Happy Sunday Meanders — we are well and into the home stretch. Just two more tiny weeks to wrap. And yet, and yet: plenty of roadway for anyone who’s behind to catch up and make the lunge to the back cover. And you know, just imagine the holiday conversations as you try to explain what the hell to friends and family.
Thanks as always for a rich comment thread. It’s a gift to read these every week as a live communal response to the Intentionally Overcharged Adventures of Oedipa Mass.
Like many, I especially enjoyed this stretch. Like some, the Bay Area locations helped keep me tethered. And maybe this one is just me, but I’m pretty sure I met Stanley Koteks when I used to visit computer game companies in the mid-90s. I don’t think we talked, but he looked up when I walked by, unimpressed. No sensitive, me.
This coming week: What say we regroup at the end of Chapter 5, aka page 120 (HP). Please add your comment to this post although “by then it was too late to make any difference.”
Have a good week, and may all your trumpets stay unmuted. Assuming that’s a good thing. And maybe it’s not?
Having spent a significant chunk of my life in the Bay Area (peninsula, city & East Bay), this stretch was like taking a Sunday drive through my mid-30s after a long bender the night beforehand. My brain’s a bit tired, but oh, the imagery…
The bit about finding a WASTE/Tristero breakthrough (tangentially) through a Bay Area pub crawl made this wackadoodle story hit home a bit. I’ve spontaneously joined a Bay Area pub crawl type-thing myself, although I did not steal a name tag or uncover a worldwide mail conspiracy during my outing.
Oedipa’s discovery that her new Wharfinger edition is missing the vital line about Trystero she was looking for foreshadows my own latter-day distrust of e-books. I’m paranoid they can be digitally edited at any time to conform to some contemporary ideological convention or prevailing sentiment. In other words that they can be turned into something less than authentic just as Oed discovered on her own quest for the truth in literary investigation.
(Incidentally a real-life example of this can be found in the work of Milan Kundera, who later in life had most (or at least many) of his books re-translated into English from their French versions, which differed in some particulars from the Czech originals. Not a lot, but a few of his insights and observations, which later embarrassed him, were edited out. or amended)
Although her journey exposes her to a multitude of disorienting revelations, it makes sense to me that the message that Oedipa finally delivers to Dr. Hilarius with a shrug is, “Accept the reality principle.” She’s fundamentally a practical, grounded person in a web of misfits.
I came hoping you can talk me out of a fantasy.
Cherish it, what else do any of you have!
This is a shapeshifting book. In struggling to follow the convoluted story I find a higher level of understanding the book.
I imagine Thomas enjoyed the journey of writing it as it tumbles out in a wide array of colors, thoughts and emotions. And in the center of it is Oedipa trying to figure out the secret of Tristero and W.A.S.T.E.
And Mucho’s “Rich Chocolaty Goodness” revelation, which explains so much.. I look forward for the final ride!!
I’m thinking of Oedipa’s night in SF as a voyage to the Underworld, a pilgrim with safe passage. Maybe the sailor is Charon. Sort of.
I like the notion that a miracle is an intrusion from an Elsewhere.
This: Some songs, “melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung.”
On to the home stretch!
…aah, now onto the home stretch where all the loose ends will be neatly tied in a bow, all mysteries resolved…in typical TP fashion!
The mother repeatedly reminding her son to communicate by WASTE somehow reminds me of my grandmother, who lived to be 101, and who would tell me at least once every single time I called that “next time I should reverse the charges.”
Cecil vortex reminds me of a spin instructor. I want to do it, and I know I should, but it’s hard unless someone tells me exactly when and what to do. He reminds me to show up, and he tells me I’m doing a good job, even if maybe I’m not.
And “He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight” reminds me of someone too.
I’m behind but hoping to catch up this week!
This turned very dark for awhile. Holocaust references, suicide, LSD for Mucho. I do like the question of one complex and amazing scheme or secret society conspiracy.
Enjoying the book and erudite comments!
I wonder, if Pynchon is presenting an meaning behind a meaning behind a meaning or if he is just messing around with postmodern paranoia. Oedipa is a strange heroine. Set into a even stranger world.
