werfner di Gottinga che già dai nomi fanno immaginare uno stretto rapporto di dualità. Questi, “non solo esimii negli ambienti universitari, ma anche ipoteticamente potenti nel mondo in generale” (pag. 242) hanno una potenza che deriva anche dalla reputazione di “luminari dell’avanguardia, consultati dai ministeri degli Esteri e dai servizi segreti del proprio rispettivo Paese” (pag. 243). Attraverso di loro Pynchon evidenzia in modo critico e sarcastico come l’intellighenzia sia spesso senza scrupoli ed asservita al potere. Quella tra la nave Stupendica, dove viaggiano Kit, Dally, Erlys e Luca Zombini e l’Imperator Maximilian, due identità della stessa nave (“Il destino della Stupendica era riprendere la sua identità latente di nave da guerra Imperator Maximilian, una delle corazzate monocalibro da 25.000 tonnellate previste dai programmi navali austriaci” (pag. 539)). Lungo tutto il racconto è poi espressa la contrapposizione tra lavoratori e padroni, tra minatori e compagnie, tra oppressori ed oppressi come evidenziato nello stralcio di discussione sopra riportato tra Vibe e Foley, suo segretario e guardaspalle.

Il tema della dualità è suggerito già dalla copertina del libro in cui si vede il titolo Contro il giorno, duplicato come se tra noi ed esso fosse interposta una lastra di Spato d’Islanda che, con il fenomeno della birifrangenza, permette lo sdoppiamento dell’immagine degli oggetti posti dietro il cristallo.

Ne L’Arcobaleno della Gravità, di cui Contro il giorno può considerarsi un prequel, la metafora di fondo era il Razzo simbolo della tecnologia e della distruzione che con il “suo arcobaleno” si contrappone parodisticamente a quello che la tradizione vuole sancisca il patto intercorso fra Dio e Noè dopo il diluvio, ovvero che non vi sarebbe stata più distruzione sulla terra. In Contro il giorno la metafora è rappresentata dalla lastra di Spato d’Islanda che permette di vedere le cose nella loro duplice veste, di comprendere meglio la realtà quando questa risulta confusa o fuorviante (ad es. a pag. 325 per rendersi conto che le riserve auree sono fasulle perché formate da un misto cinquanta e cinquanta di oro ed argento), di vedere nel futuro (come a pag. 413 dove Frank specchiandosi in una lastra fatta di questo materiale, vedrà Sloat Fresno “dove doveva trovarsi”), di vedere nel passato reale ed in quello alternativo (attraverso uno speciale proiettore come spiegano Merle e Roswell a pag. 1091) ed infine di uccidere (attraverso l’arma quaternionica descritta a pag. 590 che concentra l’energia cinetica terrestre per ottenere un potere distruttivo enorme).

Lo Spato d’Islanda è anche una chiave d’accesso, non completa, al segreto della mappa dell’Itinerario Sfinciuno, quel percorso che conduce verso la pacifica ed utopica città di Shambala (termine sanscrito che significa luogo di pace, di tranquillità e di felicità). In definitiva lo Spato d’Islanda sembra rappresentare la conoscenza stessa in tutte le sue sfaccettature, l’utilizzo distorto dei suoi frutti per distruggere la vita, un mezzo per comprendere i meccanismi nascosti del mondo, il punto di partenza per la ricerca mistica di un luogo di pace ed infine una via per riconoscere se stessi ed i propri limiti.

SOUNDTRACK: CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND-Trout Mask Replica (1968).

–Fast and Bulbous.
–Bulbous yes, but also tapered.

This is an infamous disc in the history of music.  Which surprises me, as I can’t imagine many people have ever listened to it in its entirety.  I learned about it though my Frank Zappa fascination (he produced the record).

This disc also holds some kind of fascination for fiction writers.  I recall an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 (yes, of course I watched it) in which a new character was introduced.  He was a cool hip indie guy and I thought he was finally a cool character on a show I was getting rather sick of.  But because he was different, he was of course mocked.

He is first mocked for keeping his records in alphabetical order (and come on, anyone with more than 50 discs has to, it’s not a sign of weirdness, just common sense).  And second he was mocked for owning this album (picture a 90210er say Captain Beefheart?).  Of course, later on, he goes on to commit murder or arson or some other thing, thereby proving that alternative music is only for psychopaths, but heck, when has TV ever lied to us?

And now, this disc is a favorite of the hero of this book (which is what prompted me to bust out the disc and give it a listen).

And so wow, what a weird album.  Even 41 years later this record is still waaay out there.   The disc opens with “Frownland.”  And how to describe it?  The left speaker is playing sort of free jazz guitar chords.  The right speaker is playing a wild atonal guitar solo with a thumping bass.  In both speakers you get all over the place (but rather quiet) drums and the good Captain himself singing in a voice that could have inspired Tom Waits.  And the Captain’s song would be a very catchy melody if it had anything to do with what everyone else was playing (which it doesn’t).  And the whole things lasts for under 2 minutes.  There’s 28 songs not unlike this one, for a total of about 75 minutes.

Some other treats: a wild skronking horn solo on one song.  There’s also a song about the Holocaust.  And there’s even several music-free spoken word “poetry” readings.  And of course, the aforementioned bulbous quote.

Amidst this chaos are three songs that are more or less songs in the conventional sense, “Moonlight on Vermont,” “Veteran’s Day Poppy” and “Sugar ‘n Spikes,” meaning they have verses and choruses and whatnot.  But even those are still pretty far out and won’t be (and haven’t been) on the radio anytime soon.

Word is that this is a hugely influential disc and it lands on all kinds of Best Album Of All Time lists.  I can see that it has influenced a few people over the years (Devandra Banhart comes to mind), but still.  This is the kind of music you put on at a party when you want everyone to go home.

[READ: November 6, 2009] I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President

I heard about this book when Jon Stewart gave it a big plug on The Daily Show (the author is one of the writers for the show).  After many of the “heavy” titles that I’d been reading, it was a delight to read something that was purely comic.

And it was very funny indeed.

The book reminded me in many ways of Artemis Fowl (if Aretmis hadn’t turned over a new leaf–and without the fairies, of course).  In fact, I’m not entirely sure what the age group for the book is.  The main character is in seventh grade (and the language is very mild, certainly suitable for kids).  But when I found it in the book store, it was in the adult section.  So, I’m not entirely sure where to place it.

Anyhow, the premise here is that Oliver Watson is an evil genius.  Evil here doesn’t mean psychotic or sociopathic, he doesn’t want to kill people.  He just wants things to go the way he wants.  All the time.  And he is usually quite successful.  He is, after all, one of the top 5 wealthiest people in the world.  And he’s only in 7th Grade.

