The Chumps of Choice

Rue du Départ

noreply@blogger.com (Neddie) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:31:00 +0000

(pp. 1065-1085)

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) (Source)

And so it comes to this.

Before I start with this, the final episode in this unprecedented, year-long group-reading experiment, let me say a big thank-you to all our participants, lurkers and commenters. In particular, I want to thank the Moderators for dedicating their time and not inconsiderable effort to stoking the fires of conversation about this mad, sprawling, enormous book. Through mayonnaise, mathematics and Mexico, through ballooning, the Balkans and bilocation, through T.W.I.T., Tunguska and To-Hell-You-Ride, with stops to replenish the dope supply at Chicago, Chihuahua and Chillicothe, vivisect Vectors in Venice and Venedig-an-Wien, take tea with Tesla, Tatzelwurms and the Tarahumara, chuck an insouciant bomb with Blavatsky, Bakhunin and the Bindlestiffs of the Blue, we've come a long way, baby.

It's been an Anarchist's dynamite blast, and I thank you all for participating.

This final section of the book finds us finishing up the Aetheric conversation between Dally and Merle that ended the penultimate "Against the Day" section. Dally's living on the Rue du Départ (day-part, anyone?), next to the departures track at the gare Montparnasse. Leaving the suburb (banlieue) where the mysterious transmitter allowed her to chat "across the dimensions" with her father, she hums a popular tune from a Reynaldo Hahn operetta, "C'est pas Paris, c'est sa banlieue" ("It's not Paris, it's her suburbs" -- cut 16 on the linked CD). Walking on, who should she run into but La Jarretiere, a musical-comedy danseuse who has staged her own "death and rebirth as someone else." Together, Dally and Jarri regale some Yank tourists with "Mon Dieu! Que les hommes sont bêtes," with could quite possibly be Messager's "Les hommes sont biens tous les mêmes."

We learn that Dally is continuing her stage career, appearing in the (fictional) Jean-Raoul Oeuillade's Fossettes l'Enflammeuse, but her mind drifts to Kit Traverse, whom, it seems, Dally married in 1915. In a long flashback, we learn that their marriage wasn't a particularly successful one, under pressure both from wartime deprivations, and from the reappearance of Clive Crouchmas in Dally's life. Despite "that awkward business of his having once tried to shop her into white slavery," Dally...well...dallies, is I guess how you'd put it, with Crouchmas, and Kit ain't happy about it. With his pal Renzo, a maniac pilot who's working on the nascent concept of dive-bombing as a military tactic, he buzzes the restaurant where his kitten canoodles* with Crouchmas, a scene in which the diving plane goes so fast that "something happened to time, and maybe they'd slipped into the Future, the Future known to Italian Futurists, with events superimposed on one another..."

Kit, our flashback continues, went up with Renzo for some more of those dive-bombing runs, most notably against a workers' strike, helping to crush it. During the run, he has a "velocity-given illumination. It was all political." The dive-bombing was "perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word that would not quite exist for another year or two." (Fascism. Hence the Futurist reference earlier.)

Well, who should show up in our continuing flashback but old Reef and Yashmeen, escaping the fighting in northeastern Italy. Something slightly redolent of menace passes between Dally and Yash, wife and ex-lover, and it begins to look like another Traverse marriage is headed for the rocks. Kit, "shamed into abandoning his engineer's neutrality," begins flying missions for the Italian air force against the Austrian invaders, allowing himself to be "seduced into the Futurist nosedive." Dally points out that Austrians, "your brothers-in-arms," aren't the ones he should be aiming his bombs at -- Traverse family values and all that -- and her disgust with Kit's helplessness to fight the Fascist/Futurist impulse leads her to walk out, head for Paris and solitude.

The narrative -- in a strange vectoring away from Dally's flashback, it seems, and not in the "present tense" as it were -- then concentrates itself on Reef and Yashmin. They cross the Atlantic to Ellis Island, where Reef gets a big "I" (for "idiot") chalked on his back. They head west, "propelled by [Reef's] old faith in the westward vector, in finding someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn't got to quite yet." (Good luck with that, kids...) Who should they run into in Montana but Frank, Stray and Jesse, Reef's son by Stray. The two families, strangely intertwined by marriage, fall in together, and the complicated emotions engendered by having two dads, one mom, and two half-sisters living under one roof begins to tell on Jesse.

The families have moved to the farthest-northwest corner of the US, Kitsap Peninsula (Google Earth puts it in Tacoma, WA), and Jesse brings home a school assignment: "What it Means to Be an American." His response, "It means do what they tell you...," shows the old Anarchist flame to be alive and well in the third generation of Traverses. He gets an A-plus from his teacher, who'd been "at Cour d'Alene back in the olden days." Thus, the brotherhood of the downtrodden...

And, drool drool, our last view of this Traverse family arc promises some Steamin' Hot Lesbo Action. Unfortunately, we're not gonna get to watch....

Now we're back with Dally in the "present tense." Meeting up with Policarpe, from that Young Congo crowd of Belgian nihilists back on 527, she buys him a drink, and we're back in Buddhist Maya again; postwar Paris, allows Policarpe, is naught but "Illusion... At your most langourous moment of maximum surrender, the true state of affairs will be borne in on you. Swiftly and without mercy."

Kit appears in the "present tense" Paris, apparently looking for Dally, and we're off on another flashback explaining how he came to be here. The war over and his divebombing proclivities now no longer needed, he drifts to Lwow and the Scottish Café, gathering place for insane mathematicians. He "is shown beyond a doubt" (although by whom we're not privileged to know) a "startling implication of Zermelo's Axiom of Choice": that it is in theory possible "to take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun."

"Staggering subsets, fellows," marvels a voice in the Café crowd, "Those Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were right all along, the world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as 'this' one."

(Weren't we looking for a topic sentence, a summing up of this whole mad book, a few weeks ago? I'm nominating that one right up there.)

Who should the speaker be but old Heino Vanderjuice himself, looking younger and free of worry, now, like Kit, out from under Scarsdale Vibe. Vanderjuice recounts how the Chums of Chance rescued him from an attempt of Vibe's life, "rescued me from my own life, from the cheaply-sold and dishonored thing I might have allowed it to become."

Then Vanderjuice vanishes, "some claimed to have seen him taken into the sky." Kit goes into a strange, Vectorial migration around Europe, "thinking about nothing but Dally, aware that they'd separated, but unable to remember why." He has visions (or are they real?) of a portal, a "framed shadow" approaching him; after a time the portal swallows him, and he finds himself transported (the description reminds me of the transporter beam in those old Star Trek shows) to a hotel room in Paris belonging to Lord Overlunch, a collector of Tibetan stamps (that image on the cover finally pays off!). Kit's face has been appearing on one of his stamps -- "But I wasn't..." "Well, well. A twin, perhaps."

And yes, Kit's mercifully back with Dally. "Some sort of husband in the picture..."**

May we imagine for them a vector....

Lovely.

And now, finally, the great wheel having come full circle, we're back with the Chums of Chance, at the Garçons de '71, "There, but Invisible" in a great gathering of skyships that transcend "the old political space, the map-space of two dimensions, by climbing into the third." Married, now, to the women of the Sodality of Aetheronauts, the Inconvenience now grown to the size of a small city, the Chums are literally surfing on light. "It is no longer a matter of gravity -- it is an acceptance of sky."

They fly toward grace.***

*Sorry.
**Tee-hee.
***Look out, Grace!

Chumps On Turkey Break

noreply@blogger.com (Neddie) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:36:00 +0000

A Gentle Reminder: We are on a two-week break for the Thanksgiving holiday. We will be back in session on Monday, December 3, with the Final Installment of our festivities.

That certainly doesn't mean that discussion is discouraged! As a suggested starting point, allow me to throw out this quote, from Scott Leith in The Spectator:

I’m far from the first person to point it out, but it bears pointing out again: Pynchon’s novels behave much more like jazz than they do like anything else. Themes emerge, are riffed on, returned to, and transfigured. Passages refer to each other not so much directly as by a sort of sympathetic vibration. You suddenly notice something -- be it as slight as the conjunction of the colours mauve and green -- that clicks in your mind. I’ve seen this earlier. Where the hell was it ? What’s he getting at? Accordingly, my notes are as bizarre as those I have made on any book I’ve read for review. (...) What is Against the Day about? What is it not about? To try to summarise the plot would be insanity. It is a comedy of ideas with people in it. Describing it as if it were a realist novel would be like trying to transcribe in musical notation the sound of a piano falling down the stairs. (...) It is virtuoso nonsense; it is a giant shaggy dog story, serious as history; it is by turns mind-crushingly tedious and utterly exhilarating; it is remorselessly facetious and yet deeply moving. It is like watching the European apocalypse as scripted by Looney Toons. It is brilliant, but it is exhaustingly brilliant.

Thoughts?

Basnight in Twilight

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 03:44:00 +0000

But here seemed to be those old bilocational powers emerging now once again, only different.
picture source

(pp. 1040-1062)

It is 1925, and Lew Basnight, after spending the war in England has, like all good private eyes nearing retirement age, ended up in Los Angeles. He has a staff of three mighty fit young ladies, Thetis, Shalimar, and Mezzanine, handy with firearms, enough rich clients with messy lives needing cleaning, and some mysterious overseas income, so that he is doing quite well for himself.

As our penultimate episode opens, a black jazz musician, Chester LeStreet, tells Lew he's been sent by Tony Tsangarakis, a club owner and gangster, to ask him to investigate the possible reappearance of a party girl named Encarnacion, who was supposed to have been murdered some time before. This word has come via a phone call from Santa Barbara made by one Miss Jardine Maraca, Encarnacion's old roommate.

Lew traces Miss Maraca to a shabby motor court on the Pacific Coast Highway, from which she has departed. Finding no clues in her empty room, Lew calls Emilio, a Filipino dope peddler and psychic living nearby, to come give the place, specifically the toilet bowl, a look.

Emilio, appalled by his visions, gives Lew a Los Angeles address that appears to him, and demands his fee right then, in cash.

Back at the office, Lew learns that Merle Rideout has been calling every ten minutes to speak to him. Finally getting him on the line, Merle asks Lew to meet him at a picnic ground.

Merle has been in L.A. for over a decade, running into Luca Zombini, now a designer of movie special effects, in early 1914. He visits the always interesting Zombini household and comes to some affectionate resolution with Erlys. The Zombinis become what family Merle has.

At the picnic park, Merle has Lew take steps to shake anyone tailing him, directing him to meet his partner Roswell Bounce at the other end of the park. The three of them proceed to the inventors' lab.

Rideout and Bounce (heh) have invented a sort of viewing process which accesses the mysterious capabilities of silver to bring photographs to life, making them not only windows of the future, and the past of their subjects, but, depending on the settings, viewers of alternate futures as well.

The scientists think the studios are out to steal the process and ask Lew for protection. Testing their invention, Lew gets them to scan a photo of Jardine Maraca, and watches as she drives to a place called Carefree Court.

When Lew finally checks out the address Emilio gave him, he finds a bungalow, and, behind its screen door, the malevolently beautiful, and haunted looking, Mrs. Deuce Kindred. Noting Lew's obvious arousal, the very willing Lake invites him in.

Oh this was going to be sordid as all hell, thinks Lew, and boy is he right.

Afterwards, while Lew is chatting with Lake about Encarnacion's case over coffee in the kitchen, Deuce enters, a mean runt packing heat, a labor-busting goon for a low-rent movie studio.

Deuce does not care, like at all, about what Lew and Lake have been up to, but objects heatedly to Lew's mocking questions about what he does, and finally pulls his gun. Luckily, Lew had earlier told Shalimar to back him up. She enters with a machine gun and Deuce ducks out.

The next three pages are sketched out of the miserable dream lives of Lake and Deuce, two pathetic people who've used each other for years merely to escape the consequences of any human feelings.

A day or two later, Lew goes to Carefree Court, where he crashes a party. Everyone there has been, over the years, at war, or at least at odds, with the many forces of authority, but seem pretty chipper about it all. Lew meets Virgil Maraca, who reminds him of the Hermit tarot card, and his daughter Jardine, who reminds Lew of his lost wife, Troth.

Jardine tells Lew that Encarnacion's case is closed, that she returned (from the dead?) only long enough to testify against Deuce, whom the cops have picked up for a string of grizzly murders of women.

Though she makes plans for Lew to take her out of town, Jardine decides instead to steal an airplane, and flies away over the desert.

Lew goes to Merle with a photo of Troth taken in 1890 and asks to see her grow old. Doing so, he falls into a reverie of the irrecoverable past, wondering if she can see him too.

Merle, perhaps inspired by this, uses a picture of Dally he took in Colorado when she was 12, to find her now in Paris, where she, sitting in a tiny studio, now appears to return his gaze, smiles at him, saying something.

-----

I will add my comments in Comments in a bit.

Cue The Band!!

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:24:00 +0000

Apologies to Chumps near and far, but a clot of work which needs to get off my desk subito has kept me from my obligation here. I'll have it up, I dearly hope, by tomorrow evening. In the meantime, here's another word from our patron saint.

Also note: due to the looming Thanksgiving holiday, Neddie will be back with our last (gasp!) installment in two weeks.

Remember the Starving

noreply@blogger.com (Neddie) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:10:00 +0000

Pp. 1018 - 1039

We're back, finally, with the Chums of Chance.

The Chums are now working mainly on their own stick, as the National Office has been so cheap with the budget that the organization is crumbling. Everybody's negotiating their own prices and choosing their own missions. This has proved to be marvelously profitable, and the Chums are rolling in scratch -- champagne with dinner, improvements and upgrades on the Inconvenience...

It's a very hot summer, and the Saharan updrafts are spectacular. Goaded by Pugnax's companion Ksenija, the dog who was protecting Reef's "family exfiltration" back on 969, the Chums vote to dive into the updraft to see where it will take them, picking up the costs out of overhead, just, it seems, for the hell of it.

