I’ve been reading the comments right after I finish each section and that is such a rich dang experience. Thanks for the hellos, for the nuanced takes, for the fact checking and the flights of fancy. And thanks to Pynchon for sunken bones, floating heads, a courier’s tragedy (controversial to our crew), and a quick call-back to Metzger’s hairpiece.
Lots to think about. But the standout for me right now is the sense so many have that this reading experience is designed to trigger some firsthand discomfort and paranoia. How it is, somewhere near its core, a song sung by and to a band of paranoids
When we Meandered White Noise, many of us felt the plot was mirroring what we were living through day to day (2020). And it looks like late 2025 is a good time to tackle TCoL49.
“Is that real?” “Where have I heard that name?” “How does this fit together?” “What’s up with this grand communication conspiracy?” It’s all a little on the nose. But in a good way.
And if Pynchon seems to be sometimes having a little too much fun, I’m enjoying picturing him pause after a particular bit to giggle. The room is full of smoke, or maybe a couple kinds of smoke. It’s a thing.
This coming week: Speaking of pausing, this week we are going to catch our breath in the middle of a chapter. I know I know! Page 89 (HP), mid-Chapter 5. Please add your comment below when someone asks, “How’d you get a name like Arnold Snarb?” Thanks for your indulgence!
The characters, the characters! I’m catching up on my weeks now but honestly my favorite part of each installment is the new names and stories that come alongside them. I’ll probably be rewinding this book and trying to decode all the small side references and easter eggs packed into Pynchon’s between-the-lines lore.
What happened? Yesterday I wrote one of my more insightful and beautiful posts. Only way to find this am Cecil warning that I was at risk of losing out on the end of book (end of days?) mug. That frightens and confuses me.
What did I write about? Something relating to Meaning, Whether the author is helping or confusing us in periodically summing up what the characters know and adding what they do not, Genghis Cohen, and why in the world does he keep spelling it, “Wells , Fargo”?
What happened to my post? I don’t know. Was it the demon, the trystero, or did I just forget to hit “post”?
To be clear, you stole fizzy lifting drinks. You bumped into the ceiling, which has to be washed and sterilized. So you get no mug.
Now a mystery prize, that could still be a thing!
Probably your original post revealed something that is Not to Be Known. Sounds like something you would do.
Magoo has a strong will and he is trying to Obi-Wan me into making mugs!
“Shall I project a world?” Oedipa asks. She takes her executrix duties seriously, having “undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat[.]” Oedipa is “a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts.” So she attends the Yoyodyne shareholders meeting, but she’s distracted by watermarks on counterfeit stamps. Trystero, “perhaps fantasied by Oedipa,” opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal system in Europe and fought the Pony Express and Wells Fargo either as outlaws in black or disguised as Indians. Maybe Trystero promises an escape from her encapsulation, but maybe she’ll be “convinced it was purely nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix.”
Just one comment if I may – did anyone else read the phrase “masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms” and suddenly wish to be reading this book in any other timeline?
Abe, I keep circling moments like that one that feel a little too on point for this timeline. Last week one of them was Oedipa’s revelation that she was a Young Republican.
I’m catching up this week, but a couple of LOL moments… I was so engrossed by the narration of the play, not sure when it dawned on me, I suddenly felt like I was having a CANDID CAMERA moment, when I thought, “Woah, just hold on a second, there’s not a theatre in the world big enough to stage this play!”
Then, reading:
“Fine,” Metzger Ssaid, “and what next, picket the V.A.? March on Washington? God protect me,” he addressed the ceiling of the little theater…”
The plays was a wonderful moment of ekphrasis-tic absurdity to rival Homer’s description on Achilles’s shield.
Then, later, being taken from this macro view of theater to this micro view of stamps, equally crowded with detail, and the thought, “How are they able to fit all this on a stamp?”
First week was a slog, but I’m getting more comfortable just riding the wave, coming in and out of consciousness. Tuning into something sensible and just as quickly being tuned out, losing reception.
