I’m so far behind, I think the Gravity’s Rainbow Deathmarch just passed me on the trail. Hey guys!
As with all things of late, I blame the Golden State Warriors. See, as a Warriors fan, I’ve been conditioned to expect to have substantially more free time in May, not substantially less. Still more proof of the end times, and all that.
One thing I’ve noticed — the more I fall behind, the more comments we get on the thread. So really, I’m just taking one for the team here. At least, that’s my story this week. As for next week… Tuesday 5/22 It’s entirely possible that I’ll meet you at the bottom of page 848, where “it surprised him, and did not surprise him.” He’s complex that way. (which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 848. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
(Here) Pugnax! (Here) Pugnax! (Good) Pugnax!
-Cecil
17 comments for “The Against the Day Deathmarch, Week 16”
So-Called Bill
May 18, 2007 at 9:30 am
Actually got some good Momentum going these last couple days. It felt great to pass page 800, especially once I realized there now there’s no way I can ever be 300 pages behind. And Jah bless that dirty old man for throwing in a nice sex scene every once in a while. That bit between Yashmeen and whatshername–interesting, very interesting, suddenly not so interesting anymore. But it does help keep those pages turning.
Still under 800, but slogging forward. Is there a point to the pointlessness of Kit & Reef not shooting Vibe? Heard on the radio today about Hamlet being one person deciding whether or not to kill his uncle. Long at 3 hours, interminable at 1000 pages. (or whatever.)
Note on the Eastward movement. If this is “Against the Day,” Eastward is rushing against the day and towards the night. So what? The oncoming destruction of the great war? The killing fields of Flanders? We’re so conditioned in the late 20th century to look at everything through the lens of the bomb as the annihilation of humanity. It was the item that at the final moment of the meat-grinder ripping of WWII made the whole preceding war and holocaust moot. What is the death of XX million in the face of true global annihiliation. We tend to think of WWI as almost quaint, if we think of it at all.
So why the focus in this book on days we don’t bother with? To shine light on a forgotten corner of the 20th century? His other books, excepting Mason & Dixon cover other parts of the century. Is he going for the whole picture?
I have a feeling that like GR, there’s going to be very little war actually shown. There was a throwaway line about an awful affair in Bosnia. Is this the assasination of Franz Ferdinand that started WWI, just mentioned in passing? I don’t remember any mention of the Spanish American War or the death of McKinley by an anarchist. As always these people seem to live in a world running parallel to our where the amount of time spent on them is in proportion to how much they can be paranoid about conspiracies and shiver in inaction. (Ok, it’s late & I’m being uncharitable.)
But goddamit, somebody better get to Shamballa, or shoot Vibe, or Kit better become worthy of Dally. Otherwise I’m taking my mug and conking TP right in his smug paper bag face.
hey cap’n–very useful context you’ve provided; thanks. i like the idea that he’s trying to cover the century with his works. i’m still having lots of fun with this book down at ground level, feeling like he’s long since repaid the price of admission. so i don’t share your and other folk’s frustration (even the math is ok by me–not delightful or anything but…), but i do like your fighting words, and that’s why i’ll now root for kit to become worthy of dally by shooting vibe in some shambalan alleyway while lew basnight croons his forgotten backstory in a dive nearby….though i’m ok if, like slothrop, they all just fade away.
well, i’m back from barcelona. for me, barcelona shot right up to a 2nd ranking, just under new orleans. planning on heading back at the end of august, my trip wasn’t quite finished.
now i have the daunting task of catching up, over 100 pages behind and as of tomorrow i may have to rip some pages out just have a fighting chance. maybe i’ll have a good session early this week and make a run.
i’m noticing my book is taking quite a beating, it looks years old, lets say about 7. how are some of the other hardcovers out there fairing?
Another quick thought on eastward movements.
In early Christianity, moving east was seen as a movement toward Jesus. See John Donne’s
“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” available at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/654.html
Mine got a good dose of laundry detergent yesterday. Fortunately, most of it was on the dust cover and wiped off easily.
Line of the week, hands down: “You can’t fool the fez.” Were truer words ever written?