And dive they do. As they're borne upward, Chick Counterfly muses a notion that comes to us from the very beginning of the book (hey, we've gotta tie up some loose ends, nicht wahr?), the dark warning from Randolph back in Chicago that "going up was like going north," and that if you ascend high enough, you'll eventually begin to descend to the surface of another planet. "And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics [Hey! It's Pynchon!] ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy."

Chick takes the air temperature and pressure outside in the sand-cloud, and is alarmed to see that the pressure is increasing, not decreasing: The ship is heading for a crash landing on the surface of some other Earth! Unable to discern where the hell they actually are, the "two-lad Navigational Committee" concludes they have reached the Pythagorean or Counter-Earth once postulated by Philolaus of Tarentum (but shorten that throttle, Aristotle), which posits a second Earth, the Antichthon. In the Chums' conception, it's a second planet whose orbit is 180 degrees opposite "our" Earth's, and is thus never seen from Earth.

No, Darby, they didn't just fly through the sun, but maybe it's "more like seeing though the Sun with a telescope of very high resolution so clearly that we're no longer aware of anything but the Aether between us."

"Oh, like X-Ray Spex."

So the Chums find themselves on the Counter-Earth, a planet that some days perfectly resembles Earth, and on others holds "an American Republic...passed...irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic." Now they appear to inhabit two Earths, and yet belong in any true sense to neither.

A shadowy Russian agent, one Baklashchan (backlash?) sends them off on a mission to find their "old friendly nemesis" Padzhitnoff. In performing this undertaking, the Chums seem strangely oblivious to the First World War going on on the earth beneath them. "'Trenches,'" muses Miles, "as if it were a foreign technical term."

(Oddly, I've noticed at least two grammatical terms, verbal moods, used in this section: Here (1023:3) we have the Chums' freedom from "enfoldment by the indicative world below"; and on 1033:14 Noseworth's "I am as fond of the subjunctive mood as any...". Not sure what to make of it...)

Chick notes that Padzhitnoff's travels have been closely mirroring the Chums' own: "Where we haven't been yet, he seems to have left no trace." "Swell," sez Darby. "We;'re chasing ourselves now."

Foreshadowing from earlier in the book now begins to pay off. Miles recalls his bicycle ride through Flanders with Ryder Thorn, back on 552-3, in which Thorn says, "Our people know what will happen here...and my assignment is to find out whether, and how much, yours know." It's worth going back and reading that passage, where Thorn blurts out that "Flanders will be the mass grave of History." Back in this section, some sort of scales fall away from Miles' eyes, and he has an insight that the other Chums fail to see: the noble youth of Europe "cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death."

The lads find Padzhitnoff, his Bolshai'a Igra now "dozens of times its former size," colored solid red, and renamed "Remember the Starving." He's engaged in charity work now, dropping not brickwork but food, clothing and medical supplies to "whatever populations below were in need of them." He's based in Switzerland, in a "private Alp" stuffed full of contraband chocolate and coffee. The Chums decide not to turn Padzhitnoff in to the "cringers" but to become fugitives from justice themselves.

(Want to call your attention to 1025:35-38, in which artillery shells can be seen "reaching the tops of their trajectories and pausing in the air for an instant before the deadly plunge back to Earth." But this time, the Rainbow of Gravity is observed from above, a reverse parabola. Just sayin'.)

The Chums now find themselves, owing to "special situation" and the Inconvenience's superior speed, repatriating "persons of particular interest who cannot be repatriated without certain awkwardness," when one day, Martinmas (November 11), the Armistice is signed and the war is over. Pugnax brings in an offer from California, an offer of unbelievable remuneration, so it's ho for Los Angeles.

The wind blows them off course, south of the Rio Bravo, where they are rescued by the Sodality of Aethernauts. Here my expertise in Steampunk Science fails me somewhat, as the explanation of the girls' ability to use the Aether as a medium of flight goes whizzing over my fuzzy little head, but I do get the fruity import of Viridian's tart retort: "Burning dead dinosaurs and whatever they ate ain't the answer, Crankshaft Boy."

Also well within my intellectual grasp is the pairing off of Chums and Sodalites (hee!).

The winds finally shift in the Chums' favor, and Los Angeles heaves into view. "Where on Earth is this?" wonders Heartsease. ""That's sort of the problem," muses Chick. "That 'on Earth' part."

The passage that follows tugs at my heartstrings a bit: As a rural sort, living in the shadow of a mountain, I marvel at the stars I can see on a clear, cold night; in my former, light-polluted suburban existence, I missed them terribly, and thought with nostalgia of a time when the cities of Earth didn't blot them almost completely from the sky. In the Chums' day, this process, in which "a triumph over night" meant that shift-work was now possible, meant either "the further expansion of an already prodigious American economy," or "groundhog sweat, misery and early graves," depending on how you see it.

The Chums discover that the lucrative mission they've been sent on is a phony, and they find themselves at a loose end. Wandering around in Hollywood "whom should he run into" but his old dad, "Dick" Counterfly (love those quote marks!). "Dick" (everybody in the world calls him that!) is doing mighty well for himself and this third wife, possibly younger than Chick, named Treacle. "Dick" shows Chick a machine he's invented that has all the appearances of being a primitive Steampunk television; the program -- a submoronic bit of monkey-slapstick -- being broadcast from somewhere "not on the surface of the Earth so much as" -- "Perpendicular," fills in Chick.

The next day, "Dick" picks up Chick in his Packard and takes him to meet up with ol' Merle Rideout and Roswell Bounce, who are running a research facility on Santa Monica Bay. Merle quizzes "Dick" as to some "muscle" to protect their operation -- Roswell's a hair paranoid. Who should "Dick" recommend but our old friend Lew Basnight!

Turns out the device Merle and Roswell are working on is pretty miraculous. Having thrown together some worm drives, Nicol prisms, Navy-surplus Thalofide cells and some baling wire and chewing gum, they've invented a machine that can actually make a photograph come to life! "Ain't that just the damnedest thing you ever saw?"

We end with "Dick" driving Chick back to the Inconvenience in Van Nuys, and some father-son bonding; "Dick" offers to teach Chick to drive, and Chick extends an invitation to go for a spin in the airship. "Well. Thought you'd never ask," sez Dick, and our cold, cold hearts melt just a little tiny bit.

Unavoidably Detained...

noreply@blogger.com (Neddie) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:04:00 +0000

...I'm woikin' as fast as I can! This unemployment dodge ain't all beer and skittles!

Meanwhile, here's a little diversion from Epigraph Pianist and His Mighty Sidekick Coltrane...

The Unquiet, Malevolent Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Civic Center) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:11:00 +0000

The Death Pit, Ludlow, Colorado 1914

In this chapter, three monumental things occur. We finally embark on page 1,000 of our tale, The Villain Scarsdale Vibe is murdered, and the culmination of the political saga of Colorado miners reaches its historical apex in the Ludlow Massacre during the Colorado Coal Field War of 1913-14. In case you didn't follow the link in DJ's synopsis last week, please click here to read a short history of the war which is completely fascinating (and it's where all these photos came from). It also confirms that Pynchon is being historically accurate in his background for this week's tales of love and murder.

The section begins on page 1,000 at a hot-springs resort casino "up near the Continental Divide" where Vibe is addressing the greatest acronym since T.W.I.T., the Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A.). Midway through the page, he begins a long soliloquy, "So of course we use them," that is positively operatic. Both Iago in Shakespeare's "Othello" and Claggart in Melville's "Billy Budd" were representatives of ultimate evil whose motivations were never explained by their creators, but in the opera versions by Verdi and Britten respectively, they both get a "Credo" aria to explain their point of view and Pynchon has decided to do the same thing. Like those characters, Vibe's own imminent doom is spelled out mid-aria, in this case, with the aside "He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore." (1001:23)

The next day in his private train The Juggernaut on his way to the "coal war," Vibe encounters a spirit, whose presence usually terrifies him, but this time he's only curious, and after an odd exchange with the spirit, Vibe announces to Foley that he looks forward "to being one of the malevolent dead" (1002:16), which Foley understands from his Civil War experience to be "ghosts...filled with resentments, drifting, or stationed by cemetery gates and abandoned farmhouses where half-mad survivors wuld be mostly likely to see them...not the companionship he would have chosen."

The scene shifts to Frank and Ewball making their way to the striking mining town of Trinidad, where Ewball makes the observation that some of the Balkan-originated strikers must be ghosts (1003:12), "the unquiet dead, geography ain't the point, it's all unfinished business, it's wherever there's accounts to be balanced..." which prompts Frank to say, "Ewball, that is some bughouse talk." When the two get into Trinidad, they immediately notice Foley in front of the Columbian Hotel where Vibe is staying, and make a plan of attack, which includes the sly observation (1004:5), "They say Foley's a born-again Christer, so he can act as bad as he wants because Jesus is coming and nothin a human can do so bad Jesus won't forgive it." The irony of that remark is underlined when Frank and Ewball make a pathetic attempt to assassinate Vibe in the main street. Instead of following Scarsdale's imperious tone of command to shoot the anarchists, Foley instead lines up his Luger "with his employer's heart, and chambered the first round. Scarsdale Vibe peered back, as if only curious. 'Lord, Foley...' 'Jesus is Lord,' cried Foley, and pulled the trigger, proceeeding to empty all eight rounds..."

The Death Special

The narrative turns to Stray, who had been in Trinidad but decided to help out the tent colony in Ludlow filled with striking miner families. While she's dodging random machine gun fire from the militia, her son Jesse shows up after having hitched a ride on a train, which both dismays and warms her. Searchlights on towers are set up by the mining company and "began sweeping the tents all night long" which leads to the suggestion, "The Colorado militia were in fact giving light a bad name...In the tents, darkness in that awful winter was sought like warmth or quiet. It came for many to seem like a form of compassion."(1008:25) There's a welcome return of the Reverend Moss Gatlin, giving yet another great Anarchist sermon (1009:15), and we follow Jesse in his wanderings through the camp and among the militia, being young enough to still get away with it though it comes with the realization that "pretending to have a friendly chat with potential targets of their Death Special was a level of evil neither boy had quite suspected in adults till now." (1010:10)

Later, at the 19 Luglio Saloon, "named for the date back in 1900 when an Anarchist named Bresci assassinated King Umberto of Italy," Frank runs into Stray, who is looking like Michelangelo's Pieta while nursing a striker. After he brings up Ewball, she tells him, "Buy me one of whatever that is in your fist and I'll tell you the whole sordid tale." From here, we go through a brilliantly written scene (page 1012) where Stray FINALLY, after being with Reef, bad boy motorcyclists, Ewball, and god knows who else, realizes who Frank is and how he loves her. She invites him to the tent city, he tells her it's about ready to be razed by the militia, and her response is "Guess you better visit us soon, then."

Karl Linderfeldt, Mercenary

During Frank's visit, he catches sight of a real historical character, a truly malevolent proto-Blackwater mercenary named Karl Linderfeldt, who guided the Ludlow Massacre and who also murdered people for hire during the Mexican Revolution. Jesse arrives breathlessly from some adventure involving bullets, uncle and nephew bond over weaponry, and after realizing that "not much Frank could teach him," he starts to talk to Stray, "I wanted to say," Frank said. "Oh you been sayin it, don't worry." He gave her a closer look, just to make sure of her face. "Fine time to be getting around to this." (1014:15) This may be the single most romantic exchange in the 1,000+ novel, with its hundreds of pages filled with time and Frank's yearning for Estrella from the moment he met her.

Frank immediately comes up with an escape plan, the militia attacks, and we're in a scene of confusion and slaughter. After being caught by a militiaman named Brice, Jesse has a moment of grace and is allowed to escape, and the three of them "take shelter with hundreds of others...in the wide arroyo north of town, waiting for some letup in the shooting to get someplace safe. After a hallucinatory moment with Webb's dead hand on his shoulder, Frank wakes up and sees the awful slaughter. And here we come to one of the novel's serious morals (1016:14): "But it happened, each casualty, one by one, in light that history would be blind to. The only accounts would be the militia's." One proof of Pynchon's charge is that I was once again completely ignorant of this fairly essential history until reading this novel.

Ludlow Family

There's a gorgeously romantic section where Frank sends Estrella and Jesse off back home while he joins up with the strikers, "dead on their feet, not half a dozen words of English among them." After it's settled, Frank and Estrella face off. "Their embrace might not have been so close or desperate, but no kiss he could remember had ever been quite this honest, nor this weighted with sorrow." The last line invokes Orpheus and Eurydice "not looking back" once again, just as Yashmeen and Reef didn't look back at Cyprian.

What I Tell You Three Times Is True

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Z.) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:00:00 +0000

pp 976-999

What we've got this week are two chapters, both returning us to the Southwest, and inaugurating another long string of unlikely reunions. For such a vast sprawl of geographic locations, all the same people sure keep running into each other -- and am I the only one at this point who's pretty well lost track of who's shagged who?

In the short chapter on pp 976-981, we pick up with Ewball and Stray, as he brings her home to meet his parents. His father is, to put it lightly, piqued that Ewb Jr's been using extremely rare stamps for potsage on his letters home. It's nice to see someone taking philately so seriously. The mêlée is interrupted by none other than Mayva Traverse, who now works for the Ousts. Mayva and Stray catch up, and talk about Reef, Jesse, and Frank. (No mention of Jesse's new half-sister? Didn't the postcard Reef sent home to Mayva [p. 968] ever arrive? Or did Reef neglect to mention it?)

This chapter reads like something of an intermezzo, tying a number of Traverse story lines together, especially since the next chapter, pp 982-999, returns to Frank, still in Mexico, who we last saw here. He heads for Jiménez, famous for meteorites. He carries one around that speaks when he touches it. "What are you doing here?" it asks. Webb? Is that you?

máchina loca?