But as any genius knows, a 7th grader can’t be one of the richest men in the world, so he needs a front.  And he has hired Sheldrake to be the face of his wealth (at least until he is 18).

Oliver is pretty contemptuous of people in general, but of children in general.  He believes that all children are stupid (and he cites many examples of middle school behavior to back him up).  He also thinks most of his teachers are stupid (and in one case he tries to set two of them up so that they can make each other miserable (ha!)).

And so, his public face to the whole school (and even to his parents) is that of a complete moron.  He sleeps during class, he answers poorly and, most importantly he talks like a blithering idiot.  But if he thinks everyone is beneath contempt, then why does he wan to be class president?

Well, first, because he was nominated. The most evil girl in school Tati, nominated him, presumably as a joke (although she may suspect that he’s not as dumb as he seems).  But he refused the nomination.  So then, why?

Well, that has a lot to do with his family.  The most important part of his family is his dog Lollipop.  Lollipop is a specially trained pit bull (photo included in the book).  And wait till you here how well trained she is!  As for the rest of his family, his mother is fat and dumb and rather lovable (and he does love her…he allows that much affection in his life). His father is, well, let’s say his father is not very happy that his life was ruined by the birth of this idiot son of his.  In fact, his father has made no bones about his distaste for his son.  So, when Oliver learns that his father won class president and it was the most important day of his life, well Oliver sets out to show him that any idiot (namely himself) can do it.

And he is willing to do ANYTHING to win (including spend a lot of his vast fortune) and deliberately make a fool of himself in front of everyone.  So imagine his surprise when he suddenly gets a trio of girls in his class making posters for him (their moms will have to “win” a lottery one of these days).

But what happens when all of his plans go awry (as you know they will)?  And just how many enemies can a 7th grader make?

This book was very very funny.  The way that Oliver spoke and dismissed others was great.  The running cigarette joke is hilarious.  As are all of the wonderful literary jokes (he’s trying to set up the English teacher after all).  In fact, everything to do with Mr Moorhead is fantastic.  And the pacing is wonderful  It’s a super fast read, and I laughed on just about every page (except during the explosions).

I was also very amused by the whole Captain Beefheart thing.  (What a wonderfully weird thing to have as a kid’s favorite band…how on earth would he have ever heard of it?)

The only complaint about the book I had was with the plates (well, specifically because one was missing).  There are pictures scattered through out the book.  They are all referenced in the text (ie. See Plate 1 for  picture of Lollipop).  And many of them are funny.  The problem was that Plate Number 16 was not included in the book!  It’s nowhere to be found.  And it had the potential to be the funniest one of all, as it was meant to show a typical PBS pledge drive (his father works for the local affiliate).  Given the mock up of other scenes, I think the PBS one would have been great.

That said, one printing error does not in any way detract from the book.  It’s a great read.  It’s very funny. What else can I write?

As Oliver himself might say:

Chapter 1:

I am Done now

Chapter 2:

Stop reading

Chapter 3:

What are you, an idiot?  I said stop reading.

By Jason Diamond

Los Angeles has always been this strange and fascinating place to me that I will forever look at squarely from the perspective of somebody that has little to no intention of ever calling the it my home.  This is sorta funny considering I live in the single biggest freakshow on the planet,  making it a bit hypocritical of me to attempt and diss LA for any of it’s eccentric qualities, because to be honest, I really like the place, it just weirds me out for a bunch of reasons.

Even though John Cheever wrote the story, “O City of Broken Dreams” about New York, I always think to myself “that story makes me think more of L.A. than my hometown”,  because something about L.A.  has always seemed like it’s this dark place where dreams go to die, or people go to sell their souls.  After reading Arthur Krystol’s piece in the New Yorker, on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years in Hollywood, about him trying (in vain) to squeeze some bit of magic from what was left of his talent, I got to thinking more and more of what makes Los Angeles so strange to me.  I fast realized most of it is based totally on books , music and film, which of course is not at all shocking considering those are the things that occupy my time the most.

So here, just for the sake of wanting to get this off my chest, are the top five things that influence my ideas about L.A. for no reason other than the fact that I read too much, and listen to too many records.

1) X’s album Los Angeles.

As amazing as The Screamers, The Germs, Circle Jerks, and The Weirdos were, the band from the early days of the LA punk scene that is closest to my heart are undoubtedly X. John Doe and Exene Cervenka’s chance meeting at a poetry reading (as legend has it) should have been a good foreshadowing of the duo’s ambitions beyond rock n’ roll, as their song are gritty descriptions of late 70’s-early 1980’s Los Angeles, that were obviously written from the point of view of people who knew how to write. Their debut album to this day is one of the finest things I have heard, and while the next two albums (Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun) are better than just about anything else that would come out in their time, X never sounded better than on the album they wrote this bloodstained love letter to their hometown.

2) John Fante’s Ask the Dust

Depression-era LA was the setting for Fante’s semi-autobiographical novel that is one of the most haunting, down-and-out pieces of literature I’ve ever read. It’s also the only book Fante is somewhat well-known for, which is a shame because the guy was a great writer. Bukowski said of him, “Fante was my god!”

3) Charles Bukowski

Speak of the devil. Love him or hate him, the man lived, breathed, and wrote all about the seedy side of the City of Angels. “Since I was raised in L.A., I’ve always had the geographical and spiritual feeling of being here. I’ve had time to learn this city. I can’t see any other place than L.A.”

4) Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

If you had to go ahead and guess where Mr. Recluse was hanging out at the start of the 70’s, his latest novel gives you a pretty good idea. Inherent Vice reads like a strange, hazy, postmodern take on a noir novel. Or something like that…

5) Chinatown

Set around the same time as Fante’s Ask the Dust, this somehow might be not only the greatest film Polanski ever directed, but the film that made Jack, “Jack”. Take all that however you want, but this film tells a good deal of the tale of the seedy foundation LA was built upon.

Hello

July 5th – not Independence Day, but nonetheless a day that will go down in history as the day when Roger Federer finally won 15 grand slam tennis titles – saw another historic milestone. Yes, that’s right: book club no.30! If only we’d realised this at the time we might have made more of an effort to celebrate it.

The text before us was “The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell” – two separate, short works of non-fiction prose (our first foray into this genre) by renowned English bohemian and all-round literary dabbler, Aldous Huxley.

The group was reduced to a core of four personages – Owain (host), Sophie (hostess and sous chef), Pete (watching the tennis) and Ed (late). Nonetheless – and despite a certain amount of trepidation about how to approach these tricky, ambiguous books – the session was immensely fruitful and thought-provoking.