A guy could get paranoid reading this book. Seems like Pynchon’s anticipating my reactions, then making them part of the story. All that frivolity I was getting fed up with in the last 100+ pages now looks, through the red lens of the Tunguska Event, like the necessary prelude to a deepening. Kit becomes a deer-led pilgrim; the Boys see the veil pulled back on their Shambhala; Cyprian swaps the erotics of prostitution and petty espionage (is there a difference?) for the pleasures of caring for Danilo; and the plot’s whole crazy tangle of threads, Venice/Trieste/Vienna/Shambhala/the Balkans/Central Asia, gathers up for an instant into that uncanny cosmic glow—“the rise of the heart, the sense of overture and possibility” (805)—that’s obviously prelude to WW I, and behind that the Bomb, but also the real beginning of the book’s various quests for redemption.
Cyprian, Kit, Yashmeen (free of T.W.I.T.) and even the Chums are free in a way the plot’s never allowed them be until now. Of the two lenses available to account for the Event—the rational, scientific/diplomatic one and the druggy, shamanic/spiritual one—this stretch belongs to the wandering shamans: “In these nocturnal modalities, ‘roads,’ as the musicians called them, Cyprian heard anthems not of defined homelands but of release into lifelong exile.” (843)
Cyprian and Kit at least seem released into exile, free of the desire they never really had enough of to begin with (“Where was desire, and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire?” (844); “The two of them might have been sitting right at the heart of the Pure Land, with neither able to see it, sentenced to blind passage, Kit for too little desire, Fleetwood for too much, and of the opposite sign.” (791)).
The difference between the story pre- and post-Tunguska is the difference between Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and Vesna.
Is the Event the prelude to the world’s destruction or the beginning of its redemption? And which one, deep down, do we really desire? What lens do we collectively want to see it through: Apocalypse or Shambhala? It’s a question of lenses and perceptions. Bi-focality.
“Prussophiles, I suppose is what I mean. Lovers of might. They want to preside over the end of the world.” (808)
vs.
“And from everywhere in the taiga, all up and down the basins of the Yeninsei, came reports of a figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel but moving like one, deliberately, unhurried, a consoler. Accounts differed as to whether the outsize figure was a man or woman, but all reported having to look steeply upward when trying to make out its face, and a deep feeling of fearless calm once it had passed.” (785)
I’m so back in. Don’t fail me, Thomas.
Hm, I like the give & take of the carping & praising of us readers. As one of us gets into it, the other gets out, and vice versa. And of course as pointed out by the dear nonplacental mammal above, against the day, eastward. I don’t think of the obvious sometimes. Anyway, does anyone else find it disturbing (or even amusing) that Cyprian, a character at least a couple of us didn’t even remember had existed when he was earliest in the book, has now become the central character toward this end of the book, while all of the multitude of other, often more interesting (well, perhaps), folks have been left by the wayside for hundreds (it seems) of pages? I glossed over most of this week’s section. Well, I read it, but I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering elsewhere because it didn’t turn me on much, at least until Danilo broke his leg. I ditto So-Called Bill by noting that I did wake up momentarily with “The fez knows…. You cannot fool the fez.” That was fun. Also, what about the bland nonchalance with which the characters float from one affair into the next (which either makes the paragraph about Love with a capital L ironic or right on target, I can’t decide)? And how it’s fairly impossible to even differentiate one character from the next – they might as well be all the same, except for a few stereo types. And I guess what I’m getting at is what are all of these ‘problems’ for, because clearly, surely…. Is it simply that we’re working against our days by reading this, as Pynchon worked against his days writing it (with obvious relish)? A whimsical if not eloquent negation of time? I’m not so much complaining as pondering. I must admit there is plenty that would be interesting to further discuss about this book. This section had me (once again) doing little researches on the various hysterias that led to WWI. There seems to be more poignancy in Pynchon’s exploration of senseless balkanization than in anything else. Oh, a picture I keep getting in my head while reading this book is that of a giant cottonball with giant toothpicks stuck through it in every possible angle. Silly me.
I propounded my theory of AtD to another Marcher today: embrace the weird science and science fiction–the hollow-Earth, the Campanile, the bilocated ships, Tunguska–because they are all means for examining the effect of physical (and perhaps metaphysical) events on human character and behavior.
So if you read the book as a character study, it’s mediocre–poor development plus all these irrelevant strangenesses scattered around. But these extreme and unrealistic people do change over the course of many pages. Pynchon uses the two ships on Kit the same way that, for example, Brecht used the loss of a purse of money. The question is the same in any novel: how does someone change when X happens to them?
Yes, there are still a lot of non sequiturs–Rudolph the reindeer, for chrissakes! But as we travel geographically “against” the day, we are connecting a chain of experiments and outcomes. We are saving up data against the day when we shall understand humans better.