Frank modifies a train engine, transforming it into a moving bomb, something the locals call a "máchina loca" -- an activity worthy of the Kieselguhr Kid. He then drifts away south to the Capital and, finding himself in an "out-of-the-way" restaurant, runs into none other than Günther von Quassel, who we haven't seen since, oh, the 630s. They discuss Frank lending Günther a hand fixing all of his newfangled machines he's using at the coffee plantation. But Günther's got problems with revolutionaries and re-revolutionaries between the Capital and Chiapas.

So he accompanies Günther to a meeting with someone who will help get them through the troubled regions and back to the coffee plantation. It takes place at the new "Hotel Tezcatlipoca" in a suite overlooking Chapultepec Park, and a new statue of an angel representing winged victory. Frank looks through a telescope trained on its face, and recognizes it. The statue speaks to him.

The plantation is on the extreme south Pacific coast, almost in Guatamala. He meets there a girl with the intense name of "Melpómene" -- her namesake, the muse of tragedy. She tells him of the fireflies in the trees. She shows him one, named Pancho, who blinks on command. Frank realizes this is his soul. Comparisons to the eucharist and Special Relativity are mentioned, as well as instant telepathy.

Watching the tree full of fireflies, Frank falls into a trance and has a vision that is deeply reminiscent of several other episodes in the book, including Jeshimon and the disaster visited up on the nameless city. Seems this vision, and the news Melpómene has for him about the most recent coup, leads Frank to decide finally to quit Mexico.

He heads back to Denver, and, in rapid succession, bumps into Willis Turnstone, Wren Prevenence, and Ewball. He signs on to help them out in the labor struggles at the nearby mines.

===

Can I just say that I certainly hope Our Mexican Correspondent Sr René López Villamar chimes in at any time? (Will I in the meantime suggest that people consult the Pynchonwiki (which has grown increasingly valuable over the course of this first post-ATD year has progressed) for what has proven to be a lot of useful research points?)

Why did Stray and Ewball run off together in the first place, anyway? Does their parting have more to do with the pair's amicability -- or the subtle amnesia that seems to afflict all too many characters in this book? And does it seem strange that Stray believes, or ever believed, that anarchism and "greater invisibility" might be in any way related -- indeed, does this evoke the Chums' increasingly shadowy and indistinct appearances or am I just whistling dixie?

Given that we as readers have spent considerably more time with her sons than she has, can we agree with Mayva's characterization that Frank is "the patient one in the family"? Is there more than a little bit of that oldtimey Buddhist Karma in what Stray sez at 980:24-6?

Isn't it the strangest sort of insight into Reef's character to think that he, too, could perhaps be described as "a child of the storm," thrilled and hyped up by the St. Elmo's Fire on the stovepipe, and hearing the dynamite blasts, his frown saying "where's the lightning, where's the storm" (981:11-16)?

Did anyone perk up at the mention of both of meteorite fragments and Iceland Spar, especially considering that Frank believes that it was somewhere nearby that he had that other encounter with the spar (391:30-32) which "led him to Sloat Fresno" (983:40)? Isn't that long paragraph starting at the bottom of 984 gorgeous? And funny how it's a bug that brings him "back to the day," isn't it?

When Frank meets up again with Günther, what could Günther mean when he says he hopes "to slip through a loophole in the laws of chance" (987:4)? Since when did chance follow any law? And if it actually does, the Chums of Chance are arbiters or at least monitors of such laws, of course, aren't they? Come to think of it, isn't there an implicit paradox in the idea that there would be a heirarchical organization in the service of Chance? Isn't Chance by definition supposed to be, well, random? Or is this like the common misconception that Anarchy is analogous with anything-goes lawlessness?... (Or, because the word "chance" isn't capitalized when Günther says it, should we assume that he's just talking about "chance" rather than "Chance"?)

Could Ibargüengoitia, "the Repairman," really be the "Genevan contact" that Slothrop meets with (GR 384)? And are these appearances of the name an homage to this Mexican satirist?

Whose face do you suppose Frank recognizes in the statue?

I wasn't the only one waiting for the third brother to pass under a third arch ever since Reef went under the Halkata back on page 955, was I? How is Frank's passage through the ceremonial arch on page 993 different from the other two arches? Is it, for example, significant that "Frank," rather than Frank, passes thru it? And why do you suppose it grows more substantial and "takes on a ghostly light" (993:30) once he passes under it? I mean, it can't be an accident that "Frank" passed under an arch too, can it? What do you suppose it means, assuming it means anything at all? And should we now be waiting for Lake to pass through one as well? (Whatever happened to her, anyway? How long has it been since we saw her sorry fundament, or her jittery little shit of a husband?) If Kit's passage was one of transformation (771:16) and release (771:20), and Reef's was one of perpetual love (955:29-30), what is Frank's? Life and death (993:29)? What does that mean? And what might we expect Lake's passage to be, if it ever happens? Did she in fact already pass under an arch of some kind in the deep past of the book, and I just missed it? Or, in fairytales inviolving three sons, does a daughter even count? Should we find it important that both Reef's and Frank's arches are encountered amid swarms of insects (Reef: butterflies; Frank: fireflies), while Kit and Frank are near or on trains when they dream of theirs? Or that Reef's and Kit's were natural rock formations, while Frank's was built by humans?

Would I be lying if I said I hadn't been suffering a bit from "Against the Day" Fatigue lately? Who wouldn't be at this point, as we close in on the end of the first "millennium" and the beginning of the last "century" of the book? Would anyone be surprised to learn that I'm getting a little misty-eyed at the thought that this is my last go-round as moderator? Why can't I stop phrasing sentences in the form of a question, like a gameshow from which I am trying to awake? (And am I the only one who's wondering what snorting coffee powder would be like, or am I sharing a little too much here?)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being -or- Guns 'N Roses

noreply@blogger.com (H. Rumbold, Master Barber) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:29:00 +0000

AtD pp. 950-975

Synopsis:

Yashmeen Halfcourt, Reef Traverse, Cyprian Latewood and Baby Ljubica lead an idyllic existence in the Rose Valley. After the harvest is in, Gabrovo Slim takes Cyp and Reef on a ramble to see a tower surmounted by a black iron toroidal antenna- in fact another Tesla station. In the radio shack, instead of transmitting power or Q-Rays, the Sparks are listening intently to the received transmissions of the dead. A pack of motorcyclists pulls up and turns out to be Derrick Theign's elite "shadowing" unit, R.U.S.H. led by Mihály Vámos. He and Cyps compare notes and the bikers take Cyp and Reef out to the Interdikt (952). Nobody seems to own the place and it seems to defend itself, but the bikers know the way in, following a weaving cartesian path. Inside they find canisters of phosgene , but instead of poison gas, it is to be used as a light-weapon "a great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan peninsula. Like nothing that has ever happened." (953:25). Backshadows of the Vormance Monster and foreshadows of WWI. Oddly, there is no light source. Vámos takes leave without looking back (more on this later).

Time for Cyp, Reef and Yash to move on. They head east toward the Black Sea and Varna, detour to an arched rock formation called Halkata (The Ring). Yashmeen and Reef walk through together ("you will both be in love forever" according to local tradition) and Cyps follows alone ("turn into the opposite sex" 955:33). They reach, to the accompaniment of birdsong and choral music, a remote mountain monastery of a sect descended from the Bogomils, devoted to silence, contemplation and a Manichean/Buddhistic emphasis on duality, light:dark, the ratio and similarity of the part to the whole. They were of course persecuted as heretical until the absorption of the main branch into the Roman church in 1650. Cyprian decides this is just his cup of tea and stays on as a postulant nun, as Dwight Prance did back in Tuva (787). Cyprian has had an epiphany and is permitted to ask the hegumen one question: "What is it that is born of light?" (959:37) and Father Ponko answers with a reference to the hesychasts' (their fourteenth century rival sect) tradition of the light of the Transfiguration of Christ and its equivalence to the inner light perceived emanating from one's middle in meditation (omphalopsychoi). Ponko contrasts this with his sect's perception of light approached through darkness, as the Moon is to the Sun. And asks his own koanic question: "When something is born of light, what does that enable us to see?" (960:14). They part, unlike Orpheus and Eurydice and Mr. and Mrs. Lot, without looking back.

Yash, Ljubica and Reef head off West toward the Adriatic as the First Balkan War breaks out, pegging the time as October, 1912. Skirting the fighting, Reef picks up a Madsen gun and bouquets of wildflowers for Yashmeen and Ljubica. They pause to send postcards with weird multi-alphabet stamps to Yz-les-Bains, Chunxton Crescent, Gabrovo Slim and Zhivka, Frank and Mayva in the U.S.A., Kit Traverse and Auberon Halfcourt, Hotel Tarim, Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan (968:17) and enter Albania, which everyone had warned them to avoid. After a scrape with some local highwaymen, Reef is rescued by Ramiz, his buddy from the Swiss tunnel. Next thing you know they are invited home and playing clarinets in harmony and drinking rakia. Through more idyllic scenery and family bonding, they make their way to the coast and catch a lift on a fishing boat to Corfu.

Here walks into a cafe where Yash and Ljubica are sitting none other than Auberon Halfcourt (973:11). He got their postcard from page 968. He has deserted his post, made a fortune in jade (Yashmeen's namesake mineral) and having encountered Kit Traverse tending bar in the Deux Continents in Constantinople, Auberon hooks up with Umeki Tsurigane, of Q-Weapon fame (974:21). They go and find Reef in a taverna, teaching the locals Leadville Fan-Tan and all have a jolly meal of "tsingarelli and polenta and yaprakia and a chicken stoufado
with fennel and quince and pancetta" from an ancient Venetian recipe with lashings of Mavrodaphne (975:17) and all wind up doing the karsilamás. Auberon explains to Yashmeen "For me Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople." "And your world-line crossed that of Miss Tsurigane. And so." "And so." (975:29).

Notes & Commentary:

chumps4

p. 950: tobacco patches- Eastern Rumelia (Thrace) is the home of yenidje tobacco and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. Smokes, as typical in wartime, are mentioned as items of trade and baksheesh.

p. 953: Phosgene may be synthesized by combining carbon monoxide and chlorine catalyzed by sunlight, hence the name "born of light." Aside from all the other light-themery in the work, there is Lucifer, bearer of light in Manichean opposition to Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine of the Nicean credo. A light-weapon strikes me as fanciful and impractical when we can contemplate orbiting thermonuclear-
pumped X-ray lasers.

p. 956: The Bogomils drew on local Pythagorean and Orphic sources. That they were Early Protestants in the opinion of L.P. Brockett in 1879 seems to me to be biased and a bit of a stretch. So the dualistic tradition, music of the spheres, the tetractys tattooed on the abbot's head, interdiction of beans in the diet and not looking back on parting. Don't think twice, it's all right (B. Dylan). Additionally, the solution to the Pythagorean triangle of Reef, Cyp and Yash. In Ljubica, Fr. Ponko recognizes from a previous metempsychosis the mooned
planet.... the planetary electron. Self-similarity (fractals) and karmic cycles (961:11) and for Joyceans out there, "Who's he when he's at home?"

p. 969: Sheltering in a farm outbuilding, Ljubica seems to converse with a macedonian šarplaninec sheepdog. Turns out to be a buddy of Pugnax and the Chums are just out of sight, directing them away from danger and keeping an eye on things. At this stage of the book, not at all surprising, but the way this information is revealed sticks out like a sore thumb. "It would be many years before he learned that this dog's name was Ksenija..." (969:34) - instead of linear narrative, the Author steps into the spotlight as the omniscient eye, very out of character and a self-spoiler to let us know the future life of Reef. Perhaps TRP saw that the book was already pushing page 1000 and didn't have the heart to write what is a minor episode into context. Perhaps he (and all of us) are a bit tired of the Chums.

H. Rumbold, Master Barber

Strategic Balkan Musicology and Anarchist Golf

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:56:00 +0000

PAGES 930-950

Having left our peyote glimpse into the ancient meso-american (anarchist?) village of Casas Grandes we fly now on the winds of prose to Frank's brother Reef, who with Yashmeeen and Cyprian has stumbled upon an anarchist spa called Yz-les Bains . The spa village is in the foothills of the Pyrenees with a secret path into Spain. There is a real Aix-le Bains hot springs resort town in western France, but Pynchon has given the reader a preWW1 anarchist counterforce in these less determinate y, z coordinates, where lefties are gathered for a little R&R, strategic Balkan musicology and a few games of anarchist golf.

Ratty McHugh is there, inspired by Cyprian's disposal of Theign, along with many others, to leave Whitehall . On his way out he kissed his secretary, Sophrosyne(moral sanity)Hawkes, who has joined him along with his wife in a merry menage, oppositely gender weighted to Reef, Yash and Cyp. That gender balance is significant as he introduces the newcomers to the community and they discuss among other things the all-male structures like T.W.I.T. that "blighted the hopes of anarchism for years".

As Pynchon introduces us along with Ratty, Reef and Cyprian to the comic delights of anarchist golf I would like to suggest that Yz-le-Bains is a probable stand-in for Esalen , the Big Sur birthplace and resort of new age and counter culture ideas, practices and voices like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Gregory Bateson, Hunter Thompson and Joan Baez . There are many parallels, the founding in sexual openness and role reversal, the western-edge geography, the eclectic spirituality and theorizing, but I think the clincher is The importance of the psychic dimensions of golf to Esalen founder Michael Murphy, author of Golf in the Kingdom . Also, in response to Reef's eager suggestion of the possible use of explosives, the anarchists say they are following a path of" co-evolution"as an alternative form of resistance to anarchist bombs. This kind of use of the word co-evolution is definitely from the west coast 60s ala Stewart Brand, Paul Erlich, Esalen.