Debate started by considering Huxley’s motivations for writing the book, a description of a mescalin trip he took in 1953 and its impact on his thinking about mystical or visionary experiences. Pete argued that Huxley in some sense through this book helped give birth to the Californian movement (which has been so important in the modern West) which focused on self-realisation and consciousness expansion, and that this book was particularly influential in giving credence to the drugs movement that became emerged during the 1960s. When considering why these books remain in print and are regarded so highly, we felt that Huxley’s status as an outsider – an English aristocrat arguing for drug legalisation – was significant.

We also discussed how Huxley’s attitudes to drugs in these books seem to differ from that in “Brave New World”, where his invented drug ’soma’ is used to keep the masses in a state of soporific acquiesence. And we considered the relationship of this book to previous book club authors, including JG Ballard (who wrote a cursory introduction to our edition of the text) and Thomas Pynchon, the former developing Huxley’s interest in how drugs began to permeate mainstream, ‘respectable’ society during the second half of the twentieth century, while the latter was clearly influenced by Huxley’s description of the paranoia that drug trips could bring on.

However, despite the interesting ideas raised by both books, the group found them on the whole rather disappointing. “The Doors of Perception” – with its greater narrative drive – was agreed to be the stronger of the two, but “Heaven and Hell” came in for particular criticism, especially from Ed who commented on Huxley’s pro-drugs stance and the distinct lack of a “hell” in his description of what drugs such as mescalin do to people’s minds and behaviour.

Owain (who chose the book) was particularly let down by it, finding the narrative description of Huxley’s trip – though its strongest part – still weak and unexciting, while he felt the other sections looking at the role of mysticism in art and religion were simply poorly argued, biased and subjective. We also agreed that the pieces of art shown or played to Huxley during his trip by his wife and friend – Cezanne, Mozart, Botticelli, Van Gogh – demonstrated a canonical bias of Huxley’s time and place without shedding too much valuable light on the impact of the drug trip itself.

All in all, there was much to discuss – including genre, the status of the book as ’scientific’ or otherwise, its Western bias and Orientalist attitudes, and its wider cultural impact – but our feeling was the book was not all it was cracked up to be.

The baton is passed over to Fleming (host of one of our favourite ever book clubs) even though he couldn’t be bothered to turn up this time.

Pete

את ואתה נקלף שכבה. בגוף זכר, בגוף נקבה, ראשון-שני-שלישי, נטפס על העץ התחבירי. אתה מרגיש נבצר, את מריחה צרה, למי להאמין לי-לו-לה. השלג הוא לבן, לבן הוא השלג, חם פה אימים, לא זה לא מקום לילדים.  אתה מאמין שאריסטוטלס ייסד את  ליקיאון בין העצים, את מאמינה שאריסטוטלס התהלך עם אלכסנדר הגדול בשבילים. וכזה כיף לדעת שגם אם אור יש במילה אפשר עדין לזחול במחילה. ובחשיכה יש גם הוא והיא, הם, אנחנו ואתם, איך לעזאזל כולם הגיעו

Thomas Pynchon loved this book

Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

Over at MobyLives, they talk about Glenn Beck being the new Oprah for a bunch of writers we could really care less about.  We wonder to ourselves if this post was just a genius ploy by Melville House to get Beck to notice Shoplifting From American Apparel?

Lit.

• Daniel Nester and Vol. 1 Brooklyn contributor Claire Shefchik make nice after Shefchik reviews his book.  We think everything is going to be okay.

• James Wood talks about Thomas Pynchon’s characters.  Conversational Reading has a reply.

• I wonder if Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks has read The Magicians yet?  This Boston Globe review makes me thing Gilsdorf’s new book might be an interesting way to companion to Lev Grossman’s book.

• Death and Taxes ask Chuck Klosterman about Balloon Boy

• Atlanta writer Jamie Iredell (Prose. Poems. A Novel) makes up a steak sauce at Deckfight.

• A plan to help indie bookstores.

• Churchill might be the “most exciting” biography of the year according to Huff Po.

Music

• Fiery Furnaces take on Radiohead.  Go Fiery Furnaces!

• Kurt Vile talks to AV Club.  We find out he “grew up listening to Pavement obsessively.”  Wish we would have known that a few months ago.

• Stop Smiling likes Brilliant Colors.

Our home turf.

• Brooklyn Brewery isn’t moving for at least fifteen years.

• MTV is looking for “the most charismatic and actually edgy kids” of Brooklyn.

• I was thinking of joining the Park Slope Co-op.  Now I don’t think I want to anymore.  Maybe I’ll just get this shirt.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more news

They’re watching my house and they’re tapping my telephone
I don’t trust nobody, but I’m much too scared to be on my own
And the income tax collector’s got his beady eye on me.
No, there ain’t no cure for acute schizophrenia disease

Dia worked remote today, so I got to take the truck to work. And you know what that means– woo-hoo! 97.1 FM here I come!

I should get 97.1 programmed in the radio since Dia always listens to NPR, but I can get it handily enough. The joy that is Jamie Allman ranting kicks in before I pull out of the alley.

The effect of listening to members of the radical right is interesting. It’s like undergoing a cerebral abortion, where a huge vacuum tube is shoved up my ass and turned on Very Hi setting to suck my brains out. The louder and faster Allman rants, the lower I feel my IQ drop. My built-in safeguards are that if I suddenly feel like buying a Chrysler product or turning my hat backwards, I turn the radio off.

It’s been about two weeks since Allman found out what the term teabagger refers to, and he was still ranting about it. It didn’t help that today was election day, but in between his assurances that the anti-Christ that is Obama would be flogged into the ocean by the electorate he decried the use of teabaggers as a reference to teabaggers. The general jist of his diatribe was that there was no room for name calling or insults in discussion of the issues of the day.

About a minute later, he was talking about the “stinking, dirty hippies” who protested Gulf War Redux, then a little later went on about “liberal moonbats.” About that time I was thinking that maybe a 3/4 ton Dodge Ram with a hemi would look mighty good sitting on the parking pad at home, and I managed to turn the radio off.

The best description I’ve heard of what it’s like to engage in any dialogue with members of the radical right, neo-conservatives or Moral Majority types is that it’s like being stuck in the middle of an insane asylum where all the inmates line up and take turns talking to you.

*****    **********   **********   **********   **********   *****

Tick…     tick…     tick…     tick… tick…

Today I got the appointments set up for my blood donations. I have to get up three pints for the surgery, and the donations have to be done within 42 days, at least a week apart, but within four days of surgery.

That’s too much like those damned word problems in math, which is probably why I put off making the appointments for so long. If someone is doing an autologous donation on a train moving east at 50 mph, and a drunk Red Cross volunteer is jamming an IV needle into the vein of another donor on a train that leaves a station 125 miles away and travels west at an average speed of 63 mph, how long would it take for a brain-damaged monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a banana?

Yep, too much like word problems, so I set them up today, and only fucked up one date that I have to re-schedule.

