13 weeks in now, fellow lit folks dropping all around us. Good folks. Strong folks. We march on.
Like I think pretty much everyone, the Quaternions wore my marching toes down to a nub, but I liked Bradh’s take on it in the comments: “I read the maths like a foreign language: just to enjoy the rhythms of the words.”
Things started to get a little zippy with Kit and Günther’s duel (“how lucky to have provoked your quarrel here, in the dueling capital of Germany”), the return of Lew, Lew’s encounter with the hanging man, gas traffic, and then Kit, Foley, and the mickfest. By the time we met the “jelly doughnut” man, it was like being handed a new pair of sugar powdered socks.
If you get a chance, take an amble back in time to one of the early posts. I wandered through Week 2 this morning, tipping my invisible hat brim to lost companions — calliscrapy, buffo, Ms. Maggo, AnemicPrince…. We’re down to around 14 hardy souls now. We few, we proud, we folks who get to enjoy lines like “a dog was howling at a moon no one could see, perhaps imagining that, summoned repeatedly enough, it would appear with food of some kind” and names like “Gus Swallowfield” and “Willi Dingkopf.”
Tuesday 5/1: Part Four’s within reach, so let’s lunge for the bottom of page 693, where I for one plan to howl hungrily “at the unexplained and unresponsive moon.”
(which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 693. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
I would like to reiterate, more accessible that GR. even with all the math and time travel references, i can zone out just a bit and still come away with knowing who likes, is out for revenge, or in conflict with who. sometimes it takes me a bit to remember exactly who the players are in a section but by the end of that section i’m in the know.
i’m on page 660 already but i’m trying to get ahead a week or two so i won’t have to carry my book to barcelona on tuesday.
Urg. missed reading last week. I wanted to post in detail about the math, but have been busy. I’m still in, still posting. Just trying to get work & writing in. maybe later I can post in more detail.
Quick note: A web search for Umeki’s last name: There’s an anime show called magic user’s club. There are aliens who live without interacting amongst the people. They are called Tsurigane. Coincidence? Hmmm.
So Kit is heading to Asia…
A few strucutral stylistic points now occur to me. This whole story moves east (Colorado – east coast – Europe – Asia). The old theory is that civilization moves West (Egypt – Greece – Rome – HRE – England – America). I wonder if the inverted georgraphic pattern corelates to a structural metaphor for time travel into the past. Hell, it’s been hundreds of pages since we’ve seen America. What’s Lake up to now?
Also, this is the first major section that has not ended with a CofC section (I think). They’ve sort of predicted everyone else’s movements by being the first characters on the scene in most cases. There absence here almost suggest we may be on our own.
Just spitballing here. I won’t have any legitimate literary theories til I finish this thing and start a second read (which will not be in the near future, I suspect).
Pynchon did his Pynchon thing to me again this stretch: turned my own frustrations with the story into a reflection of—an essential part of—the story. Lew’s discovery that he’s been had by T.W.I.T, who knew about the double Renfrew/Werfner all along; and Frank and Reed’s séance, where Webb suggests he’s sort of lost interest in revenge altogether, the hunt for Scarsdale being another false blind, had me feeling ‘bilocated,’ half reader, half character, my attention being slowly directed to vectors beyond the ostensible plot. Am I being tricked, Zombini-like, or being taught? Like Lew and the Traverses, even the Chums, whose missions grow less important than the self-discovery—or atonement for lost innocence—they trigger. The thing they’re chasing after (bilocated) turns out to be themselves.
Here at the end of Part III, I feel I’ve been too much of a Renfrew, trying to see the shape all the rails take (689), where I should maybe be more Grand Cohen, intuiting a higher message behind the poison clouds (692). I seemed strangely ready for the Cohen’s own lyrical message on 687/88:
“‘We are light, you see, all of light—we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at the high city window, the stars and nebulae in full midnight glory, the rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the costermonger’s barrow. … The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Aether, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction. …’ He paused at the door.”
More doors.
Gnostic Pynchon. Happy reader.
I really must object, if somewhat belatedly, to the portrayal of this nitwit, this boob, this nincompoop named “Gunther von Quassel.” How can I take this as anything other than a personal insult? I hereby challenge so-called “Thomas Pynchon” to duel me with hurled copies of “Against the Day”. I will smite him!