While golfing , Ratty tells them about a map , "purportedly the Belgian Congo" but really thought to be the Balkan Peninsula in Code. Later we are introduced to Coombs De Bottle with whom they and the ladies examine and discuss the map in detail, which points toward the coming European War, along with details like a poison gas minefield. Everyones abilities and experience contributes to a cumulative understanding.

Yashmeen asks the question "why not let them have their war?"implicit in her question that war would be self destructive of the corrupt monarchies and powers. Others argue persuasively that war reinforces the worst aspects of nation states and industrial corporations and would destroy the growing discontent with nationalism and the interest in alternatives. They consider unpromising ways to disarm the phosgene, and Yashmeen , who seems to be internalizing the horror of the situation along with a committment to act, says "this is terrible". Cyprian perceives her plans to accompany a mission and he and she have a gentle disagreement about the risks of giving birth in such circumstances. Cyprian, struggling with an inner vow not to return to the Balkans, reluctantly asks the group "How should we go in?", perhaps ready to "relax into his fate".

Here we are introduced to Professor Sleepcoat, an ethnic musicologist, who is concerned about the drastic absence in Balkan recordings of music in the Lydian mode ( Sleepcoat uses example of F to F on white keys with a b natural instead of b-flat.) . He also mentions rumors of a neo-pythagorean cult with particular aversion to the Lydian. This is the 2nd reference to Pythagoras(T.W.I.T. first) and also introduces the myth of Orpheus who used the Phrygian mode(E to E on white keys) favored by the pythagoreans.

So they form a plan to explore the Balkans as song collectors - a practice already historically underway(Bartok, Vaughn Williams) as Euro folk cultures were already stressed and threatened. This shift from geopolitics to song collecting at first struck me as comical but I think it is really pretty serious, carrying the thoughts deep into the question of what makes life precious, what is worth preserving . There is an article in newest Harpers about the Congo; the author found that most Congolese have no historical memory of the Belgian colonial rule, the same loss of history taking place in the US, whole languages disappearing rapidly.

At this point Reef is associated with the anarchist enterprise through "class hostility", Cyprian is without political faith, but Yashmeen feels at Yz -les- Bains a re-awakening of transcendent hope.

"This is our own age of exploration" she declared "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen."

The sexual limits among Yash ,Cyp and Reef continue to fall and Reef muses with genuine amazement how he feels no jealousy and has become very fond and respectful of Cyprian.

They join Sleepcoat(the name reminds of Josephs dream coat of many colors; his concern for the losses of traditional song as though colors are disappearing from the dreams of the culture) and Sleepcoats's helpers in Beograd( Belgrade) and make their first stop for research in Sofia.
One night they hear 2 lovers sing a duet across a valley, and it is

as if the division between the singer were more than the width of the valley, something to be crossed only through an undertaking as metaphysical as song, as if Orheus might once have sung it to Eurydice in Hell.

Later they share thoughts on Orpheus's failed rescue.

R ,Y and C start to look for the Interdikt line(phosgene gas or?), people shut down and say you don't find them they find you. They go to a dance and C runs into Gabrovo Slim who invites them to his house when Yash has the baby. He tells Cyp that what he thinks are Germans have been burying black cable and bringing dynamos and military equipment to the area. Powerful local Mafia types tried to steal some and disappeared without inquiry. He offers to show them what he can.

They part from the discouraged Sleepcoat and go to Slim's rose farm, where his wife does hybrid experiments. Here we have one of the best one sentence summaries of Children ever.

The farmhouse was teeming with children, though when Cyprian actually counted, there were never more than two.

Zhivka talks with her roses and Cyprian hears them talk back ; he shares with Yash that the flowers foretell a girl. Cyp feels himself estranged from locals and disinterested in erotic adventures.

The baby was born during the rose harvest, in the early morning .....into a fragrance untampered with the heat of the sun. From the very first moment her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her. .....named the baby Ljubica ( Serbo-Croatian for violet, perhaps a reference to Yugoslavian composer Ljubica Maric b. 1909)..
(Cyprian's ) nipples were all at once peculiarly sensitive, and he found himself almost desperate with an unexpected flow of feeling, a desire for her to feed at his breast..... "I knew her once-previously- perhaps in that other life it was she who took care of me- and now here is the balance being restored-"
"Oh , you're overthinking it all ," Yashmeen said, " as usual."

In Colin Turnbull's The Forest People there is a lovely passage where he describes a pygmy ritual in which the father of a newborn holds the baby to his breast to show that he too is to nurture the child tenderly. This last passage, which concludes this section , reminded me of that . There is a lot of funny stuff in this section and there is an interesting combination of lust , friendship, growing intellectual and personal respect, all pushing toward the deep need for an integration of the male and female, the aggressive and passive, the Phrygian and the Lydian, the upper and lower, the past and the future.

You may want to be careful about trying this at home and unsupervised, but I fooled around improvising in the Lydian Mode on my flute. It didn't seem that discordant, more moody and unresolved. I rather liked it. Sorry if the precis is a bit lengthy. Trying to put out some bait for further discussion and possible digression.

Frank & Wren's Love Nest

noreply@blogger.com (Boldly Serving Up Wheat Grass) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 08:18:00 +0000

[pp. 919-930]

Well, I suppose some Chumps may be reluctant to leave the certain fragrance of the previous section, but it's time to switch stories again. But, hey, you never know ... things could get a little spicy in this section, too.

This time, it's back to Chihuahua, Mexico, to pick up with Frank, who's been shot fighting in the Mexican Revolution. A shaman visits him in the makeshift infirmary to let him know Estrella (Stray) is in town looking for him. She's with the "impossibly good-looking Mexican dude," Rodrigo (himself a look-alike -- double -- for "some federal big shot"). Stray tells Frank she's somewhat of a diplomat, gives him some smokes, and leaves as he drifts off.

She returns the following day, this time with Ewball Oust (for whom she'd literally traded Rodrigo). He'd like Frank to help procure some decent mobile arms, such as the Krupp mountain gun (interesting link about that, courtesy of the ATD Wiki). I particularly liked Ewball's observation on 922:

... when all the real nihilists are working for the owners, 'cause it's them that don't believe in shit, our dead are nothin but dead, just one more Bloody Shirt to wave at us, keep us doin what they want, but our dead never stopped belongin to us, they haunt us every day, don't you see, and we got to stay true, they wouldn't forgive us if we wandered off of the trail.

In yet another "and who should walk in but"-type scenario, we see Wren Provenance once again. (Visit Axiomatic's summary from -- [*gasp!*] -- last February for a, well, summary of their original meeting.) Seems she's been doing some local archaeology, etc. Ewball asks Frank's permission, more or less, to put the moves on Stray. Wren has her fun with the boys, including a lively exchange of "doll-tits" and "puppet-pecker" (see the wiki) with Ewball.

Brief account of the next few pages: Frank then takes a peyote trip (written, appropriately, in a long stream-of-consciousness narrative), Stray runs off with Ewball, and in no time Wren and Frank are fucking like wild animals (well, amid wild animals, anyway).

Page 927: Another significant skyward event... This time it's an airplane, possibly the first ever seen by those below (though the Indians, paradoxically, apparently knew what it was). Can't be a good omen... but we'll have to wait until later to know what comes of it.

The shaman gives Frank a (possibly magical) cane and, in no time, he's much better again. He rides off to the Cases Grandes dig with Wren where they discuss and theorize vis-a-vis the history of the people who'd lived there:

[Frank] understood for a moment...that the history of all this terrible continent...was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land [928-29].

For, oh, a half-year or so (until late October), it seems Frank and Wren "inhabit the joys of domestic fucking" [929], having shacked up in Wren's little cottage near the dig. Although, Frank "knew that in her unspoken story of long pilgrimage and struggle he only happened to be on the same piece of trail for the moment" [929].

El Espinero knows this as well; but, he also tells Frank that Wren will always "see" him -- meaning, I suppose, think fondly of their brief time together (though it's also a play on visibility vs. invisibility). Yet, she does leave at the end, as expected.

Also notable on 930 is a brief yet strong, arguably counter-intuitive, critique of the railroad system. And that's about all for this rather short section.

Just to give some idea of where we're at... From this web page:

One lasting symbol of the history of Chihuahua Mexico is the Chihuahua Pacific Railway. The Railway connects the capital of Chihuahua with the Pacific coast city of Los Mochis, a sixteen-hour train ride that traverses some of the most compelling and rugged scenery in the Americas. Construction of the railway began in 1898, and wasn't completed until 1961. With a dizzying 86 tunnels, 37 bridges, and multiple switchbacks that drop from an elevation of 7,000 feet down to sea level in just 120 miles, the railway is an engineering marvel.

Spice of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:33:00 +0000

She pretended to gaze at the paprika fields ripening to a red no match for her hair--or lips for that matter (it was occurring now to Kit). . .
picture source

(pp. 908-918)

Instead of shopping Dally to a seraglio in the newly prudish, and renamed, Istanbul, Clive Crouchmas decides to sell her into white slavery in Hungary instead, and commissions two dopes from light opera central casting, Imi and Ernö, yet another of the novel's comic pairs, to kidnap her.

Under the mistaken impression that they are grabbing a redhead for the famous arms dealer Basil Zaharoff, the two accost Dally in her rail compartment while the train is stopped at Szeged. Directly across the platform, on a train headed in the opposite direction--that is, towards Europe--Kit Traverse looks out the window and sees a presentable redhead in some kind of trouble. He intervenes.

Our lovers meet again, cute as ever, and after easily outfoxing the dolts, whom they leave on the moving train, they take off running through a handy paprika field, where in short order they commence to fucking.

Kit, we learn, has drifted back from the Steppes in short hops, eventually tending bar in the Pera district of Istanbul, a colorful spot where he meets again the affable arms dealer Viktor Mulciber, last seen in Göttingen looking for the Q weapon way back on pages 557-8 (hat tip to the Chumps' own search engine!) Mulciber clues Kit into a startup Italian aircraft company, sez Kit can name his price there, and that Mulciber gets a finder's fee.

It so happens that soon after the meeting, Kit gets on the wrong side of the C.U.P., a political party with a goon squad. His boss, Jusuf, gives him a ticket out and some cash while begging for the recipe of a drink that's been wowing the clientele.

Back in Szeged, Dally and Kit prepare their escape to Italy. Before leaving they get an all-clear from Pityu, a psychic waiter, and are tipped by Miklos, the hotel desk clerk, not to miss the great Bela Blasko, in town performing in the inevitably named Pynchon operetta, The Burgher King, which details in song the merry hijinks of a disguised monarch, mixing with the middle-class Heidi, Mitzi, Schleppingdorff, and Ditters. (German song translation, anyone?)

After the show, Dally confides to Kit her rather colorful recent past, an act of trust immediately followed by more fucking.

***

The themes and tropes at large in this episode should now be old hat to readers, travel along and across parallel lines, beautiful scenery, the perpetual planning of the Powers That Be.

Kit has been drifting out of sight of the readers for two years, and shows no outward signs, good or bad, of his quasi-mystical Asian journey. Dally has grown up almost, if episodically, in front of our eyes--no small feat for an author--and the frank look at her sexual life here and in the previous episode leave this reader with a certain feeling of something, if only innocence, lost. Or maybe she's finally absorbed the lessons she first saw in that Telluride whorehouse.

Those with a lot of time on their hands may have a go at assigning Tarot cards to characters. We certainly know enough about them by now, and our author just led things off regarding The Star and Dally. I here nominate Kit as King, or maybe Knave, of Cups (Reef, Coins, and Frank, Swords.) He was a bartender, and it was the C.U.P., after all, which finally sends him back to Dally.

"It's me..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ol' Pal D) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:16:00 +0000

(pp. 892 - 907)

The moon Tarot.

The Plot

Having decided they'd had enough of "Bodeo-packing coglioni" and the Principessa's continued Yentl-ism, Dally and Hunter reappear in London. After Hunter finds his way back to "the starched bosom of collateral relations someplace west of Regents Park", jealous-of-oatmeal Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin sets Dally up in a small apartment, deciding there's really nothing going on between she and Hunter. Chirpingdon-Groin introduces Dally to Arturo Naunt, a sculptor specializing in Angel Of Death statuary, who asks Dally to become his new model. Dally reflects on her previous experience in New York as a sculptor's model, she'd modeled for The Spirit Of Bimetallism (gold/silver/sun/moon bi-references here), among others. Dally agrees to model for Naunt, to mixed results.

Perenially-mean Ruperta accompanies Hunter to the Three Choirs Festival to hear a new work by Ralph Vaughn Williams, the "Tallis Fantasia" (for those unfamiliar with Williams, the festival, composer and work are all real). The music induces in Ruperta a life-change, tears streaming, a "levitation" and "return to earth" moved to leave behind her old ways. An almost Buddhist experience?

(Pynchon's breathtaking description of a wonderful night of serious music and it's effect on Ruperta is one of my favorite passages in the whole novel. Cantori/decani splits, Phrygian resonances, "nine-part harmonies occupied the bones and blood vessels of those in attendance" set the scene, and any of us who have allowed ourselves in these 'cool' times to be moved to tears by real music know exactly what Pynchon describes so masterfully here, at least IMHO)

Dally's modeling experience turns a little kinky for her tastes, and she re-runs into R. Wilshire Vibe, who offers her a role in his newest, Wogs Begin At Wigam. Almost by chance, Dally becomes an overnight sensation, then a true celebrity, and finds herself pursued by shady Clive Crouchmas, and old friend of Ruperta's. Dally gives in to the situation, and finds herself Crouchmas' mistress.