Got my hooded bath robe and a pair of slippers ordered from LL Bean. Got in a copy of HTML, XHTML and CSS in and ordered a copy of HTML 4 In a Week so I’d have something to putz with once I can get out of bed after the surgery. Amanda is supposed to work with my landlord set my domain name up on his server, so I should be able to tinker with something to avoid going mad from boredom. Anna said she’d set me up with copies of Battlestar Galactica episodes that I don’t have so I can get my Tricia Helfer fix and Dia can drool over Katee Sackhoff.

I have Pynchon’s V and Mason & Dixon, and if things get seriously twisted I still have Ulysses and a Koran.

Also got my durable power of attorney finished along with my durable power of attorney for health directives. Even though those are something everyone should have– and I’ve been putting off getting those done for a couple years– whipping those together was more of a preemptive measure. There is an extremely slight chance that things could get weird during the surgery, but I want to be prepared to spare Dia any unnecessary expenses or grief.

Amanda is Dia’s alternate as my agent, and she is legally empowered to step in and act like a total cunt in the event Dia couldn’t handle things. She fully concurs with my decisions, and she will enforce them to an absofuckinglute T before you can say “but the Church teaches…”

She’s a damned good daughter.

You have been adequately warned.

Υποψιάζομαι ότι πίσω από το βιβλιαράκι μου με τον ένα ή τον άλλο τρόπο κρύβεται ό,τι είχα διαβάσει μέχρι να το γράψω, όμως υπάρχουν και μερικά βιβλία στα οποία χρωστάω κάτι παραπάνω:

Το Πλήθος (Α & Β), του Αντρέα Φραγκιά· το Σάββατο Βράδυ στην Άκρη της Πόλης, της Σώτης Τριανταφύλλου· τα The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions και Oracle Night του Πολ Όστερ· και φυσικά το Gravity’s Rainbow του Τόμας Πίνσον, βιβλίο που κατάφερα να διαβάσω ολόκληρο μόνο αφότου τελείωσα το REWIND, κάποια αποσπάσματά του όμως είχαν ήδη καρφωθεί στο μυαλό μου (ένα από αυτά θυμάται ο Πέτρος στη σελίδα 87 του βιβλίου μου).

This month turned out to be relatively successful.  Finally finishing up the Mariani biography of Williams was a big weight off me.  Though the book itself was rather captivating and informative, it was difficult to juggle putting in consistent effort reading such a large tome while also keeping my teaching and studying duties taken care of.  Over the course of the month the only book I specifically discussed was Molly Bendall’s most recent book here.  Though a month earlier I discussed an odd connection between Williams and Pynchon here.  I am planning on discussing the Taransky book in the near future.  And I’m assuming Dijkstra will come into play in some future thoughts on Williams.  But this post is not focused on tomorrow; it is focused on yesterday.  And so here is what I made it through during October:

Bram Dijkstra::Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams
Claudia Rankine::Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Michelle Taransky::Barn Burned, Then
Paul Mariani::William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked
Will Alexander::The Sri Lankan Loxodrome
Alice Notley::Mysteries of Small Houses
Molly Bendall::Under the Quick
Laura Walker::rimertown
Susan Howe::Frame Structures
Richard Greenfield::Tracer

Apuntes a la lectura de Vineland

Leer a Pynchon es como un mazazo, al menos leer Vineland es como un Gran mazazo. Hay que olvidar todo lo que uno ha leído hasta el momento y afrontar Vineland con la mente abierta, dispuesto a todo. O eso al menos es lo que he hecho, infiltrándome en las vidas de decenas de personajes con extraordinarias vidas, pasados imposibles, futuros impredecibles, pasiones atemporales.

Si alguien se acerca a Vineland con la única intención de conocer la historia de Zoyd, de Frenesí, de Praire, es posible que pasadas las cien paginas abandone toda intención de lectura. Vineland esconde sin duda algo más. Pero ese algo, que sin duda hay que encontrar, hay que descubrirlo apartando las capas una a una, abriendo las puertas de  las vidas de cada individuo, de cada sujeto, desplegando sus experiencias, sus historias enormes y ricas y desgraciadas, desmenuzando el enorme mundo de Vineland a trabes de los años, del pasado, escarbando en todos los errores y los sacrificios y luchas y guerras de cada uno de ellos, absorbiendo poco a poco la esencia de cada uno, los matices, las ideas, empapándonos de sus vidas, y entendiendo todo el conjunto como una gran historia de amor y de fracasos.

Sin duda Vineland es sorprendente, hipnótica. Mientras leía, estos días he caído en un pequeño letargo, embobado, insomne, incluso algo taciturno, sin tristeza, hipnotizado e impregnado de la fuerza Pynchoniana, abrumado, fascinado, encantado, hechizado. Deseando encontrar alguien con quien compartir la búsqueda de Praire, deseando encontrar alguien con quien compartir desazón por el fin de Vineland sin cruzar una palabra. Es imposible que todo  siga igual después de leer a Pynchon.

Puede que, leer que Zoyd atraviesa ventanales vestido de mujer una vez al año, para cobrar su cheque de incapacidad, suene divertido, o leer la historia de LD, que se convirtió en una experta ninja que domina la técnica de La Palma Vibrante, fue secuestrada para ser vendida como mujer objeto en un país oriental, y fue intima amiga de Frenesí, parezca complejo, o que Brock Vond, ¨perro loco Vond¨ se obsesione por amor y sin limites éticos ni presupuestarios, lo busque hasta en el ultimo de los escondites, movilizando toda la fuerza de la DEA disponible, parezca extremo. Nada de todo eso. Y todo eso, además de un sin fin de detalles y situaciones, escenarios, narraciones extraordinarias, contextos y ambientes perfectamente definidos, tramas inverosímiles tan perfectamente ajustadas, engranadas, que ha nadie se le ocurriría incurrir en la verosimilitud del texto, de la globalidad, de la historia, de Vineland.

Cuando uno lee Vineland; cuando he leído Vineland, Pynchon me ha dado una patada en el culo para sacarme del círculo vicioso de la literatura, y me ha enseñado, con la distancia que te da leer algo de este calibre, lo mucho que me queda por aprender, lo mucho que ya he aprendido, y sobre todo, lo capullo que he sido por no haberlo leído antes.

Imagino a Zoyd, con ese gracioso bigote y sus gafas de alambre, conduciendo la inestable camioneta de Trent, marca Datsun Li´l Hustler, con modulo vivienda, y no puedo mas que sonreír y compadecerme enormemente de su amor por Frenesí…

]]> http://damnedconjuror.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/library-loot-5/ Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:23:31 +0000 uenohama http://damnedconjuror.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/library-loot-5/

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Great Apes by Will Self

When artist, Simon Dykes wakes after a late night of routine debauchery, he discovers that his world has changed beyond recognition. His girlfriend, Sarah, has turned into a chimpanzee. And, to Simon’s appalled surprise, so has the rest of humanity. Simon, under the bizarre delusion that he is ‘human’, is confined to an emergency psychiatric ward. There he becomes of considerable interest to eminent psychologist and chimp, Dr Zack Busner. For with this fascinating case, Busner thinks may finally make his reputation as a truly great ape.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

This title is describes as part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon. Private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog. 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. It is 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.