I’m tickled to think that Pynchon brought Frank and Stray’s arms smuggling to El Paso just so he could have Ewball channel Marty Robbins (and/or the Grateful Dead) and casually mention that “midnight will find me in Rosie’s Cantina!”
I feel compelled to explain for those who might not know, that So-Called Bill’s umbrage comes from three overlapping vectors with Gunther: (1) SCB has a sorta similar sounding last name, (2) SCB is german(ic), (3) Like Gunther, SCB is a major player in the world coffee trade (in terms of consumption, by percentage).
-Cecil
For So-Called Bill, at least Gunther gets a great line in the modern mathematics museum:
“Fate does not speak. She carries a mauser and from time to time indicates our propper path.” p635
And speaking of casually tossed-in allusions, I loved the “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” passage. Moderately eerily, for a while the tag line on my blog was “I am a jelly donut.”
Still lagging (just began chapter 42, p.588 today), but made an amusing find at an antique store yesterday. Details here:
http://thirdfactory.net/atd-boy_allies.html
Nice to see one of Pugnax’s breed grabbing some early dialog, and interesting the opening aerial pov, not to mention the sudden descent into embattled territory on the next page. Kind of like one of Mile’s visions….
Now the big push to rejoin those of you who are on track to put “Bilocations” behind you by Tuesday evening.
Heurtebise aka Steve
old characters popping up in Mexico, hard to remember who everyone was, and then he adds to the confusion by giving a lot of his characters makeovers and new names. “Everybody at their own pace went about relocating their everyday selves.” Switzerland “arrived just in time, rising before them like a lime sorbet after a steady diet of roasted ducks and assorted goose products.” looking up ‘stranniki’ brought me to the Strugatsky brothers, Russian collaborators of a science fiction world called “Noon Universe” (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Wanderers+(Noon+Universe)) – looks like Pynchon has a penchant for Russian sci-fi? Mouffette and Reef: “Reader, she bit him.” I am becoming detached.
i marched coast to coast, south to north, and back again. i thought i’d made heroic strides, but i’m still just through the mayonnaise, into the math, and up to the monstrous weapon. however, the explication in these passages is wearing thousand-league boots: “you have been so easy to fool–most of you anyway–you are such simpletons at the fair…” [555]. yowsa!
steve, your find is eerily aligned on so many points. i’ve gotta think TP has seen that series.
As for me, I am getting a little uncomfortable with all of the not so subtle sleights of So Called Bill that are to be found in this tome. What does one man have to do to another to inspire him to create hundreds of characters and places in the course of a 1200 page book whose sole purpose appears to be to serve as a vehicle for the most personal of attacks? I suppose Pynchon was afraid to fight you.
As am I.
I, for one, never thought I would be so glad to be back in North America, where jelly donuts are more likely to actually be jelly donuts and men with scars shaped like tildes can also be men with “flawless personal toilettes.” (637). [I have always been so very partial to men with flawless personal toilettes.] Although I’m sure I’ll soon be mathematically manipulated once again, I sure do feel more comfy hanging out with the arms smugglers.
I also was struck with love and wonder over the line about Fate’s Mauser.
I am, on the other hand, as disappointed as can be that Kit is such a complete loser in love. His bemused inability to feel and express care is, of course, something he comes by naturally; but hell, he doesn’t even rage like his old man. A poor exchange, if you cannot be hot-headed and politically afire yet also wind up with a love life like–well, like certain teenage boys I am acquainted with. (Hey, at least I’m a hothead.)
My bets: Kit and Reef have a chance at Vibe but choose not to take it. Kit meets Dally in Venice and, because he can’t say how much he’s taken with her, he leaves her there in his eastward march. Yash’s father turns out to be Vibe, bilocated.
Love the Boy Allies. Last month at the flea market, in a fit of penuriousness, or rationality, I passed up a lovely tome on electricity, big picture of Thomas Edison, beautiful graphically with lots of lightning bolts everywhere, from the 30’s. The law of the flea market is buy it now, and I’ve regretted my hesitation ever since; maybe it will appear again this month. As to the reading, after a moment last Tuesday of being Totally Caught Up, I turned to the task of finishing A Prayer for Owen Meany, an odd companion for this volume, but somehow complementary. My other book group book is The World Is Flat–resonance there too I suppose.