In another thread-crossroad which I'll leave to the more-capable to explore (me, I'm just along for the ride, and diggin' the wonderfully blurry scenery flying by the window, a perfect red farm-house here, a leering polar bear there), Dally meets Lew Basnight at a party. Tarot comes up, and Lew reflects on his mission. Another beautiful Pynchon moment, combining Lew, Dally, the Sun, the Moon, the night (and a perfect description of the traditional illustration of the Moon tarot card), each of the elements given voice: "It's me... it's me...", all culminating in Dally's question: "Who turned out to be the star?" Hmm...

Lew convinces Dally (with a big wad of offered cash) to spy on Crouchmas, telling Dally a little bit more about him in the process. (Please excuse my missing what looks like a pretty obvious German joke here, don't-a speak-a the doitsch-a) After apparently going about the business of turning Crouchmas' documents/secrets over to Lew for a while, Dally is finally caught in the act by Crouchmas himself, who it turns out was harboring some pretty deep feelings for her. Reacting harshly, he decides to get his revenge by taking Dally to Constantinople, where he plans to "shop the bitch to a harem". Running into old friend "Doggo" Spokeshave (is anyone else here viewing their daily spam differently after having read ATD? It's much easier for me to deal with Karthik J. Grosshandler's exhortation to "Save your relationship, stop premature ejaculation" f'ing 15 times a day if I imagine he's just one of Pynchon's people as I Delete him again and again... The least Kute Korrespondance of all...), Crouchmas makes plans to head to Constantinople on one of Basil Zaharoff's trains, and convinces Dally to come down and meet him. Lew sees her off, and (I was right, I knew I recognized it, go Duck Stab!) the Wiki confirms her last line to Lew comes right out of The Residents songbook: "here I come, Constantinople". I love this book.

A Brand New -- and Infinitely More Complicated -- Way to Get Pregnant!

noreply@blogger.com (Neddie) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:24:00 +0000

pp. 876--891

Suffice to say, we'll avoid any illustrative Google Image Searches this week, for fear of casting this tasteful group blog down into the hellfires of the Not Safe for Work.

We're back, with a bang (har!), to Cyprian and the Question of Desire. I must confess I find Cyprian's mind at this point to be astonishingly difficult to wrap my own brain around. As a lay student (if not practitioner, in my own small way) of Buddhism, I have done a fair amount of thinking about the abnegation of desire. But as I haven't got a sadomasochistic boner -- bone! bone! Jesus, did anyone hear that? -- in my body, I have only ever thought in the shallowest way about masochistic submission as an expression of it.

And yet, we are forced to here: "Most who met [Cyprian] found it difficult to to reconcile his appetite for sexual abasement -- its specific carnality -- with what had to be termed a religious surrender of the self." This recalls a question I asked a few weeks ago: Is not the desire to end desire itself a desire?

Yashmeen, it seems, is the first to recognize this dissonance in Cyprian's mind, and to -- what's the word? Nurture? Exploit? Consume? -- it, inhabiting, as everyone is, " a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs" -- she sees Cyprian's "miraculous resurrection" (hmmm...) as an opportunity for transcendence.

Yin and Yang get all twisted up here, which, come to think of it, is perhaps the way we should always think of them. Yashmeen, hitherto always the pursued in relation to men, and the pursuer with women, finds that Cyprian responds to a seduction approach more appropriate to commanding the "desires of London shopgirls and haughty Girtonian alike." But with Cyps, unlike with the women Yashmeeen's pursued, "the gentle make-believe of princesses and maidservants [i.e., power relationships] was deepened, extended into realms of real power, real pain."

Do you see how the Personal becomes the Political here? Dominance and submission sex-games as expression, as mirroring, of the exercise of economic power? I can never see S&M at work without also thinking of czars and kulaks, of overseers in the cotton field, which, frankly, gives me a bit of a soft-off. The sadomasochistic enthusiast will no doubt answer me that, unlike the economic world, the exchange of power in S&M is voluntary, and that there are power relationships at work in even the most mundane missionary-position boffage. (Yes, but there's also a question of degree, nicht wahr?)

This can of worms is worth opening at least briefly, justified by this:

It was more than the usual history of flogging one expected from British schoolboys of all ages. It was almost an indifference to self, in which desire was directed at passing beyond the conditions of the self -- at first she thought, as other women on the face of it might, well then it's only self-hatred isn't it, perhaps a class thing -- but no, that wasn't it. Cyprian took altogether too much pleasure in what she obliged him to do. "'Hate'? no -- I don't know what this is," he protested, peering in dismay at his naked form in the mirror, "except that it's yours...."

(Emphasis mine.)

I ask again: Is not the desire to end desire itself a desire?

Later: "It was going on behind every other window one could see, common as the stars in the sky, the reversals of power, wives over husbands, pupils over masters, wogs over whites, the old expected order of things all on its head, a revolution in the terms of desire, and yet, at Yashmeen's feet, that seemed only the outskirts -- the obvious or sacramental form of the thing." Yashmeen seems to find some sort of mission to help Cyprian find oblivion and total self-abnegation -- but her self-justification is far from thought through: "Rules of proper conduct are for the dying, not for us." Famous last words...

The Spongiatosta family is throwing a "secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve." (My desktop translator widget gives "meat" and "blank" for "carne" and "salve" respectively -- not very helpful....) Unlike the public Carnevale, held before Lent in anticipation of fasting, Carnesalve is "not a farewell but an enthusiastic welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge."

My kinda party.

OK now, Jingo. Here's a challenge for you:

Try, just try, to summarize the action in the next scene without resorting to the sort of language to be found at SubmissiveCreampieTrannySlutsAndTheBi-BoysWhoLoveThem.com (not that innocent li'l me would ever visit such a louche place)....

Cyprian, bedecked in his finest drag, and wearing a wig made from Yashmeen's own hair, catches Reef's eye at the Carnesalve. Reef, surprising no readers by this point -- this is the guy who solicited a blowjob from Yashmeen's dog; he'd fuck an alligator if somebody'd drain the pool (but see below! See below!) -- responds with a positive display of appreciation. Yashmeen, who has forbidden Cyprian to make any moves on her het-fella without express permission, escorts her boys/girls/somewhere-in-betweens to a private space for some "punishment." She demands that Cyprian retain the effluent emission from

(no, no! Too Latinate!)

She forces Cyprian to keep Reef's load in

(Jesus! What are you, a hack pr0n writer?)

Ardently looking on, waves of passion crashing over her as she watches her woman-man give the ultimate pleasure to her man-man, Yashmeen demands coquettishly that Cyprian retain Reef's bounteous love-reward

(Fuckin' hell! Harlequin Romances, now!)

All right. Reef goes Number Three in Cyprian's yum-yum, which he then proceeds to dribble into Yashmeen's hoo-hoo while Reef puts his weenie in his Naughty Place. Whew!

Happy? I know I am.

Besides the obvious trouser-tightening bits, the thing to observe here is that Cyprian is now overtly not only the "go-between" connecting Yash and Reef, but he's also taken both their roles, both the recipient and the deliverer of Reef's baby-batter. He has, in effect, become both of them.

MOVING ON... (Biomechanics being one thing but intimacy quite another...)

And now we are three.

Horndog Reef and Cyprian begin to "see" each other without Yashmeen's knowledge. Their pillow-talk is fascinating -- universes colliding, America and Europe. Reef, not the most percipient or empathic of men, wonders how "anybody can let somebody do that to him [i.e., bottom]," rather missing the point that the "doing to" him had been welcomed by Cyprian, and wasn't coerced or forced. "I mean, don't it hurt?" "It hurts, and it doesn't hurt," which I imagine is a pretty fair description, given the number of times it's done every day. "Japanese talk."

(Yes, more of that Japanese talk. Cue mention of "desire" in three...two...one...)

Reef cites honor, which leads to Cyprian's observation (if "disingenuous"), "Perhaps I've only failed to see a connection between honor and desire (ding! ding! ding!), Reef." The relationship between honor and desire is of course more complicated for Cyprian, as his dismissal of honor as a personal value has been useful to him in the professional field. "Honor," as Reef sees it, equates to the refusal to be submissive to any person or thing, while for Cyprian it's an "outmoded sexual protocol." We get the searing insight that there are people who confuse Cyprian's submissiveness with sympathy, "especially those with the curious belief that sodomites, having few troubles of their own, could never become bored listening to the difficulties of others."

The passage that follows is all-revealing about Reef, and a damned sad passage too. He tells Cyprian of his encounters with closeted cowboys on trains, young men who'd left their wives ostensibly to look for work in the West but in reality to just get the hell away from the hellish secret lives they'd allowed themselves to get sucked into, of children that they love deeply and wives they may love but don't lust for. Then we're suddenly getting Reef counting himself among them, and the realization hits: Reef's closeted! And has been for the whole book!

Go back and check 218:13-18, just after Stray's had her baby and they've buried Webb. "Reef might not be able to pull off successfully the guise of a respectable wife-and-kids working stiff the way Webb had. Meant he'd either have to level with Stray or pretend to be up to his old rounder ways so she'd think when he disappeared for days at a time that it was ramblin and gamblin and nothing serious."

This explains so much! The sexual rapacity, the coolness to women even while he's laying them and his ease in leaving them, the idiot logic that leads him to solicit a blow-job from a poodle, the sudden, surprising eagerness to have it off with Cyprian... On my next re-read, I'm going to have a much more sensitive eye to this.

Reef dreams of Webb, after "years of avoidance" (how do you avoid dreaming about someone?). I think the mention of "being the Kieselguhr Kid in Webb's place" is a direct pointer back to p. 218; it was that issue that was disguising the real trouble in Reef's mind, and in ours -- "and now look at this that he'd come stepping into... Would Webb recognize him now, recognize his politics anymore, his compulsions?" Webb reminds Reef to "honor small victories"; when Reef points out their absence of late, Webb retorts, mysteriously, "Not talking about yours, numbskull."

The threesome take their act on the road, cleaning up in the casinos with Yashmeen's foolproof roulette system. Although they agree on the Big Issues (Anarchism, humor, and lots and lots of sex, and who can blame them, really?) they bicker (quite hilariously) over Reef's cooking. the outcome of which is a generous slathering of overcooked pasta in a Poisson distribution over Cyprian's phiz.

Wolfe Tone O'Rooney makes a brief appearance, warning darkly that "governments are about to fuck things up for everybody, make life more unlivable than Brother Bakunin ever imagined."

Once again, Cyprian has a nice, long wallow in his favorite subject: "But no more accountable was the absence of desire -- why one would choose not to embrace what the world judges, it often seemed unanimously, to lie clearly in one's interest." Yashmeen, her instincts as good as ever, perceives a change in Cyprian: "I feel...that somehow I am coming slowly not to matter as much to you as something else...."

Yashmeen discovers she's pregnant by Reef, and, Cyprian would like to think, with his help. I'm no gynecologist, but I'm willing to bet that the method they've been using is mighty, mighty inefficient.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Vendetta's Reunion

noreply@blogger.com (Civic Center) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:35:00 +0000

Venezia map, with Arsenale highlighted

pp 864-876

Cyprian makes a melancholy winter return to Venice after his near-fatal Balkan adventures. He had stopped in Trieste to look for Yashmeen, where he was told of Vlado's fate from his associates, along with news about his murderer. (854:31) "[Theign] has gone mad," said Vlado's cousin Zlatko Ottician. "He is dangerous now to everyone." On the boat ride into Venice, Cyprian fatefully sees Theign passing by in a traghetto which puts Cyprian into an "unexpected rage...now when he most needed a clever plan, his mind was becoming all staring Arctic vacancy," (856:6) which brings on vague thoughts of murder/suicide. At his old pensione he shared with Theign, Signora Giambolognese tells him that Theign "lives in the Arsenale."

Cyprian then runs into the newly married Ratty McHugh in front of the British consulate, and Ratty takes him to a remote courtyard-within-a-courtyard office where they speak in perfect upper-class English misdirection about Theign and Yashmeen and the horrors of marriage. Ratty strikes a gong for his colleague Piprake, and tells him that Cyprian needs to speak with the Principe Spongiatosta, who is not only the master of the house where Dally has been living, but who was also one of Cyprian's paying sexual clients when Theign was pimping him out, a fact known to both Ratty and Piprake.

Cyprian goes to Ca' Spongiatosta (no Princess or Dally to be seen), they acknowledge their history charmingly, and after a description of the antiques and modern items in the palace, the Prince gives a brilliant disquisition on Venetian history, and how each Doge became a slave to their position and power. "Other nations, Americans notoriously, style themselves 'republican' and think they understand republics, but what was fashioned here over corroded centuries of doges' cruelty lies forever beyond their understanding (868:8)...Unless one has performed in his life penance equal to what he has extracted from others, there is an imbalance in Nature." (868:22) That imbalance is what currently exists with the Austrian empire where nobody can be trusted since everyone can be bought, and Cyprian tells him that he has just returned from "a place less developed no doubt than the sophisticated cultures of the West, still naive, if not quite innocent...They possess what all the treasuries of Europe cannot buy" (869:7) The Prince replies, "Passion." and without further ado, the vendetta plot against Theign is put into motion as the Prince airily dismisses Cyprian.

"One day" Cyprian unexpectedly runs into Yashmeen who is on the arm of Reef, who Cyprian finds sexy. Yashmeen is cold and proper as they exchange brief news about Vlado, Yashmeen's escape, and Cyprian's revenge. "For the next week or so, Cyprian managed to go a little crazy, resuming, though not on a full-time basis, his old trade of compensated sodomy." With his ill-gotten gains, he heads to Fabrizio's for a "combative" makeover, and then takes a train to Trieste where he meets with Vlado's relatives, who promise, "You chase [Theign] into our sights, we'll do the rest."