At which point it becomes time to straighten out rodney’s note last week. Kit is *not* the same. He’s less often tongue-tied; some of Reef’s glibness has transferred since their time together (or hanging around Reef has made some of Kit’s native western-ness re-emerge, perhaps). He has a devil-may-care in Asia (the result of leaving both Dally and Yashmeen?) that he didn’t exhibit in New Haven or Gottingen. We saw changes in Yashmeen’s confidence and strut from her entrance in England to her (temporary, I hope) departure in Italy.
Favorite recent madeleine: Drumming provides “homeopathic echoes to protect them from” the return of the blast. If I absent-mindedly tap-dance while reading or watching TV, can I prevent the Big One?
I had meant to comment earlier on the Tushuk Tash and the Prophet’s Gate section of Kit’s journey (p 769 and onward). The Kafkaesque nature of the mapping is reminscent of Holy center approaching in GR, but they get there. Maybe going east is getting closer to … well, not Jesus exactly, but something.
I’ll try to keep this short and shallow to balance some of the meatier posts above (and I take the captain’s point that WWI is overshadowed in our popular consiousness by it’s successor – and they didn’t call it the Great War for nothing)
But I enjoyed Bevis’ gooey geeky comparison of his girl to the Ultraviolet Catastrophe (I had to look it up – thought it was a band) and Cyprian’s world-weary response shows just how far he’s come in a few hundred pages.
and the Event reverberates in the Vortex. An amazing week of commentary: something seems to be happening–are drops of meaning actually distilling for some of us? I’m grateful to the RaptorMage for the coffee break coaching session, and to all who give me hope for some understanding before this is all over…
Maybe, ala Rodney K and Raptormage, the Event is both a prelude to the World’s destruction and the potential for redemption. This week’s comments make me wonder if Pynchon is urging us to be redeemed, and recognizing we may not so choose.
“As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded …most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucintation, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them againt the day.” p 805. Doesnt sound half bad.
For much of the book, it seems like our preparations against the day are chronicled and mocked thru social commentary/humor – nothing like perpetual litigation to age a man before his time p. 794; Russians worried about their Rand stock and the bubble bursting, p. 795; obscenely rich card players losing enough money to absolve them of their sins against the working class p. 802; Anti semitism as a source of dark energy that could be tapped into for specific purposes, pp 807, 808; the Northern powers as administrators who manipulate histories but produce none of their own, p 828.
Then comes the Event, and some do seem to change. Reef is specifically called out, “Really Traverse you know you must abandon this farcical existence, rededicate yourself to real world issues..” and Reef emerges running for his life, “or anyhow the resumption of it.”
Like other marchers, I experienced a delicious hiatus of “againstness” while reading the pages where our cast of characters dangle from the bracelet of the Tonguska Event and the month-long nightlessness that followed.
“Was it, to be blunt, the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event?” (797). While welcoming the narratorial guidance, I wonder if TP betrays a certain lack of faith in his explicators with such “bluntness”?
Ebbingly, flowingly,
Heurtebise or Ramón or Steve
I agree with the Raptor Mage to a large extent. TRP has never been much for character development. But all this weird little stuff adds up to the story. As Lennon said, “life’s what happens…”
Finally passed 800–getting so close to Shambala I can almost see it. I’ve enjoyed the posts this week–since this is my first Pynchon reading, I don’t have the perspective y’all have. Not sure you’ve motivated me enough to read his juvenilia, though. (Does he have juvenilia?) I’m just slogging through trying to get to the end of this one without spilling any more coffee.
Actually got some good Momentum going these last couple days. It felt great to pass page 800, especially once I realized there now there’s no way I can ever be 300 pages behind. And Jah bless that dirty old man for throwing in a nice sex scene every once in a while. That bit between Yashmeen and whatshername–interesting, very interesting, suddenly not so interesting anymore. But it does help keep those pages turning.
Still under 800, but slogging forward. Is there a point to the pointlessness of Kit & Reef not shooting Vibe? Heard on the radio today about Hamlet being one person deciding whether or not to kill his uncle. Long at 3 hours, interminable at 1000 pages. (or whatever.)
Note on the Eastward movement. If this is “Against the Day,” Eastward is rushing against the day and towards the night. So what? The oncoming destruction of the great war? The killing fields of Flanders? We’re so conditioned in the late 20th century to look at everything through the lens of the bomb as the annihilation of humanity. It was the item that at the final moment of the meat-grinder ripping of WWII made the whole preceding war and holocaust moot. What is the death of XX million in the face of true global annihiliation. We tend to think of WWI as almost quaint, if we think of it at all.