I had the impression I watched her loosing herself. Mirrored through her floating through the night. And in the end loosing the place, where she started her journey and the safety it might have promised.
Is it reductive to say here’s the premise: When technology becomes reality, have we lost any possibility of reality?
Reading the rest of this chapter in ideal surroundings: half late at night while exhausted, mirroring Oedipa’s journey through the night, the other half on the subway with the standard New York chaos swirling around me, mirroring…whatever the hell is going on, on any given page here.
I continue to struggle significantly with this book – I feel basically no connection to the plot or the characters. Perhaps I’m not supposed to. Still occasionally, fleetingly, something rises above the noise and I feel a brief moment of, if not comprehension, then at least mild appreciation for Pynchon.
“Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide.” That’s good. That’s really good.
Descent into paranoia – will she or won’t she stay there. Pynchon loves these open- ended finales. Me- not so much, but loved getting the Pynchon tour around the SF Bay Area of my childhood.
I’ve decided I want to apply for a position at W.A.S.T.E. — it sounds like the perfect organization for my next professional phase. Anonymous communication channels, decentralized logistics, and zero bureaucracy except the trash can. Count me in. W.A.S.T.E. actually delivers! Anyone know the recruitment process — or do I just drop my CV in a muted post horn?
I bet TP created a W.A.S.T.E. Llc just for fun.
Right now, dozens and dozens of crows are gathering outside my window, swooping, cawing, and landing on roofs and wires, black shapes against a totally foggy morning. I just got a meme on my Instagram feed that says, “Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message that is addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings, and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.” Oedipa thinks of a time when, “velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in mid-flight.” Only 32 pages to go!
Things fall apart, as they say. And just before Mucho’s split consciousness reveals itself in full flower, he reacts to multitudes of tonalities in the Muzak playing overhead: “It has been seeping in, in its subliminal, unidentifiable way since they’d entered the place, all strings, reeds, muted brass.” Muted brass: our secret society is now as omnipresent as the canned music wafting through every pizzeria; it is literally on the air, and in it.
Now bring me that ending.
Boo, Meanderers—
After last week’s hijinks, I was surprised at how dark the story turned. Death everywhere: our gasoline-soaked executive, Alameda County Death Cult, the burning flop house mattress, Buchenwald, NADA, Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn. Even WASTE is revealed as “a whole underworld of suicides who failed.” (p. 94)
I found myself wedging this week’s section between Oedipa’s perspective and (Too) Mucho’s.
After her existential night on the town, aimlessly riding MUNI, she’s changed: “Where was the Oedipa who’d driven so bravely up here from San Narciso?” (p. 100). No more Driblette’s planetarium, resolved to project order onto the stars. Now she’s “voyeur and listener” who wonders if “the gemlike ‘clues’ were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.” (p. 95)
Be careful what you wish for. Thanks to the acid, Mucho’s world’s gone all Word—everything’s signal, and he’s turned “antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they’re your lives too.” (p. 118).
That’s its own kind of death, I guess: Self networked into the All. But Oedipa (wisely?) rejects the pills and heads back to San Narciso, Saint Self.
We’re hip to Arrabal’s “anarchist miracles” now–“another world’s intrusion into this one” (p. 97). That helped me make a little more sense of Maxwell’s Demon, hinged between “two kinds of entropy, thermodynamic and informational.” (p. 87) Or the two DT’s: the drunk’s Delirium Tremens and the algebraic time differential (dt) (p. 105). Same sign, different worlds: the sign is where they touch. But whatever Pynchon’s saying about the mysteries of Time is still just out of my reach.