On page 871, there is an interesting take on how Theign has been playing all sides against each other, with England, Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian empire maneuvering against each other in the context of the Macedonian Question and the Anglo-Russian Entente. However, Cyprian's "field skills" have sharpened on the "whetstone of European crisis" while Theign's had deteriorated "from overindulgence in various luxuries." Cyprian learns Theign's daily timetable as he is accompanied by a "brace of plug-uglies" and plays various pranks on him. One night, when Theign is in front of the Austro-Hungarian consulate ("How much more blatant did the man imagine he could be?"), Cyprian shows himself and tells Theign to "make your arrangements" before disappearing.

An ambiguous, one-paragraph section ensues (872:23) where Cyprian becomes insomniac "as the crisis approached," and has fitful dreams of being betrayed by Yashmeen for "Austria" but not the real "Austria."

Cyprian and the Prince have an assignation where the Prince tells Cyprian that "it will be tonight" and "you have every right to be present." Cyprian says he'll leave it to the Ottican brothers and wants nothing other than to thank the Prince for his efforts, which startles the Prince: "sometimes, not often, [a man] will simply want nothing for himself, and that must be respected, if only for its rarity." He decides to invite Cyprian to his annual ball on the island, and when Cyprian demurs over having nothing to wear, is told "The Principessa will find something for you."

Theign returns to Venice from a trip to Vienna and realizes immediately he's made a mistake. He's abducted and taken to an abandoned factory where he's tortured to death in a remarkably graphic scene. Reflecting the Prince's previous rumination on "imbalance in Nature," Vastroslav tells Theign after he's gouged out both eyes, "Whenever you people torture, you try merely to cripple. To have some mark of imbalance. We prefer a symmetry of insult--to confer a state of grace. To mark the soul."

The final vignette in this section has Yashmeen sending Cyprian a message which begins, "I must see you." Ratty has given her Cyprian's address. They discuss Vlado, she gives him "The Book of the Masked," and then they fall back into their curious s/m love relationship. She talks about fucking Reef in a way she never would with Cyprian, they play around with Cyprian's sexual desire for Reef, and then fall into recriminations about who abandoned whom. The final paragraph is fascinating (876:9), yet another take on bilocation, time, and alternate realities. "They were two entirely different people who had no business being in the same city together let alone the same room, and yet whatever it was between them was deeper now, the stakes were higher, the danger of how much there was to lose terribly, incontrovertibly clear." I think they have just transcended space and time.

Of Masks and Murder: pp. 849-63

noreply@blogger.com (Axiomatic.Apricot) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:40:00 +0000

First, a little architecture: this week's reading covers pages 849 through 863, which is a single chapter -- the tenth in the novel's titular fourth part. Said chapter is itself divided into eight sections. What's more, being that "Against the Day" (the part, not the novel) is divided into twenty chapters (4:20, anyone?), the conclusion of this chapter marks Part Four's halfway point. Its content focuses primarily on the actions and interactions of Reef (first in Nice, France, then in Venice) and Yashmeen (in Venice, though with the odd flashback to Croatia).

The Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, 1910, source

The chapter opens with Reef riding the winds of chance, gambling and "drift[ing]" through Nice's haut hotels, but desirous of a good ol' explosion. Chance favors Reef's desire by reintroducing "his old Simplon Tunnel compañero Flaco, [who is] even more anarchistic and dynamite-crazy than before" (849). The two recollect old times and discuss Flaco's recent dealing's with Frank, whose message that he'd '''got one of them''' Flaco delivers to Reef who wonders which one was "got" (849). The two begin to discuss the possibility of Frank's following Flaco back to Mexico for the impending revolution when -- BOOM -- the bourgeois café at which they'd just sat down is subject to a "great blossoming of disintegration" as a terrorist's bomb detonates (850). There follows a passage of top shelf Tom describing with Bellowsian abundance the proliferated details of the explosion (850-51). It's these moments, more than anything else, that keep me devotedly following Pynchon. Following the boom, Reef and Flaco spend some time performing triage before seeking out medical attention for themselves from one Professeur Pivoine, a knife-obsessed surgeon under whose blade Reef has a consoling vision of Kit. Following a section break, we find Flaco ready to leave, Reefless, for Mexico. The two discuss the relative ethical values of ground war and assassination (Flaco's for the former; Reef the latter).

Image taken from a film by the Lumiere Brothers, albeit of Paris, not Venice, but hey, it was the best I could do, source

Following another section break, the narrative shifts from Reef to Yashmeen, specifically her possession of The Book of the Masked, a gift from Vlado Pynchon's baroque description of which might also serve as a fairly adequate description of Against the Day. There follows a flashback to Yashmeen receiving the book from Vlado and a discussion of it authenticity, then another break and a very brief paragraph-section describing their habit of moviegoing in Venice, specifically a Lumiere film shot near the site of the theater they frequented which the folks over at the Pynchon Wiki have identified as the early Lumiere Brothers film Panorama du Grand Canal pris d'un bateau.

A ballroom at the Hotel Excelsior, Venice, source

Jump cut back to Reef now searching in vain for Scarsdale in Venice, "where everything had gone off the rails" (854). There he meets Pino and Rocco, two "inland sailors" traveling "semimiraculous routes," borne on the back of a "a species of Adriatic sea-monster" (854). Together they all head to the Hotel Excelsior, which, the sailors inform Reef, is not, as its outward appearance might suggest, closed for the winter. Rather than being fueled by the discretionary wealth of summertime tourist lira, in cold weather the bar serves as refuge to those fleeing the hostile snows outside. And there, whom should he meet but Yashmeen and Vlado, themselves fleeing not only the exterior cold but Austrian gunmen and Theign, to boot. Unfortunately, the Excelsior proves less suited to keeping out the pursuers than the wind, and the whole lot of them flee across the beach with Reef employing his elephant gun to provide cover fire. Unfortunately, during the fighting, Vlado is shot and the others are forced to leave him behind, Yashmeen and Reef fleeing in a small boat towed by Pino and Rocco's submarine Il Squalaccio.

Venetian Carnevale mask, source

They seek shelter in Pino and Roco's apartment and Reef leaves Yashmeen alone while he goes out to try and get word of Vlado's fate. When he returns he finds Yashmeen scantliy clad and asleep, which sets him off masturbate, an activity which he eventually realizes Yashmeen has joined him at. They have some summary sex -- Reef apparently having gotten himself the better part of the way home already -- and then discuss Vlado's fate, which Reef has heard is as a prisoner in the Arsenale, which, Wikipedia informs us, "is a shipyard and naval depot that played a leading role in Venetian empire-building." This section, by now the longest in the chapter, ends with Yashmeen at the hair salon, having her hair cut and colored by Fabrizio, Venice's finest stylist, in an attempt to disguise her identity. Her hair, the narrator intrudes to tell us, she donates to Fab, who employs it in "an elaborate wig in the eighteenth-century Venetian style, appropriate for a Carnevale costume, as part of which it was to appear in the near future, at a fateful masked ball" (860).

The Arsenale, Venice, source

In the next section, we get a glimpse of Vlado's condition within the Arsenale, which ain't so hot. The section begins with an extended meditation on the role of the Arsenale in the Venetian collective psyche, wherein we learn that the walled shipyard represents a "mystery" no less alien to day to day life in the city than does that of the nearby San Michele cemetery. Even from the inside, though, the analogy stands, as Vlado feels himself to be very nearly a dead man. Questioned by Theign, he plays hardball, refusing to disclose any information about Yashmeen, though the narrator informs us, his position is not so cushy as, say, a man in a tavern with a gun to his forehead, where at least there is a chance of outside aid. No, "[a]ny bet made in here would be for the highest possible stakes" (862).

Gamblers in the Casino at Monte Carlo, c. 1910, source

The chapter ends with two brief sections focused on Yashmeen. In the first, she tries to explain to Reef that "she put her faith, like a good Emotional Anarchist, in the Law of Deterministic Insufficiency," which she elaborates, is "'[l]ike a card coming up that you could never have predicted.'" This Reef doesn't buy, so she starts trying to explain the underlying math to him, which has a decidedly soporific effect. She continues to whisper her theory to him, though, referencing Wilson's theorem, which has something to do with remainders, factorials and primes, though I personally am left a little lost in trying to understand its exact relevance. Strangely, the subliminal teaching seems to be effective, because Reef starts "to win at roulette far outside the expectations of chance" (863). Reef, meantimes, is trying to come to terms with his unfading desire for her, which he finds somewhat inexplicable.

An artist's rendering of The Book of the Masked, which only coincidentally looks exactly like the Necronomicon from Evil Dead, source

In the final section -- a single paragraph -- we learn that Yashmeen misses Vlado terribly and has begun reading daily, "like a devout person with a religious text," from Vlado's ''Book of the Masked'', the contents of which appear "to be a mathematical argument of the classic sort [. . .] except that everywhere terms containing time stood like infiltrators at a masked ball, prepared at some unannounced pulse of the clock to throw back their capes and reveal their true identities and mission" (863).

Inside the Moment

noreply@blogger.com (Neddie) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:19:00 +0000

(pp. 835-848)

Sometimes, if you stare at an idea for too long, you lose the ability to judge whether it's a really brilliant insight or just, you know, duh. Ah, well: in for a penny, in for a pounding...

Salonika during World War I (source)

This chapter contains some of the most straightforward event-by-event narrative that I can recall in a book by Our Boy. But, Our Boy being Our Boy, enormous ideas are being hashed out just below the surface.

I mean, just huge ideas.

We resume in mid-chapter with Cyprian and Danilo, outcast from "steel and parallel tracks," searching for the mysteriously disappeared Bevis Moistleigh. Autumn is coming on. They sit in an olive grove (mark that well) to enjoy a freshly purchased fish (ditto), when bullets begin to fly, "striking, for the moment, surfaces other than human...though it was now of the essence to to find one's way inside the moment, with death invisible and everywhere, 'like God,' it occurred to Danilo afterward." (Emphases mine.)

The pair manage to escape the bullets (oddly without source), and flee into the Balkan mountains. As they scarper, we get another of those images of inevitability: "...and all question of alloyed steel, geometric purity of gauge, railways and timetables and the greater network, not to mention European time as it usually passed, ceased to be any part of their day...." (Day. Again.)

For inevitability, I'd like to suggest at this point that we substitute the word predestination; a train on a track has no choice about where to go, and in our last two readings we've had a great deal of discussion about this. On the train leaving Trieste, Yashmeen observes "iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor for the complete ensemble of 'free choices' that define the course of a human life." (811:5) And Cyprian, leaving Trieste on the John of Asia, reflects on watching "the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined [!] quay or slip," and the concomitant "mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability." (821:29-31)

(Interesting image: "the black that rests at the heart of all color." (835:32) My paltry knowledge of the physics of light tells me that it's white that "rests at the heart of all color," but who am I?)

High up in the mountains, now, the sunset casting a fantastic light-show on the peaks, they observe a mysterious cloaked figure standing on a bridge, "containing in its severe contours a huge compressed quantity of attention," busy doing some Serious Foreshadowing....

Cyprian and Danilo get caught in a blinding mountain storm. Fumbling their way, safety nowhere to be found, Cyprian trips and "for the first time was delivered [interesting use of the passive voice] into an embrace that did not desire him." (Note: desire.) His fall has the effect of knocking Danilo off the trail, and in his fall Danilo breaks his leg. "You must bring me out," sez Danilo. No options, here, no choice for Cyps. Danilo speaks "without the possibility of another meaning."

You have no choice but to be God's instrument in bringing me out.

Danilo, a Sephardic Jew it should be pointed out, points the finger at the culprit he finds guilty for his pain while Cyprian is setting his leg: "En tu kulo, Dio!" The language is Judezmo, the "peculiar Jewish Spanish" we've been told he speaks: "Up your ass, God!"

(I suppose he could be cursing Ronnie James Dio, but while tempting, it's temporally unlikely.)

Through the blow-winds-crack-your-cheeks madness they trudge, and Danilo disappears into the darkness. Cyprian cries out, "Where are you?" the wind "taking his voice into the vast indifference." "Where are you?" can be read in more than one way, of course; it could be a simple request for information, but it could also be taken to mean, "Do you know where you are?" -- do you know where, that is, in this predestined universe, God has placed you? Either way, his wishing for no answer is heart-rending; either he wants Danilo dead, or God.

Once out of danger, a crack in the Predestination Question appears. Danilo speaks dreamily of his home town, Salonica, and of his cousin Vesna, apparently quite a dish. Cyprian, whose devotion to Danilo's safety, apparently acquired when he saved his life, takes on a strangely maternal aspect. This in turn causes him to note that Danilo's yearning for home was the first time any question of desire had arisen between them: "This first encounter with release from desire brought Cyprian the unexpected delight of a first orgasm." (839:30)

Not to be too heavy-handed, here, but what Major World Religion takes as its first tenet the axiom that all suffering is caused by desire, and that freedom from desire is freedom from delusion? And which is the only Major World Religion in which the question of Free Will and Predestination are fundamentally meaningless? Which M.W.R. teaches us that living in the world is an illusion, a state that is not at all unlike, oh, say, a fictional character stuck in the Maya of Thomas Pynchon's Mind? Has Cyprian just fallen asleep under the Bodhi Tree?

It continues: One of the first questions they asked us in our introductory college course on Buddhism was this: Is not the desire to end Desire itself a desire? And here we have Cyprian (840:1-3): "Of course it passed, the way a pulse of desire itself will, but the odd thing was that he found himself always unexpectedly trying to locate it again, as if it were something at least as desirable as desire."

The theological wrangling goes on, as they talk about their escape from danger (840:10-14):

"It was the will of God," Danilo said.

"Which of your several Gods would that be, then?"

"There is only God."

Cyprian was nowhere near as certain. But seeing the usefulness of remaining attached to the day, he only nodded and went on chopping vegetables. [Heavy emphasis -- and significant beard-pulling -- mine .]