So why the focus in this book on days we don’t bother with? To shine light on a forgotten corner of the 20th century? His other books, excepting Mason & Dixon cover other parts of the century. Is he going for the whole picture?
I have a feeling that like GR, there’s going to be very little war actually shown. There was a throwaway line about an awful affair in Bosnia. Is this the assasination of Franz Ferdinand that started WWI, just mentioned in passing? I don’t remember any mention of the Spanish American War or the death of McKinley by an anarchist. As always these people seem to live in a world running parallel to our where the amount of time spent on them is in proportion to how much they can be paranoid about conspiracies and shiver in inaction. (Ok, it’s late & I’m being uncharitable.)
But goddamit, somebody better get to Shamballa, or shoot Vibe, or Kit better become worthy of Dally. Otherwise I’m taking my mug and conking TP right in his smug paper bag face.
hey cap’n–very useful context you’ve provided; thanks. i like the idea that he’s trying to cover the century with his works. i’m still having lots of fun with this book down at ground level, feeling like he’s long since repaid the price of admission. so i don’t share your and other folk’s frustration (even the math is ok by me–not delightful or anything but…), but i do like your fighting words, and that’s why i’ll now root for kit to become worthy of dally by shooting vibe in some shambalan alleyway while lew basnight croons his forgotten backstory in a dive nearby….though i’m ok if, like slothrop, they all just fade away.
well, i’m back from barcelona. for me, barcelona shot right up to a 2nd ranking, just under new orleans. planning on heading back at the end of august, my trip wasn’t quite finished.
now i have the daunting task of catching up, over 100 pages behind and as of tomorrow i may have to rip some pages out just have a fighting chance. maybe i’ll have a good session early this week and make a run.
i’m noticing my book is taking quite a beating, it looks years old, lets say about 7. how are some of the other hardcovers out there fairing?
mine looks like it’s had a light acid wash….
-Cecil
Another quick thought on eastward movements.
In early Christianity, moving east was seen as a movement toward Jesus. See John Donne’s
“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” available at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/654.html
Mine got a good dose of laundry detergent yesterday. Fortunately, most of it was on the dust cover and wiped off easily.
Line of the week, hands down: “You can’t fool the fez.” Were truer words ever written?
A guy could get paranoid reading this book. Seems like Pynchon’s anticipating my reactions, then making them part of the story. All that frivolity I was getting fed up with in the last 100+ pages now looks, through the red lens of the Tunguska Event, like the necessary prelude to a deepening. Kit becomes a deer-led pilgrim; the Boys see the veil pulled back on their Shambhala; Cyprian swaps the erotics of prostitution and petty espionage (is there a difference?) for the pleasures of caring for Danilo; and the plot’s whole crazy tangle of threads, Venice/Trieste/Vienna/Shambhala/the Balkans/Central Asia, gathers up for an instant into that uncanny cosmic glow—“the rise of the heart, the sense of overture and possibility” (805)—that’s obviously prelude to WW I, and behind that the Bomb, but also the real beginning of the book’s various quests for redemption.
Cyprian, Kit, Yashmeen (free of T.W.I.T.) and even the Chums are free in a way the plot’s never allowed them be until now. Of the two lenses available to account for the Event—the rational, scientific/diplomatic one and the druggy, shamanic/spiritual one—this stretch belongs to the wandering shamans: “In these nocturnal modalities, ‘roads,’ as the musicians called them, Cyprian heard anthems not of defined homelands but of release into lifelong exile.” (843)
Cyprian and Kit at least seem released into exile, free of the desire they never really had enough of to begin with (“Where was desire, and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire?” (844); “The two of them might have been sitting right at the heart of the Pure Land, with neither able to see it, sentenced to blind passage, Kit for too little desire, Fleetwood for too much, and of the opposite sign.” (791)).
The difference between the story pre- and post-Tunguska is the difference between Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and Vesna.
Is the Event the prelude to the world’s destruction or the beginning of its redemption? And which one, deep down, do we really desire? What lens do we collectively want to see it through: Apocalypse or Shambhala? It’s a question of lenses and perceptions. Bi-focality.
“Prussophiles, I suppose is what I mean. Lovers of might. They want to preside over the end of the world.” (808)
vs.