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography by Rodge Glass

‘Alasdair Gray was not always the rapidly ageing, fat Glasgow pedestrian he likes to describe on the inside leaf of his books. There was once a time when he was young. A time when he was really rather thin. Many years when he went unpublished and unrecognised. This book aims to document, as faithfully as possible, that journey from son of a box-maker, encouraged to paint, write and do whatever made him feel good, to septuagenarian “little grey deity” (as Will Self has called him). For the first time in his life, Alasdair claims to be completely satisfied and well-paid (he lived in debt until 1990), and now lives a settled, happy day-to-day existence with Morag, painting his mural at the Oran Mor arts centre five minutes walk from his home most days, while (at the time of writing) taking occasional periods off for writing several books. Aside from work, Gray’s pleasures include daytime whisky, giving money away, reading books by people he doesn’t have to meet and “having my way”. This book will look in depth at the people, events, books, paintings, plays, poems and circumstances that conspired to make the man as he is today.’ RODGE GLASS Suiting form to subject, Rodge Glass has brought the inventive techniques of Gray’s fiction to bear on the biographer’s role. Mixing a chronological narrative of his subject’s life (at the rate of one chapter per decade) with his own diaries of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, narrative and diaries eventually dovetail in a riotous final chapter on the publication of Alasdair Gray’s latest novel, Old Men in Love, in October 2007.

Hello. Elk here.

This past weekend was a pretty swell one. I got to go to a kick-ass party with some of my friends and my two brothers. I think they enjoyed it as well. The next day, I decide to go drive around town with my brothers to get a lanyard or chain for my flash drive (because I almost lost it before). At the local mall, I got a set of  50 chains which never even got to fit into the damn drive. Eventually, my dad made me a lanyard (because he’s crafty). Also at the mall, I went to pick up Animal Collective’s album ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’ because there were a couple of songs I liked from there. Turns out I really love the album! After that, I drove into a second-hand store to check out any books people might have thrown away donated, and found two I had been looking for: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Granted, none of these I’ll be reading anytime soon as I have a list of other books I plan to read (more on that later).

Then, my wonderful weekend decided to jump off a cliff into some jagged rocks. I got an e-mail from a club where I was to be heading to a Venetian Snares and Wisp concert saying they canceled the stop to Phoenix. Eventually, I found out it was the club’s fault as they wouldn’t accomodate the stage for a proper performance.

To Club Mardi Gras in Scottsdale, Arizona: Fuck you.

/

So I was invited to try out Google’s new “revolutionary” communication platform codename: Wave. At first, I was indifferent, but then I started begging for an invite because I had to be one of those cool geeks who can flaunt his invite in the air to those inferior to me. After the invitation, I started to understand the purpose of Wave; it’s a communication tool good for conferences and such. I guess, in the end, it’s not a big a deal as I would’ve hoped for. Maybe I just wanted a Google Voice invite instead?

/

As of October 26, I finished JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I loved the novel and don’t understand why so many of my friends didn’t like it. I loved the writing behind it and the development of Holden Caulfield. That marks book #3 in my series of books to finish before 2010. In my list, there are five books of which I told myself I would finish as a means of reading more (I had to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for a history report last semester, didn’t finish until three months after, then read Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Before that, nothing much in reading). The list is as follows:

• George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four (May – September)
• Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five (Sept. 18 – 30)
• JD Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye (Oct. 1 – 26)
• Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale (Starting today)
• Joseph Heller – Catch-22

I think I’ve been reading very good books; have not been disappointed with any of my selections and recommendations (or maybe I’m just very tolerant). More on my previous books in another blog post, though.

/

I love Twitter. It has many good uses. I joined Twitter August 2008, just a few months before the big Twitter explosion. I didn’t officially start using it until October of that year to post random crap to remind myself of. Then it became an addiction in January where I would post crap like every hour on the hour. Somehow, I convinced most of my friends to join Twitter, especially when one of them cut off his phone bill and needed a means to communicate. Now, I’m sure I’m not as hooked on the website as much as I was back then, but now some people use it way too much and to post some seriously crap.

Twitter has become this tool for stupid people to post random crap, spam, and Gostse in mini-URL form. Every time I read the Trending Topics, most of the people just post gibberish and troll. Sometimes, I just wish I could quit Twitter for a more sophisticated form of micro-blogging…but nothing much is out there for the time being.

\

My set-up for this blog isn’t really going anywhere but ranting. I promise to come up with more ideas soon.

-Freezing Elk

(It should not be 50F in Arizona this time of the year!)

Given that I haven’t picked up Gravity’s Rainbow in over a week it must be time to throw in the towel.  Over the last week I have picked up some advice from a variety of sources.  Advice no.1 is to not make Gravity’s Rainbow your first ever Pynchon.  Oops.  Advice no. 2 is not to worry about anything on the first read through, things are more likely to work out second time round.  Huh?  Read it twice?  God forbid!

As I beat a hasty and thankful retreat I reflect that to Gravity’s Rainbow falls the singular, and dubious, honour of being the book to most nearly cause me to throw up (in public!)  Yeah, that was the clinching moment.

However, I also recall that “All the radii of the room are hers”  (love that), there were lyrical bananas, a hilarious take on English “candy” and everything with an octopus is good.

There is a plan.  Read some shorter offerings from Pynchon, and then, I’ll be back…

Cormac McCarthy en route vers l’apocalypse

http://www.rue89.com/cabinet-de-lecture/cormac-mccarthy-en-route-vers-lapocalypse

Quelques mois après » Un homme » , de Philip Roth -autre géant vivant des lettres yankee-, Cormac McCarthy propose lui aussi une réflexion sur la mort. Et, un an après avoir revisité le western ( » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » ), revisite le roman apocalyptique. Roman le plus étrange de son auteur, » La Route » obtint le Pulitzer 2007. Et est le premier coup de coeur du Cabinet de lecture en cette rentrée 2008.

Depuis la disparition de Norman Mailer, Philip Roth et Cormac McCarthy sont -avec Thomas Pynchon- les derniers géants de leur génération. Deux écrivains reclus, introuvables, quasi impossibles à interviewer. Aussi, en juin, quand le dernier accepta l’invitation télévisée d’Oprah Winfrey, ce fut le tonnerre. C’est que le roman venait de recevoir le Prix Pulitzer 2007. Quelques semaines auparavant, les frères Coen avaient projeté à Cannes l’adaptation de » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » .

Ainsi, après une décennie de silence, l’auteur du capital » Méridien de sang » (1985) refaisait donc bel et bien surface. Et montrait à quel point ses fictions étaient utiles.

Le monde d’hier, le monde de demain : un roman de transition

» La Route » est un vrai roman de transition. Idéal pour passer d’un monde à l’autre. Les ombres y sont aussi vivantes que les hommes, et on ne sait pas où on est.

Nous voici dans un pays où les cendres fument encore, un pays que vient de traverser une tragédie (laquelle ? nous ne saurons jamais). Ne subsistent que des routes, des ruines, des palissades, des restes d’incendies.

Un homme et son petit garçon semblent être seuls survivants de la tragédie. En pleine apocalypse, ils marchent, avancent vers les côtes du Sud. Ils poussent un caddie orné d’un rétroviseur chromé, où est stocké le strict nécessaire. Ils croisent nombres de cadavres, de ruines, de carcasses. Tel un prédateur, le père quête les conserves pourries et les ramène comme nourriture à son fils. Le parcours est lent, très lent, dans la peur, la pluie, le vent, la neige, la nuit.

L’un comme l’autre vivent surtout la peur au ventre. Peur de la mort, certes, mais aussi peur d’eux-mêmes : quand l’adulte voit son reflet dans la glace, son premier réflexe est de pointer le revolver. Les dialogues sont rares. Ils matérialisent trop la peur. Et pour survivre ici, il faut marcher. Ils croiseront quelques » survivants » , êtres non-définis d’un monde en recomposition.

C’est que le couple est pisté. Sont-ils les derniers hommes du monde connu ? L’existence même de l’enfant devient une énigme : il est le futur incarné… Mais il reste quelques autres hommes qui ont survécu. Rares. Peut-être notre duo est-il, seulement, le dernier spécimen de » gentils » , de » ceux qui portent le feu » . Aussi doivent-ils échapper aux pillards.

Roman réaliste et new age

Dans » Le Méridien de sang » , dans » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » -deux westerns-, comme dans ce dernier livre, McCarthy revisite des genres littéraires. Dans ces derniers -polar, western, SF-, il est souvent question de la fin d’un homme, de la fin d’un monde. D’une civilisation. Le genre a ceci de particulier qu’il angle, qu’il métaphorise. Qu’il offre la matière et l’anti-matière.

« La Route » est comme une métaphore plurielle. Globale. A l’heure où, allongement de la durée de vie et clonage faisant, l’homme a un rapport de moins en moins rationnel à sa vie et à sa mort, le livre de McCarthy agit comme le roman d’une autre rationalité. D’un monde où l’homme n’est plus seul, mais où il n’a pas conscience de ce qui l’accompagne. Il n’a plus conscience que de sa survie.

Ici, le père » ne savait qu’une chose, que l’enfant était son garant. Il dit : « S’il n’est pas la parole de Dieu, Dieu n’a jamais parlé’ » . Ici, les survivants sont » assis au bord de la route comme des aéronautes en détresse » .

McCarthy, dans son style toujours très resserré, allie roman réaliste et récit new age. Un livre narratif et puissamment philosophique. Qui unit le défini et l’indéfini : ici, peu de faits, peu d’histoire, seulement le souffle pur de ce qui fait survivre.

De McCarthy à Spielberg en passant par les Pink Floyd

Cela donne un livre où les deux garçons semblent fuir leur propre mort comme leur propre vie. Où tout ce qu’ils croisent (objet comme signe comme homme) semble symboliser la mort. En lisant » La Route » on pense beaucoup à  » Duel » , le premier téléfilm de Spielberg (1975), à cette course à la mort entre la voiture et le titanesque camion.

En lisant » La Route » , on se dit que » Wish you were here » , l’album de Pink Floyd sortit la même année que » Duel » -l’album de » Welcome to the Machine » et de » Shine on you Crazy Diamond » , l’hommage à Syd Barrett- a trouvé son histoire.

» La Route » se lira avec » Un homme » de Roth, paru en France à l’automne. Deux auteurs qui n’avaient jamais si profondément évoqué la mort. Roth est un urbain, et » Un homme » est un livre psychologique. McCarthy est un nomade, et ses romans sont des romans d’espaces.

Le souffle et la perspective qu’on trouve dans la dernière partie de » La Route » est titanesque. C’est le roman le plus dépouillé de McCarthy, un vrai roman car il est un espace-temps.

The New Yorker’s litblog, the Book Bench, has posted a lengthy 1978 interview of John Updike by two professors of English at the University of Sarajevo. Updike covers Moby-Dick, his writing routine, authors he enjoys who live outside the United States, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had just won the Nobel Prize in literature. But he also expounds on the wave of postmodern authors who were coming into full flower at the time, like John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Updike is sympathetic toward the work of those two authors, but he’s not so kind to Thomas Pynchon:

I really find it not easy to read him; I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that he sets for us. I believe that life is frightening and tragic, but I think that it is other things, too. Temperamentally, I just have not been able to read enough Pynchon to pronounce intelligently upon him. Clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read…. I am not among those who has found much comfort in Pynchon. As to so-called black humor, which is maybe a passé phrase, it did seem to me at its best to be true enough and to correspond with a quality of, at least, American life in the sixties.

By 1978, Gravity’s Rainbow was only five years old—that book, combined with the wave of postmodernists, might have made feel like his own fictional enterprise was on the wane. But even if Updike wasn’t being defensive, he is voicing a fairly common complaint about Pynchon. For all his dark humor, wisdom, and gamesmanship, the line goes, he’s a product of the 60s who doesn’t have much to say about contemporary life—the postmodernist as nostalgist. “For me, I kind of think that there was a moment where he kind of held the reins of the zeitgeist in his hands, and then he kind of lost it,” Robert Goolrick told me a few months back in a conversation about his attempt to track down Pynchon. “I found his later work very disappointing and diffuse…. [B]ut there was a moment when he was completely in sync with the tenor of the times, and was completely a genius.”

No more, perhaps? Is it that his reputation now runs on the dying fumes of the enthusiasm of once-hip boomer critics and readers? Much as I find Pynchon’s persona fascinating, I haven’t gotten the impression that there’s enough in his work to merit the dedication required to get through it, though I’m an admirer of The Crying of Lot 49. I suspect that Inherent Vice goes down more smoothly, but, being set in the 60s, would only help support the complaint. He’s under no obligation to write a novel set in the present day, of course, but what is it about his work that makes him meaningful and relevant today?

My old friend Sara Foss is trying hard to square her taste in books.