It's interesting that these revelations happen when the two are far away in the trackless mountains; when they return to civilization, "back again to steel and parallel tracks," different questions of Free Will and Predestination find them. Are there two kinds of Predestination, that imposed by God on all of humanity, and that of Man over Man? I love the observation, "Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception [exhibited by prey], poison and surprise."

Cyprian and Danilo make it through Serbia, with Cyps disguised as an English civil-service wife; again we see that he is relinquishing desire, this time of an overtly sexual nature. They are forced to reverse their northward journey when they find the rivers interdicted in Belgrade, and they look southward toward Greece, to Danilo's childhood home in Salonica. (This is Thessaloniki in modern spelling; confused the hell out of Google Earth!) First following a railroad right-of-way (a straight line drawn over earth, but one that has not yet met the "parallel tracks" of the steel itself) and then on a "physical or material" train through Macedonia to Greece and the Aegean.

Arrived in Salonica, a place under the political dominion of the Young Turks, the "flophouse of Europe" they are ecstatically greeted by Danilo's cousin Vesna, who's every bit the hot patootie he described back in the mountains. Salonica is already showing signs of an unbecoming modernity under the Young Turks: "The mosqueless idea of a city is nearly upon us, dull modern, orthogonal, altogether lacking in God's mystery. You Northern people will feel right at home." (Zing!)

That Mavri Gata sounds like a fun spot. And, natch, through the hasheesh smoke we get that microtonal music we were so enraptured over about 700 pages back: "flatted seconds and sixths, and a kind of fretless portamento between..." I'd love to do a riff on modal scales characterized as "roads" (musical Predestination!) but I do have to hit Publish on this sucker soon. Maybe in Comments....

It doesn't take long for the Desperate Political Situation to rear its head in Salonica. (Honestly, I'd expected Cyps and Danilo to be greeted with the news of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand when came in out of the wilderness, but I suppose that's not far off...) Danilo brings onstage a "noodle-thin" character with the highly amusing name of Gabrovo Slim. Slim, finding Greece to be too hot for a Bulgarian, needs help getting out of town. "Oh, I'm the Scarlet Pimpernel, now, is that it?" protests Cyprian. "It is your destiny," purrs Vesna -- and if I get smacked over the head with Predestination one more goddamned time in this chapter, I'm going Gavrilo Princip on this book....

(Ommmm... Ommmm.... Ommmm mani padme hum....)

Cyps makes with the Iceland Spar action, exchanging clothes with Slim, who uses his disguise to blow Salonica.

Now on his way back to Trieste, taking coaster ships, Cyprian, "for no reason he could think of" (what, maybe he had to? Chill, Gavrilo...), hops off the boat and makes for Cetinje, in Macedonia. And who should he run into but Bevis Moistleigh, who abandoned the original get-Danilo-out-of-Sarajevo mission to shack up with Jacintha Drulov ("Truelove," surely?)! Cyprian is deliciously annoyed. And he has picked up the ability to observe himself being annoyed. Enlightenment will do that to you.

Jesus, this guy. Has any writer ever been able to pack so much into so little space?

I'm exhausted.

Doin' "The Idiotic"

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:09:00 +0000

Head like a pin? drool down your chin?
Could qualify-you
To give it a spin, tho'
It sounds neurotic,
It's just 'The Idiotic'!
picture source

(pp. 821-835)

Cyprian and Bevis Moistleigh depart Trieste on the ship John of Asia on a putative mission to rescue an operative in Sarajevo.

Everyone on board is, apparently, a spy for at least one of the competing world powers, a Nabokovian array of butterfly hunters, bird-watchers [...] photographers, schoolgirls and their guardians, examples of the latter two categories being the sprightly young creature Jacintha Drulov, an orphan under the care of her guardian, Lady Quethlock. (And here we note in passing that perhaps Pynchon is writing the espionage story which his old European Lit. prof never got around to doing himself.)

Anyway, after an up-tempo dance number (see above) featuring Jacintha and Bevis, and considerations, via Lady Q., of an alternate, recondite Adriatic geography, we land, after another dreamy passage by train, with our two foppish British ops in Sarajevo, yet a hidden city of minarets and blond Muslems on the firing line of East and West, North and South. There they find the polyglot Danilo Ashkil, a Shephardic Jew, the agent they've come to get out from harm's way.

As the lads discuss old history and recent Austro-Hungarian politics in a cafe, the Russian agents Misha and Grisha - those gay blades who introduced Cyprian to the world of espionage and Max Kautch way back in Vienna - reappear, as does the old Colonel, in disgrace at headquarters and a fugitive from Vienna, now a seedy barroom bore, who probably has several tricks, so to speak, left up his sleeve.

Time to skip town and Danilo reveals what we've felt all along, that Cyprian, and probably Bevis too, are in far more danger than he, having been shopped by Theign to the Austrians. With Ashkil they make their escape wearing fezes which can't, or won't, fit either of them.

Two weeks later, Bevis has vanished (like Kit and Hassan, right?) from a moving train. In looking for him, Cyp and Danilo travel up a spur rail line to Jajce, a small mountain resort resembling the Austrian variety, where they find waiting for them two members of the Black Hand underground, Batko and Senta, who warn them that they'd best walk across the mountains to Split (Ha!) on the coast for a boat out, a dangerous trek of ravines, diverging paths and hidden enemies, which they have undertaken as our episode (in mid-chapter) ends.

Not much to add. In all candor I have to admit to persistently wondering why Cyprian's tale is in the same novel with Lew Basnight, the Chums and Kit Traverse. But I suppose we'll hash out the whys of this as the book narrows at last to the destined quay (821:15). Or not. For there is also beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern. (821:17-19)

Sigh.

There is what strikes me as another key passage at pg. 828:5-34, where Danilo explains an idea of history as being endemic to culture and geography: "[...] try for a moment to imagine that, except in the most limited and trivial ways, history does not take place north of the forty-fifth parallel." That latitude is the northernmost historic reach of Islam, a cultural and climatic high tide mark that has spooked Europeans and vexed the Turks since the 17th century.

Cue The Band!!

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:52:00 +0000

Maybe we'll get the next post up around midnight. . .

From Neddie: My humblest apologies for the delay, but a full-on hard-disk failure has caused the loss of everything -- that's everything -- I possessed in the digital realm. As a result, I was unable to remind the next Mod in a timely fashion, and Will has kindly volunteered to get a post up. He's a treas. Thanks, man.

European Apocalypse Pools

noreply@blogger.com (Civic Center) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:40:00 +0000

Map of Eastern Europe 1878, with the Ottoman Empire to the South and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the North.

pp 806-820

Following Decency Jigsaw's example from last week, let's start with numerological chapter and verse, this being Chapter 57 which consists of ten smaller installments that can be divided into three larger groups.

1-3:

It's October of 1908 and "all hell" breaks loose when Austria announces its annexation of Bosnia, with Theign visiting Cyprian in Trieste at Bevis Moistleigh's underground crypto shop. Theign orders Cyprian on a dangerous mission in the Balkans and tells him to take Bevis along "if you feel you need a bodyguard." Though Moistleigh agrees to join Cyprian, he's also horrified by Theign once again after the latter gives them an absurdly undetailed map (page 807:11): "No, no, he doesn't care, can't you see that, none of the details matter to him, not only the map, he knows we won't live long enough to use it..."

Also being banished at the same time is Yashmeen in Vienna, who finds her dress shop suddenly closed and her landlady calling her a Jew Pig before evicting her, which leads Pynchon to a rumination about longtime Viennese mayor Karl Lueger and the city's anti-semitism which "really went far beyond feelings, had become a source of energy, tremendous dark energy that could be tapped in to like an electric main for specific purposes, a way to a political career...or in Yashmeen's case a simple method of chasing somebody out of town" (807:39). The short section ends with a visit from Cyprian, presumably to Vienna, where he tells her she should leave and come join him in Trieste. Cyprian makes fun of the Viennese calling Trieste a Jewish city with "they think Shanghai is a Jewish city" which leads to Yashmeen's "Well, actually..." (Click the link here to get the joke.)

In the third vignette, Cyprian meets up with old schoolmate Ratty in Graz, and the latter gives an entertaining account of all the double-dealing going on with the Bosnian Crisis (click on the link for a good, short Wikipedia account that unties a lot of knots). The Austrian foreign minister, "the vile Aurenthal," was seemingly the Henry Kissinger of his time. Ratty expresses concern for Cyprian's safety on his dangerous mission, but all Cyprian really cares about is securing Yashmeen's safety, and Ratty promises to do his best while reminding Cyprian that there is "his own op, the neo-Uskok chap, Vlado Clissan, as well" who conveniently hates Theign.

4-7:

Yashmeen takes a train from Vienna to Trieste where she stays at a pensione in the nightwalking ladies' section of the Old City which Cyprian has secretly arranged for her.

In Venice, Cyprian asks Theign for protection for Yashmeen (811:26), but is rudely turned down because Yashmeen "is a person of interest to the Okhrana...with the Anglo-Russian understanding still so new, so fearfully sensitive, we must all support F.O. in this, set aside our unimportant little personal dreams and wishes mustn't we." Cyprian replies that "We had an agreement. and you might as well be an Austrian double, you contemptible pile of shit." This sets Theign to slapping, which Cyprian artfully dodges, and finally Theign says "I suppose you want to be released from your end of the agreement," but Cyprian says no, which puzzles both Theign and Max Khautsch in Vienna when they gossip about it later. "Perhaps," Khautsch would speculate in the peculiar whisper he reserved for shop talk, "he is tired, and wishes for an end."

Cyprian takes a train to Trieste and tells Yashmeen the bad news, but she takes it calmly, and Cyprian marvels "at the ease with which she could let hope glide away."

The final vignette in the section is a beautiful scene on the Trieste waterfront as Cyprian and Yashmeen say goodbye together, and Cyprian resolves not to cry. In a flashback, we are told that the last time he had cried was "one drunken evening in Vienna after discovering Derrick Theign in the embrace of a miserable little five-kroner Strichmadchen." Still, his resolve dissolves when embarking on his boat and a waterfront band strikes up that classic of Victoriana, "Nimrod" from Elgar's "Enigma Variations," Cyprian "felt the taps opening decisively."

Senj Nejahgrad castle, 1558.

8-10:

Yashmeen adopts a stray cat and names her Cyprienne, and "one day" finds herself in a bora wind which causes her mathematical brain to start whirling again, "into her old Zetamania." She ruminates and almost solves Ramananujan's Formula before the vision disappears. (Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar, 1887-1920, from India is another weird historical mathematical genius in a book literally peppered with them. Click here for a short, interesting article.). The wind blows Yashmeen's hat away, undoes her hair, and lifts her skirts just in time for Vlado Clissan to meet up with her in a doorway, "and in the moment one of his hands had seized her, down between her bared legs" and a wild stand-up public sex scene ensues.

The sexual affair continues, hot and heavy with "Sur savam!" being screamed during the many orgasms both in Trieste and at Vlado's digs in Venice, where Yashmeen ends up spending more and more time.

The final vignette is a train trip the couple make to Fiume (now called Rijeka in Croatia) and a boat ride to Zengg (now called Senj in Croatia) where Vlado gives a short history of the Croatian Uskoks and their ambivalent relationship with Venice. "You were pirates," Yashmeen said, and "Vlado made a face. We try to avoid that word," and then tells her that his people always root for "Antonio to come to grief" in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," a feeling I sometimes share with the Uskoks. Yashmeen accuses, "You ate people's hearts, so the stories go." and Vlado shrugs it off with "Myself, personally? no. Raw heart is an acquired taste." After he leaves on a day-long mission, and Yashmeen makes it to a little church "kneeling and praying for his safety," Vlado returns and fucks her "savagely from behind," sending Yashmeen into involuntary orgasm and the cry, "You have eaten my heart."

Against the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Z.) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:15:00 +0000

Pages 792-805.

With this chapter and the last, we see the Event from a number of perspectives. This chapter (number 56 for those who've been counting) is divided into eight sections (with a notable parallel between the opening and closing lines of this chapter: "through the day" and "against the day".)

1

We begin with the Chums, who appear for the first time since about page 556. Back then, to other characters, they were growing indistinct and nearly invisible. When we saw them briefly a few pages ago, they were little more than a shadowy presence.

Last night, they anchored above a hermetic city sealed off from the sky by seamless rooftops. Darby has the 4-8 watch, and Miles is making breakfast. Pugnax, like any other animal before a storm, is anticipating the Event: on the bridge, stock still, looking east. The sky changes, and it is only with the arrival of the sound shock that the Chums themselves know where to look for its source.

The city beneath them has been utterly transformed. It is now wide open, brimming with gardens and fountains and "cheerful commotion." The Event has "torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world" (793:13-14). We would do well to recall that "apocalypse" means an unveiling. But what does it mean for us, for Shambhala, for the Chums, that the membrane between their meta-universe and ours has been rent?

Linsay sez it was the Trespassers. Maybe, sez Randolph, but: if it's true that the Chums had traditionally been sent on missions to oppose the Trespassers from entering the Chums' "time-regime" (see 415:27-29), and since the Chums were not, this time, "sent here," then this suggests that the Trespassers may not be responsible. The others aren't convinced by Randolph's argument (assuming I even understand his point) but just then, Vanderjuice calls from Tierra del Fuego, confirming what we've already been hearing about on page 784: Siberian and Fuegan stuff has swapped places. Sublime wackiness. (Does anyone else think it's curious that Vanderjuice just happens to be in antipodal opposition to the Event and the Chums? This is more than a little like that other time on page 109, when the Chums were sent to the antipode of Telsa's Colorado experiments.)