This week’s grab bag: “…as if the more she collected the more would come to her” — the dopamine hit of conspiracy mining is similar to leveling up in a game.
I missed why Oedipa went to the old folks home, or maybe it was random?
Being stuck in Bay Bridge traffic madness is the perfect opportunity to think 🙂
And, hello Wheeler! I sort of miss you.
Here to preserve my dibs on nonexistent magnet!
I’m still in the previous week. It’s a mind-bending slog! I’m reading and re-reading. I’ll catch up next week… I know there’s a carrot at the end of this stick.
Pynchon time was overtaken by dressing-baby-as-Frida-Kahlo-and-going-to-a-parade time. Will catch up this week!
Patterns, patterns, patterns and in between entropy. Every time Oedipa meets someone new I am interested how screwed up this person is. And I never get disappointed.
This time I found it harder to understand everything with my not-English brain. The language of some parts is so dense, that I fear, I am missing half of the fun. Since this weekend I am using a German kindle-Version beside the English paper back now. That makes it easier.
Alas, a family gathering in New Hampshire has thrown me off-schedule. Back next week.
The second mention of Remedios Varos took me down a rabbit hole of her art and significance for TP. In another portion of the tryptic, just one of the girls is unaffected by the hypnosis and acting on some independence – though limited. This imagery is repeated in her other works. I found this article interesting.
https://biblioklept.org/2019/07/08/an-interview-with-margaret-carson-about-translating-remedios-varos-letters-dreams-other-writings/
Cool, thanks! The interview says that Varo described the painting in a letter to her family: “Under the orders of the Great Master, they’re embroidering the earth’s mantle, seas, mountains, and living things. Only the girl has woven a ruse in which she is seen beside her beloved.”
The news will be on any minute. We can do it there. Maybe there’ll be something about China…
A boozy club, an intriguing play, thun and taxi, the mail, a philatelist (not what I thought it meant), stamps, the mystery of the charcoal bones and what’s up with Trystereo?
Odepia is on the case!!
Significantly more palatable section for me than the last. Even if everything remains opaque, there’s at least the feel of forward momentum here.
I see many strongly responding to the milieu in the book. Perhaps as someone born after this period and who has lived his entire life on the east coast, some of the precision of Pynchon’s description glides by me. I’m certainly not one to usually struggle with works from the mid-century (and I can’t say I’m struggling per se here) but I’m trying to find reasons for my personal disconnect from the book relative to many, much more enthusiastic, meanderers.
Because I find her encounters with various people so mind blowing I am helped by the geographical references as that helps me picture her journey. At this point I’m not sure what she’ll find or if the point of the story is the “friends” she’s made along the way.
alive, well, and with eight hours of airports and airplanes ahead of me today that should see me across the line. fly Pynchon Air: we guarantee that if we get you up, you’ll come down!
Ahoy ye Mean Derers, I am late to the party so my remarks will be short and somewhat derivative. The postmodernist nomenclature truly has been kicked into overdrive: Emory Bortz, for Pete (Pinguid)’s sake. I said “Genghis Cohen” to myself and thought of the homophone “koan.” Professor Google reminds me that a koan is a paradoxical riddle used in Zen Buddhism to illustrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning. And immediately afterwards we have that beautifully mournful description of the singular sensory experience preceding an epileptic episode, which, post-seizure, is all that remains:
“… but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second—but there was no way to tell.”
As Oedipa worries that she may emerge from this experience unenlightened, we the readers cannot help but identify with her.
Quite the cast of characters. A horse named Adolf, Genghis Cohen and a demon in a box. Wonder if Schrödinger’s cat is in that box.
I disagree with Cecil about whether this book particularly suits the moment. The paranoia here is about covert symbols and signs, but the paranoia we face in the real world is from entirely overt causes. The book almost feels like escapism.