You know, I don’t like to bash writers, and I feel like I’ve been a little mean. Writing a book — even a bad book — is actually quite difficult, and if you can get millions of people to read your books, well, more power to you. The truth is, everyone indulges their trashier literary tastes from time to time. I certainly don’t spend all my time reading great books and defending the literary canon. I seldom read Stephen King anymore, but I’m still a huge fan, and I really like the Harry Potter books, although they’re too long and not as well written as they should be. After slogging my way through Thomas Pynchon’s “V,” I turned to “The Amber Spyglass,” the final book in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. And I’ve got some Elmore Leonard I’m dying to get into. So there’s nothing wrong with a little diversion, or a little genre fiction. But “The Lost Symbol?” Thanks, but I’ll pass.

“Not my favorite writer” by Foss Forward

Thomas Pynchon has a reputation as a challenging author. I’ve just finished The Crying of Lot 49, he lives up to that reputation. This is an extraordinary work, not one that apparently Pynchon himself rates but one that I definifely do. All that said, it’s complex stuff.

Pynchon is most famous for his third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, a book with such impact that Pynchon’s career is now divided into pre- and post-Gravity’s Rainbow phases. By all accounts, Gravity’s Rainbow is a masterpiece, a triumph of 20th Century literature, it’s also though famously dense and rather long and so perhaps a slightly amibitious entry point to Pynchon’s work. The Crying of Lot 49, by contrast, is around 110 pages or so and is thought to be one of his most straightforward and linear novels. Straightforward is relative, it is superb, but having finished it I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the plot was, or even whether there was a plot.

On the surface, it’s the tale of how Oedipa Maas is appointed executor to the estate of a rich ex-boyfriend, and as a result comes to uncover an ancient conspiracy dedicated to creating a rival postal service to the US Government one. It’s not that simple though, there may not be a conspiracy, if there is it may not be that one, there may be several conspiracies, there may just be random noise, throughout this novel meaning is always just out of grasp, never quite realisable, perhaps not there at all.

Here’s the first sentence of the novel:

One Summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsh in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or the supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous enough and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

That’s a very characteristic sentence, dense yet clearly written and already not wholly serious. It also contains what is usually a pet hate of mine, blatantly incredible character names. Obviously in real life few people have names like Pierce Inverarity or Oedipa Maas. Generally, when novelists seek to give characters cutesy names I find it alienating, it reminds me I’m reading a book. Waugh’s Scoop was in large part ruined for me by the obviousness of the silly names given to the newspapers in it.

Here, that didn’t happen, and the reason it didn’t is that the names have a purpose. Before I get to that though, here’s a few more, a sample of some of the characters encountered in this short work:

Wendell ‘Mucho’ Maas, Dr Hilarius, Metzger who used to be a child actor named Baby Igor and who is now a lawyer (and whose life story is being made by a former lawyer who is now an actor named Manny Di Presso), Mike Fallopian, Randolph Driblette, Genghis Cohen. There’s also the wonderfully named law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles.

A lot of these names are allusions, though not necessarily ones with any actual significance to the text. Some, Genghis Cohen, are outright jokes, but most of them almost mean something. Oedipa Maas, Manny Di Presso, the references are obvious, but meaningless. Like so much of this novel, they tremble on the brink of significance, they appear important, but it’s really not clear that they mean anything at all.

As Oedipa starts to investigate Pierce’s affairs, she becomes involved with co-executor Metzger, and becomes aware of what may be a conspiracy running right through Southern California involving a centuries-old organisation dedicated to alternate means of mail delivery. She goes to see a newly staged Jacobean revenge play, which contains within it curious references to the contemporary conspiracy, she visits an inventor of a perpetual motion machine that doesn’t appear to work, and becomes alert to the symbols of the conspiracy – a line drawing of a muted trumpet, forged stamps each containing intentional and often disturbing minor errors.

Her psychiatrist, Dr Hilarius, presses her to take part in a new study using LSD for therapeutic purposes, her husband is still scarred by the psychological trauma of having worked on a used car lot and now works as a DJ but is having a crisis of faith in that calling, Manny Di Presso is being hunted by one of his clients, the hotel Oedipa books into is used for practice sessions by a mock-English band called The Paranoids who try to spy on her in the mistaken belief she is having bizarrely kinky sex. Paranoia then is everywhere, paranoia is at the heart of the novel.

Pynchon creates here a powerful sense of place, even though the place much of the story occurs in is made up, San Narcisco:

San Narcisco lay farther south, near LA. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a group of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access routes to its own freeway.

Throughout the novel there is a sense of 1960s Southern California, a mix of drugs, capitalism, creativity and urban sprawl. The weird is everywhere, there is a bar that only play electronic music (which to me is a form of music that originates in Germany and Britain in the late 1970s, I don’t really know what it meant back then), with live nights on Saturdays. The defence contractor Yoyodyne has its offices here, where the staff sing company songs but use their own private mail network (separate to the conspiracy) to pass contentless messages, sent to each other only to ensure the private mail network has something to deliver. There is a company that makes bone-dust cigarette filters from the bones of dead GIs. It is an an insane melting-pot of innovation and horror.

Among the chaos of Southern California, Oedipa begins to find meaning in her investigation of the conspiracy, assuming it exists that is. Is she herself descending into paranoia? Is it all some post-mortem joke of Pierce Inverarity’s? Is it in fact an ancient conspiracy, albeit a singularly pointless one? The search for meaning creates meaning, we find patterns in the noise, but whether any of it exists outside our own heads is unclear, perhaps unknowable.

And that is a large part of what this is about, for me anyway. It is a vision of paranoia, of the terror of a world in which everything makes sense, we create conspiracies though because even that is preferable to a world where things make no sense at all. They are out to get you, but at least they care enough to try. As reader, we are like Oedipa, looking for meaning in a mass of references, allusions, apparent themes, we draw conclusions on what it’s all about but who knows if we’re right? Perhaps we just want it to be about something, so we find things within it that support our expectations.

Along the way, there is some genuinely very funny comedy here, it contains for example one of the funniest, and stupidest, sex scenes I’ve ever read and there are some marvellous throwaway lines:

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

There is also a certain beauty to the whole thing, wonderful and disturbing imagery, an exuberance bursting through the pages which seems uncontrolled but which is in fact expertly crafted. At one point Oedipa finds herself staying in a hotel which is also hosting a conference for deaf-mutes:

Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crêpe paper after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible.They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner’s lead, limp in the young mute’s clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner.

Apart from the beauty and strangeness of the imagery in that passage, I can’t help but see it as an image of America itself. Everyone dancing to their own dream, somehow not colliding and the whole thing unexpectedly working. There is something both frightening and magnificent in it, it’s not the only vision of America out there (I don’t myself buy into American exceptionalism), but it’s a vision and in some ways an optimistic one. And if America is anything, it’s optimistic.