And, indeed, Tesla is another prime suspect. Vanderjuice suggests that the Event might be some sort of power burst sent from Tesla's Wardenclyffe station, up to Peary's base on Ellsmere Island. The geography works out, even if the chronology and blast patterns don't: a straight trajectory from Wardenclyffe over Ellsmere Island does in fact leave you within 170 miles of the Event itself, so it wouldn't take much of a miscalculation to land the energy blast at the Event's coordinates. But: (1) Peary won't arrive at Ellsmere until the summer of 1909 and (2) the butterfly patterns of downed trees suggest the blast came from the south not the north.

2

The Chums meet up with the Bol'shaia Igra over Semipalatinsk, which is a tad over a thousand miles southwest of the Event, for a confab. The Bol'shaia Igra crew have known about the Trespassers since Venice (circa page 243) -- earlier than the Chums, who first met them during their sojourn at Candlebrow (around page 415). So a better question might be, why hadn't Padhzi told the Chums sooner?

The Russian government thinks Japan (or at least China) was responsible. Padhzi asks about what the US govt thinks. The Chums don't know: they work for themselves now. "You -- balloonboys -- are large American corporation?" "...not quite yet." Did anyone else find this a little creepy? especially given Pynchon's longstanding suspicion of corporations?

I love the paean to wireless communication. As an erstwhile computer tech and IT guy m'self, that was a laugh-out-loud moment. And the Chums' concern for encryption parallels the exchange between Cyprian and Bevis will have below.

The section closes with a stunningly surreal series of visions, with the "axes of Creation" having been jolted. Notable is the gridwork of rail has appeared: not a heartening sign, given what the railroad stands for both in this book and in Pynchon's ouvre. The skyful of unmanned balloons is another, which is overthetop bizarre. Any/all thoughts (except spoilers) welcome.

3

I'll gloss this dense section, since I'm pressed for time, and say only: I find it ironic that the humans find the so-called "simultaneousness" of the Event's repercussions and aftershocks so remarkable, when Pugnax actually anticipated it. If a protagonist from another book comes to mind, I suggest you stop by the Additional Discussion next door (~~coming soon, but I'll predate it so this stays at the top all week~~ 8/2 edit: it's up)...

4 thru 7

The next four sections are brief tranche de vie scenes: Dally in Venice, Cyprian in Trieste, Reef in Marienbad, Yashmeen in Vienna. In each of these passages, we see the Event break in upon them as they have been moving thru their lives. A strange menace runs thru each, reflecting the menacing sandstorm at the beginning of this chapter. Dally's "diagreeable gent" telling her "I'm coming for you." The deliciously named Bevis Moistleigh decyphering a message and uncovering only the Albanian word for "disaster." Reef nearly caught in flagrante delictu, balancing on a window ledge as the unreal light grows in the sky. Yashmeen entangling with her old school chum Noellyn, who may be "here at the behest of TWIT. Or someone even more determined" (803:38).

8

This last passage is so unbearably lovely. It could justify a week of exegesis all to itself. It captures vividly both anticipation and forgetfulness, terror and calm. How we can be swept up in the promise of revolution, but then fall imperceptibly, inexorably back into grooves of habit and mindless pleasures. And, of course, we encounter the sentence that arguably supplies the book with its title. In this context, the phrase implies that the day is an implacable adversary whose quotidian onslaught we must ever be steeled for.

Qs & Obs

It might be fruitful to remark upon which characters we don't see in this chapter. Frank, for instance, and Lew. Is there anything conspicuous in their absence? At first, I thought it's a European thing, but: Lew is still in London, isn't he?

After the scavenger hunt thru the last 800 pages for all the variations on, echoes of, approaches to "against the day," it is a little jarring to see it here at last, intact. And how does it affect the Monk quote, which after all speaks of night and light, rather than night and day.

That's all for the nonce.

Mindless Pleasures

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Z.) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 07:01:00 +0000

(This week only! Special Deal! I thought I would, con permiso, reinstate the Addl Discussion post. Future moderators should feel under no obligation to follow suit. I just have a few small observations to make that would likely take the main comment stream too far afield... I meant to get this up at the beginning of the week, but -- alas, time being what it is -- that didn't quite work out. Better Nate than lever, I s'pose. Posted 10pm CDT 8/2/07. Pre-dated to keep the Main Weekly post on top.)

1

Orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep is a fairly succinct catalogue of Pynchon's motifs. They are the mindless pleasures of the Preterite. They are the carrot and stick, the currency more potent than lucre, that They use to bend people to Their will...

The working title of Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures, and there is something about the closing passage of this chapter that suggests to me (once again) that this current book, in some embryonic form, was already gestating alongside an incipient Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow, as hinted at in the Donatio letters. (So another point of speculation: which is the fourth novel referenced? Some version of Vineland? Some other monster work slouching toward Penguin to be born?)

2

Also, I had never before thought of Slothrop's anticipatory hardon as resembling a dog's nervous anticipation of an electrical storm, but the similarities are striking (ouch, sorry). Has this been suggested before? I mean, I know there's that strong Pavlovian theme going on in GR, but that's about conditioning -- what about plain old "animal freaking out hours before the tornado hits" type stuff? What if Slothrop was just... born that way?

And if we recall Vineland's epitaph ("Every dog has his day, and a good dog just might have two days") along with the proliferation of dogs throughout his books (almost more important, or at least ubiquitous, than TRP's beloved pigs), we might have a curious reflection on the idea of anticipation, simultaneity, mindless pleasures, the life (and exploitation) of appetites, etc etc, which seems more and more to be a basso continuo of sorts within all his books...

Any other thoughts, reactions, intimations, discuss below/within.

for Richard Fariña

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 12:13:00 +0000

A college buddy of Thomas Pynchon's, to whom Pynchon dedicated Gravity's Rainbow, Richard Fariña, would have been 70 this year. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966, two days after the publication of his only book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, a late-Beat rucksack hero novel.

An early star of the 60s Greenwich Village folk music scene, here Fariña performs his best known song with his wife Mimi, Joan Baez' younger sister, and Pete Seeger, ca. 1965. Interestingly, Richard and Mimi's first album Celebrations For a Grey Day includes a song called, simply, V.

Pynchon's affectionate essay in remembrance of Fariña is here.

Deus ex Machina, I Presume

noreply@blogger.com (H. Rumbold, Master Barber) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:23:00 +0000

Against the Day pp. 779-791

View from Vanavara trading post, at the moment of the explosion.
Painting © William K. Hartmann. Link

Synopsis:

A heavenwide blast of light (779) heralds the Tunguska Event of 30 Jun 1908. Current thinking interprets this massive explosion as an airburst at an altitude of 5-10 km of an asteroid or comet on the order of 500 m diameter and equivalent to a nuclear explosion of 10-20 megatons (1,000 Hiroshimas in the obligatory comparison). The most notable evidence of this stupendous event over a sparsely-populated Siberia was tree-flattening over an area of some 2,150 square km.

The Bol'shaia Igra under Capt. Padzhitnoff is snooping around the vicinity, pondering the Event and the lack of an impact crater or notable debris. The locals blame the Agdy, the God of Thunder. The Chinese are, of course, suspect ("remember who invented gunpowder" 780:18). Radiation levels and reports of stones raining from the sky (déjà vu) and general political intrigue and uncertainty moot the possibilities that the Event may be an extra-dimensional interaction, with effects felt at another time and place or a weapons test by the Bol'shaia Igra, possibly involving capacitative discharge.

In another part of Siberia (and it's a big place), Kit Traverse and Dwight Prance react to the Event with hyperattention and hysteria, respectively. Improbably, two black birds pop out of the aether. The natives are restless and start up the drums, perhaps as a homeopathic talisman against the Thunder God. Prance is shot at as a Japanese spy. Religious mania ensues, centering on the star Tchernobyl (Wormwood) out of the Book of Revelation. Reindeer acquire the power of flight and red noses (we get it, Tom). Biota of Tierra del Fuego at the antipode manifest themselves. Magyakan, the Shaman we encountered on p. 143 with the Vormance Expedition, goes missing. Kit worries about the quaternion weapon that he turned over to Umeki Tsurigame back in Ostend (784).

Ssagan, a white reindeer, gives them a lift to Tuva, on the Mongolian border, a strangely tranquil region which may, in fact, be Shambala. Prance thinks it has all the trappings - an island of tibetan Buddhism in a surround of Islam, Old Uyghur, the Wheel of Life, throat singing. And after the Event, It's unclear whether their mission from Lieutenant-Colonel Halfcourt still exists. They decide to part ways. Kit rides off over the steppe (787).

The Inconvenience appears overhead, being the third Deus ex Machina in this short section. Prance asks if they're good Deities or bad Deities (c.f. Wheel of Life). Randolph St. Cosmo says they eneavor to be kind, while Darby Suckling, by now a thoroughly jaded mascotte, is surly. they invite Prance aboard to discuss compassion over a Lafite '99.

Kit, on the road, falls in with a band of brodyagi, internal exiles devolved into banditry, and their axe-master Topor, whose main pursuits are distilled spirit and Amanita muscaria. They come upon a railroad a-building- the fabled, hidden "Tuva to Taklamakan". Kit wanders into an exploring camp and has a Dr. Livingstone moment encountering Fleetwood Vibe (!). They touch on the old man ("no longer of sound mind" 789:18) and brother 'Fax (pitching under an assumed name [this would be an anachronistic Sandy Koufax] in the Pacific Coast League. Fleetwood is not seeking Shambala ("I no longer have the right 790:9), but a cluster of secret cities, csecular counterparts to the Buddhist Hidden Lands, whose doors may have been opened to him by the Event. "Whatever goes on in there, whatever unspeakable compact with sin and death,, is what I am destined for -- the goal of this long pilgrimage, whose penance is my life." (790:31). Kit's reply is "You know, you're like every other so-called explorer out here, a remittance man with too much sense of privilege, no idea what to do with it" (790:35).

Kit and Fleetwood fall into an uneasy sleep, dreaming of murdering each other and amidst a great windstorm, Fleetwood recalls back to the Event and the evil precence unleashed by the Vormance Expedition. Would Kit bring his torment to an end? But he has left in the night.

Notes and Commentary:

The "heavenwide blast of light" strongly echoes "A screaming comes across the sky" from Gravity's Rainbow and to my mind marks one of the few times Pynchon steps out of character to become "authorly".

Alternative explanations of Tunguska have of course arisen, ranging from comets to black holes anti-matter to UFOs on a progressive scale of woo-woo. and notably our friend Dr. Nikola Tesla's "Death Ray" is also raised as a possibility.

The Tunguska Event may be related to or may be (in disconnected space-time) the "meteorite" pursued back around p. 130 by the Vormance Expedition.

Kit's speculation that the weirdness of the apperance of the black birds depends exquisitely on the position of a bettle on the other side of the world is the Brizilian butterfly of Chaos theory. They also echo the sperm whale and bowl of petunias manifesting in the backwash of the Infinite Improbability field in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The throat singers of Tuva exhibit a form of vocal bilocation, amplifying fundamentals and overtones through the manipulation of the vocal apparatus. All trained singers do this, but the singers of Tuva control the overtones independently. Ths singing commences at about 4:15 into the audio at the link above.

Tuva and Taklamakan are about the last places a rational person would want to connect with a railroad.

chumps3

H. Rumbold, Master Barber

The Gate Further East

noreply@blogger.com (Will Divide) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:00:00 +0000

In the still-luminous sky, the thing was immense. . .
picture source

(pp. 768-778)

One of the novel's briefest episodes, as well as with the fewest named characters, it begins with one of our author's direct addresses to the reader, which seems distilled from an ocean of personal experience.

On his journey to find the Doorsa's master, Kit has reached Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water in the world, limpid to its mile depth, so stunning to behold, so dangerous to navigate that it appears part of a supernatural order included provisionally in this lower, broken one (769:8) On seeing it Kit feels unworthy of his quest, wants to begin it again, though when he turns to say this to Hassan, the man the Doorsa sent to guide him that far, he realizes Hassan has disappeared.

The journey in fact began with Hassan guiding Kit and Dwight Prance to the Prophet's Gate, an enormous, perhaps constructed, arch of tremendous age, set in the center of a maze of canyons that only Hassan could have led them through. Passing through the Gate, both the actual and symbolic start of his journey, Kit has a brief vision of a city, bright yellow and orange which quickly vanishes.

The trip by camel across central Asia is beautifully rendered; of oases, wolves, herds of wild asses and tall stands of flowering hemp. By now the reader has also been on a long journey of his or her own into the novel, and may feel a striking sympathy, in wonder and endurance, with Kit's expanding spirit.

Sans Hassan, Kit and Prance reach Irkutsk, a mining town very alike in many ruckus details with those Kit knew in Colorado. They meet with one of Halfcourt's operatives, Swithin Poundstock, who supplies the lads with maybe 2,000 counterfeit gold English sovereigns, with the profile of a young Queen Victoria, to spread among the natives as they journey further north.

As they do, Kit witnesses Prance talking of Shambhala with the locals, in their own languages, as a means of impressing them with the sources of the western monarchs', Czar and Queen, power. After a while they begin to bicker. Prance, clearly, has a greater mission than graduate studies in religion, one allied with the faceless powers of the secular world. Exasperated by Kit's naivete, Prance gives him a crash course (pg. 777:12-40) in the history of worldly, especially American, power's war against the realm of the spirits.

We see that Prance, like Scarsdale Vibe, is a Christian soldier who has grown steadily less Christian and more soldier as he goes along, and Kit despairs that his vision of Lake Baikal was not enough to stop him from falling now into this bickering numbness of spirit.

--Will

From Neddie: What is up with those rock fragments putatively being thrown off by the Gate? "...Shedding pieces of itself from so high up that by by the time they hit the ground they'd be invisible, followed by the whizzing sound of their descent, for they fall faster than the speed of sound.... At any moment a loose fragment might fall too fast for Kit to hear it before it slashed into him...."? Could Our Artificer be more blatantly alluding to a falling rock[et]?