Yes, I miss the romance of sinister machinations. Today’s evil is so clumsy and vulgar.
Fair points all — I think it’s the trying to put back together a mental model for a world that used to make sense part that resonates. Plus the demons…
A clerk popped up from behind the desk…and began making sign language at her. Oedipa considered giving him the finger to see what would happen. (P80). A gem of two lines.
“Metzger…wanted to argue. ‘You’re so right-wing you’re left wing,’ he protested.” A real TP statement that would be considered trite if it weren’t a) written by TP and b) true. And speaking of truth, the truth itself moved me into a section later on when TP describes Oedipa’s state of mind as “All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth.” (Everyone is being asked to be JUST BE KIND now, but rarely do we see exhortations to TELL the TRUTH, truth being so overrated now.)
The Porky Pig Anarchist reference got me thinking that I had in fact seen the original cartoon somewhere…and I had. It’s called “Blow Out” and was Porky’s first solo film/short for Warner Brothers.
just watched it — thanks for the lead! (I had wondered if that was real.) Boy that anarchist laugh will haunt me!
Viewing Oedipa as possibly a courier, rather than a character, as Rodney K suggests, may help me stay engaged with the book. So far, I have found Oedipa, as a character, confounding.
Maybe she’s a vessel. I’m looking for play on the word “vessel” in a name-to-be-named-later.
Other books found their way into my life this week (“A History of the World in 47 Borders” – eye-opening! – and the latest novel by Isabel Allende) and left no room and time for the one we’re concerned with her, but I’ll catch up over the weekend…
“Ghengis Cohen”. TP’s character names are a joy.
Am I alone in questioning TP’s obsession with postal services? Dog meet bone. It’s a meaty bone, and obvi central to the book, but was hoping for more. TP went postal over postal.
For anyone following the NBA gambling scandal, I’ve seen it suggested that Chauncey Billups is exactly the name Pynchon would have devised for that offending coach.
Agree!
“All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth.”
This line got me thinking about the human brain’s inclination to recognize pattern. And also about David Brooks. A lot of people dislike David Brooks (How much is he read on the West Coast?). But Brooks is smart and sees patterns, and one pattern he recognized this week is the individual’s tendency to seek a champion (Call him/her/they a savior, if you like) to impose a will to power, which of course is a will to consolidate power. (Republican or Democrat, although these days that may be a false equivalency, but then I follow my preferred media.) Which flies in the faith of the myth of American democracy and the creed of individualism. Myth and creed. Myth and words. All that we cling to with our taxed brain cells. Oedipa has “a growing obsession, with “bringing something of herself”—even if that something was just her presence—to the scatter of business interests that had survived Inverarity.” Can anybody do that through words, to fulfill a mythology of individual achievement (patents), unless the words and mythology serve a collective? That collective could be the (sinister) corporation or the (blessed) community. Or are they the same? I wonder what David Brooks would say.
Interesting idea. As you say, Oedipa seems to want to find the pattern and somehow become part of the pattern. Not sure her quest fits Brooks’s conception of our tendency to look for a “savior,” but then I don’t know what it actually does fit.
Hola Meanderers,
As the plot thickens (at this point you could stand a spoon up in it), Oedipa thins. Is she a character or a courier? A planetarium or a signal destined to shuttle between assorted obsessives, cranks, eccentrics and pervs, each leaving me wanting to buy another vowel to make the phrase whole?
Can’t work out who’s on first, but I found myself hanging on this week by two’s. Two stories: Cashiered and The Courier’s Tragedy. Both meet a bloody The End, but neither gets the last word. Baby Igor’s still alive in the person of Metzger; Trystero too is alive and kicking—and murdering?—in some sinister postal form.