So, there are my thoughts, for now anyway. Whole books have been written on The Crying of Lot 49, books longer than the novel itself. There are essay collections about it, teacher study guides, any blog post is but a thin scraping at the surface. This book is packed with references, to Nabokov, to the Beatles, to all sorts of things, most of which I probably didn’t get. Most of which I doubt anyone gets, though we’d each likely get different ones.

I’ve not even touched here on many possible core issues of the book, communications theory and failures of communication, consumed experience, the blurring of the self, entropy, I could write 10,000 words and still not manage all of it. For me though, it connected most as a story of the search for meaning and the (perhaps?) creation of it where we don’t find it – the imposition of patterns on random data. Other readers could, many have, drawn quite different conclusions.

It’s an extraordinary achievement.

The Crying of Lot 49

Laskar Pelangi by Andrea Hirata. Making my way through the tetralogy again. So far the first one is the best. Somehow his writing lost his charm when the first book was successful. Anyway, anything from Andrea Hirata better than nothing, beggars can’t be choosers.

Was planning to read Laskar Pelangi earlier but was distracted by two Arthur C. Clarke books: Rendezvous With Rama and Childhood’s End. Rendezvous was written after he did 2001: A Space Odyssey; his most famous work. I find it interesting and full with wonder. It’s only weakness is the dialogue. Somehow stilted and seems added upon the story, to somehow make a connection with the reader. So as not too lose the humanness of the people in the story.

I find Childhood’s End the better of the two even though it’s was written in the late fifties much more earlier than Rendezvous With Rama. The people in it seems much more human, they have frailties,they are sad, happy, curious. The late Sir Clarke seems to succeed making these characters human without trying to. Though who can tell what the rough drafts read like?

The story does have a weakness too though. I find the ending a bit underwhelming and there were some parts that seems disconnected to the whole. Though understandably the story is divided into parts of different time scopes so as to make it clear to the reader that the story is going on a much longer timeframe, much longer than that which is usually understood as a lifetime. several lifetimes in fact.

The point I’m getting at is that, there seems to be a lack of cohesion between the parts. The same plot, some recurring characters but when reflected upon, it feels that Sir Clarke combined a few stories together to make the whole. As a whole the book feels like a multiple storied building that have a different architectural style for each floor. The first floor a modernist reminder of the cold war, the second floor art deco, the third classical chinese and so on.

The ending and the view of the whole one would get after finishing the story, with it’s diversions into the ideas of utopia and the prediction that some of humanity would reject this utopia with a counter utopia; mentions of Jung’s racial memory; and the idea of a transcendent post humanity that would be unrecognisable to a normal human is a bit hope crushing.

Next, after the Laskar Pelangi tetralogy, I would be diving again into Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. WW2, psychedelics, Pavlovian conditioning, sexual pervesrsion, rockets and a dude killed while wearing a pig suit. Hell yeah!

He’s not my favorite writer but if anyone wanted to make a case for Thomas Pynchon as the greatest living American author, I think I would have a hard time coming up with a counter argument. Over the course of his career he has so seemlessly slipped across the boundaries of genres and woven together such disparate tales that have kept academics on their tenure paths straight up until they have gained job security that the man is nearly unassailable. And I have enjoyed the majority of his books. And of the books I haven’t enjoyed, I have had to admit at the mastery of his craft. This is why Inherent Vice is a bit of an odd duck to me.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable and quick read. You fly across the pages and quickly find yourself flipping the back cover shut. From Pynchon’s works, only The Crying of Lot 49 can be said to be a quicker and more simply enjoyable read. But there is a vital difference between Vice and Lot 49. With Lot 49 there same mastery evident in V., Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland is still plainly evident. Lot 49 might be far shorter than any of them but it was still obscenely skillfully done.

Inherent Vice just isn’t as tight as Pynchon’s other works. Some cracks show. It’s pacing falls off at times, it’s turns occasionally come up as possibly the long way around instead of the right path. It’s Pynchon as an every day novelist rather than the freak of nature his other works held him up to be.

And this isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a quite enjoyable thing. not because I am saying tht Pynchon’s finally fallen from his throne but because without some of the polish his work has a different livelier feel to it.

The one review for Vice that has stuck in my head has been the review by Rolling Stone that essentially made it out to be something like Big Lebowski Nights where Dude and Walter team up to solve a mystery. Except there really isn’t a Walter in Vice unless you count a stoned, incompetant friend as the walter stand-in. Larry Sportello, the lead character and supposed Dude stand-in, does do some very Dude things but also some very un-dude things. And the world of Inherent Vice is roughly the same world as the southern california in the Coen Brothers’s cult hit. But the tone is different. Larry Sportello is not the dude and seeems to have come to some stoner wisdom that is down a forking path from the stoner wisdom the Dude lived by.

Larry is a private eye that has taken on a handful of cases at once that, in the end, more or less converge. I say more or less because it does lack the typical Pynchonic flair of bringing everything together at the end in a seriously breathtaking bow. It just sort of loosely jumbles together into a pile that feels pretty well resolved

Again, this isn’t a bad thing. pynchon makes it work and work enjoyablly well. The read is fantastic and is still probably one of the best books to come out this year. Maybe it’s his own fault for simply setting the bar too high with his past works that it has become nearly impossible for him to exceed the expectations lofted upon him.

Apuntes a la lectura de Vineland.

Es la primera vez que leo a Pynchon, peco de idólatra, de obsesivo.

Vineland es absorbente y  tan fascinante que mí alrededor se desmenuza en miles de  diminutos pedazos que se esparcen en todas direcciones. Uno a uno los he de volver a agrupar al cerrar el libro y mirando a mi alrededor, cerciorarme de quien soy.

No se si hay algo después de Vineland, después de Pynchon. Después de Pynchon solo hay Pynchon. Vivo obsesionado estos días, abducido por la vida de Zoyd y de Frenesí, por Hector Zuñiga, el agente de la DEA con un diagnostico alarmante de tele adicción y que vive obsesionado con las series de televisión y con Zoyd, como yo vivo obsesionado con Pynchon, como Zoyd vive obsesionado con Frenesí.

Preire, Isaías dos cuatro, Flash, Justin, hub, Sasha, Jess, Eula, en apenas cien paginas ya conozco tal elenco de protagonistas, de personajes, de vidas, que mirando hacia delante, hacia las mas de doscientas paginas que me quedan por leer, no puedo mas que sonreír y dejarme llevar.

Una vez leí en algún sitio, ¨si no te gusta Pynchon, no te gusta la literatura¨. Es una afirmación cruel y algo pretenciosa, pero esconde algo de verdad; Pynchon es literatura de fondo, gruesa, quizá no apta para todos los públicos, literatura enorme.

]]>