Three images stuck with me, “gemlike ‘clues’”:
+ Mucho’s used cars, that still carry the lives of the previous owners who traded them;
+ the flop house mattress that holds “the set of all men who had slept on it” (p. 104);
+ Mucho’s “rich, chocolaty, goodness” phrase, where “Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time.” (p. 116)
These came to mind as I skimmed back through the section and spotted Pynchon’s description of WASTE, a confederation of all undergrounds, each making “a calculated withdrawal from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.” But once they’ve withdrawn, where do they go?:
“Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.” (p. 101)
Something’s going on with these “separate, unsuspected” worlds: USPS vs. WASTE, Republic vs. Trystero, daylight vs. night. Arrabal tells us they’re normally invisible to one another and “able to coexist peacefully…but when [they] do touch, there’s catyclysm.” (p. 97)
Is that what the posthorn emblem is? The used cars, the mattress, the Demon, DT/dt, the word ‘Trystero’? Portals where “separate, unsuspected worlds” touch? Unloosed from the time differential that normally keeps them apart?
If so, there should be a cataclysm up ahead next week. Bring it all back home, TP… you’ve got just 30 pages.
Whenever I keep finding excuses to pick up a bool and continue reading > bad, bad sign for me!
And that’s just what keeps happening with this one…
Am I the wrong generation for this book? Too old? Too young? Too in-between?
Are my English language skills not good enough? Would reading it in German make a difference? (this is albeit a theoretical option only, as I’m a snob and only read translations of books written in a language I don’t speak; and yes, this limits me when it comes to choosing what to read, but as I said, I’m a snob and sucker for originals).
Whatever the answer to these questions might be: I’m out of here!
Everyone, enjoy the rest of your meandering and who knows, maybe we’ll meet again journeying together through a different story!
We enjoyed your company while we had it! And hope to see you on the next go around, coming relatively soon….
I felt that things really started to click in this last section. But not click as in becoming clearer or more understandable. More that I slipped into Pynchon’s groove and found myself carried along with the narrative.
“Write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other.” OK, so there’s some direct insight into the conspiratorial nature of the underground postal system. But the fact that the speaker thinks that using “the other” will make dolphins, the future rulers of the Earth, mad, pushes conspiracy thinking into madness. (The bit about the dolphins made me think of a classic Simpsons episode. Perhaps Matt Groening or Conan O’Brian were Pychon fans.) Oedipa’s final encounter with LSD-trippin’ Mucho adds even more doubt to the reality that she has been experiencing.
I am struggling to resist the urge to read through to the end. I look forward to Sunday.
All those little scenes in Oedipa (or Edna’s) night – I used to obsess about the sailor and the DTs or delta-ts, but I suddenly find myself thinking the man filling his virtuoso stomach with soap – watching someone train themselves to swallow anything even against their self-interest feels like a potent symbol for our moment in history
Mucho’s is a roomful of people who can focus in on the exact frequency of a single string
Is W.A.S.T.E. the trash of the system, or the only true way to communicate?
Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn!
This morning when the dental tech asked what the book I was reading was about, I was really flummoxed. After a minute I muttered something about the mail and tried to change the subject. What would you have said?
Whether things mean what we think they mean?
“And part. of me must have really wanted to believe–like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror, that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in….That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting.” Poor Hilarious speaks the truth here. The everyday tales of horror we hear and see each day, whether via broadcast or podcast, are unlikely to be tamed by therapy. Above all, we’re no longer like children “hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror.” Too many of are actually living the horror, so yes, Pynchon the Prescient is right on the money.
Sorry: I posted this in a Reply post rather than the regular post!
In the way that things sometimes call to mind their opposites, the idea that “the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in” evokes the ghost stories of Henry James, where that is emphatically not the case. Oedipa’s paranoia is completely different from his characters’, arising from information overload instead of something like sensory deprivation.
Pynchon was prescient. So much is still relevant.
For example, this passage hits hard, as it could have been written about the current mass layoffs and job security threats with the rise of AI. “Nearly three weeks it takes him,” marvelled the efficiency expert, “to decide. You know how long it would’ve taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.”
This part also feels really relevant, as Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be living more isolated lives — engaging less in community and in relationships than previous generations. “From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or cat, car, every kind there is. I will found a society of isolates, dedicated to this purpose, and this sign, revealed by the same gasoline that almost destroyed me, will be its emblem.”
Yes! Coming here to post exactly this. Hard to believe this book is 60 years old.
8th wormhole and prize of Mystery?
Now I’m deeply engaged and curious!!