And two images. One is Oedipa bundled in all those entropic sparkly clothes, to buy herself time to gather clues about the ending before she’s stripped to nothing. The other’s Driblette’s–self as planetarium:
“I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.” (p. 62)
Oedipa starts this section deciding her duty is “to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her.” (p.65)
Now wherever the plot twists—North Beach, Sproul Plaza, Bay Bridge, Yoyodyne, rooms “receding in the general direction of Santa Monica”—I tell myself they’re star charts, “stelliferous” points linked by the lines Oedipa projects between them. (“She would give them order, she would create constellations…” p. 72).
If I knew from physics, Clerk Maxwell’s Demon might help, too:
“The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving all at different random speeds, and sort out the fast moving molecules from the slow ones….Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have to put any real work into the system… getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion.” (p. 68)
Is Oedipa the Demon of Pynchon’s system? Just a few pages later, she imagines a perpetual motion of her own:
“Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only complied memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold.” (p. 76)
It’s too bright for mine—information overload. But maybe that’s Pynchon’s point, to show us how that feels: wonky planetariums crowded with too many stars.
Dug the Berkeleyana—those suds were still there in the fountain when I was.
Last week I couldn’t wait for the assignment to be over. This week I was disappointed to see the words “How’d you get a name like Arnold Snarb?”
Rather impulsively I bought a copy of “V,” which I’m going to try to tackle in between stints of “Lot 49.” This will probably break my brain but maybe in a fun way? Apologies in advance for the gibberish I start spouting in the near future.
Hi S-C B,
“I bought a copy of “V,” which I’m going to try to tackle in between stints of “Lot 49.”
I’m doing the same with “Shadow Ticket”! Slow progress so far–my heart’s here, with the Meander.
What would this book look like in the post-internet era? All of Oedipa’s sleuthing could’ve been done from her phone. The story seems to be morphing into a mystery though I’m not holding out hope for a tidy solve at book’s end.
First, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the casual winking at pedophilia, but I am reminded that Pynchon studied writing with Nabokov
Now the big “I had to learn this, so you have to let me teach it” past
In the common parlance, entropy = disorder (or the tendency toward it) in a system
And this is a helpful way to view informational entropy, which is the amount of information that can be misunderstood in a message
But in the thermodynamic world, in which energy is conserved and will always be the same before and after any thermodynamic process, entropy is best understood as the energy that cannot be converted into thermodynamic work at the end of the process
And they work inversely – imagine the moment of universal heat death, in which everything in universe is the exact same temperature and no process can take place, thermodynamic entropy is at the maximum, BUT there is zero doubt about information because only one state is even possible
Except at Maxwell’s Demon, because as the Demon sorts (which is not thermodynamic work) heat into one area, it comes to know information, thus reducing informational entropy, AND it causes the piston to raise and generate thermodynamic work without using energy, thus reducing thermodynamic entropy
Of course, the most important thing about Maxwell’s Demon is that it’s just a thought experiment and the second law of thermodynamics remains inviolable
I’m cringing at the pedophilia too, plus the “rapey” first sexual encounter with Metzger, and the overly assuming Cohen…
Here I am, finished already with this week’s portion, happy to have Jacobean drama behind me, “attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take.”
Not relevant to this particular section, but last night we went to see “One Battle After Another,” which apparently at one point was supposed to be an adaptation of TP’s “Vineland.” As far as I can tell no trace of that book remains – except maybe a vague connection to Humboldt County – but it has a very Pynchonesque sensibility. There’s characters named “Perfidia Beverly Hills” and “Steven Lockjaw” and a shady organization called the “Christmas Adventurer’s Club.” It’s a big time investment but gets my thumbs up, FWIW.
Yeah, perhaps influenced by our current group project, I found myself observing during the movie that there was something Pynchonesque about it–only to see during the credits that it was indeed “inspired by” Pynchon’s novel Vineland (which I recall that I enjoyed reading back when it first came out 30+ years ago, though I don’t remember much about it now).
This passage could well describe the modern workplace — the notion of signing away one’s rights to the company and, in the process, stamping out individuality and pride of ownership.
… “they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or ‘team’ and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent—only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook.“