“And from everywhere in the taiga, all up and down the basins of the Yeninsei, came reports of a figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel but moving like one, deliberately, unhurried, a consoler. Accounts differed as to whether the outsize figure was a man or woman, but all reported having to look steeply upward when trying to make out its face, and a deep feeling of fearless calm once it had passed.” (785)
I’m so back in. Don’t fail me, Thomas.
Hm, I like the give & take of the carping & praising of us readers. As one of us gets into it, the other gets out, and vice versa. And of course as pointed out by the dear nonplacental mammal above, against the day, eastward. I don’t think of the obvious sometimes. Anyway, does anyone else find it disturbing (or even amusing) that Cyprian, a character at least a couple of us didn’t even remember had existed when he was earliest in the book, has now become the central character toward this end of the book, while all of the multitude of other, often more interesting (well, perhaps), folks have been left by the wayside for hundreds (it seems) of pages? I glossed over most of this week’s section. Well, I read it, but I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering elsewhere because it didn’t turn me on much, at least until Danilo broke his leg. I ditto So-Called Bill by noting that I did wake up momentarily with “The fez knows…. You cannot fool the fez.” That was fun. Also, what about the bland nonchalance with which the characters float from one affair into the next (which either makes the paragraph about Love with a capital L ironic or right on target, I can’t decide)? And how it’s fairly impossible to even differentiate one character from the next – they might as well be all the same, except for a few stereo types. And I guess what I’m getting at is what are all of these ‘problems’ for, because clearly, surely…. Is it simply that we’re working against our days by reading this, as Pynchon worked against his days writing it (with obvious relish)? A whimsical if not eloquent negation of time? I’m not so much complaining as pondering. I must admit there is plenty that would be interesting to further discuss about this book. This section had me (once again) doing little researches on the various hysterias that led to WWI. There seems to be more poignancy in Pynchon’s exploration of senseless balkanization than in anything else. Oh, a picture I keep getting in my head while reading this book is that of a giant cottonball with giant toothpicks stuck through it in every possible angle. Silly me.
I propounded my theory of AtD to another Marcher today: embrace the weird science and science fiction–the hollow-Earth, the Campanile, the bilocated ships, Tunguska–because they are all means for examining the effect of physical (and perhaps metaphysical) events on human character and behavior.
So if you read the book as a character study, it’s mediocre–poor development plus all these irrelevant strangenesses scattered around. But these extreme and unrealistic people do change over the course of many pages. Pynchon uses the two ships on Kit the same way that, for example, Brecht used the loss of a purse of money. The question is the same in any novel: how does someone change when X happens to them?
Yes, there are still a lot of non sequiturs–Rudolph the reindeer, for chrissakes! But as we travel geographically “against” the day, we are connecting a chain of experiments and outcomes. We are saving up data against the day when we shall understand humans better.
At which point it becomes time to straighten out rodney’s note last week. Kit is *not* the same. He’s less often tongue-tied; some of Reef’s glibness has transferred since their time together (or hanging around Reef has made some of Kit’s native western-ness re-emerge, perhaps). He has a devil-may-care in Asia (the result of leaving both Dally and Yashmeen?) that he didn’t exhibit in New Haven or Gottingen. We saw changes in Yashmeen’s confidence and strut from her entrance in England to her (temporary, I hope) departure in Italy.
Favorite recent madeleine: Drumming provides “homeopathic echoes to protect them from” the return of the blast. If I absent-mindedly tap-dance while reading or watching TV, can I prevent the Big One?
I had meant to comment earlier on the Tushuk Tash and the Prophet’s Gate section of Kit’s journey (p 769 and onward). The Kafkaesque nature of the mapping is reminscent of Holy center approaching in GR, but they get there. Maybe going east is getting closer to … well, not Jesus exactly, but something.
I’ll try to keep this short and shallow to balance some of the meatier posts above (and I take the captain’s point that WWI is overshadowed in our popular consiousness by it’s successor – and they didn’t call it the Great War for nothing)
But I enjoyed Bevis’ gooey geeky comparison of his girl to the Ultraviolet Catastrophe (I had to look it up – thought it was a band) and Cyprian’s world-weary response shows just how far he’s come in a few hundred pages.
and the Event reverberates in the Vortex. An amazing week of commentary: something seems to be happening–are drops of meaning actually distilling for some of us? I’m grateful to the RaptorMage for the coffee break coaching session, and to all who give me hope for some understanding before this is all over…
Maybe, ala Rodney K and Raptormage, the Event is both a prelude to the World’s destruction and the potential for redemption. This week’s comments make me wonder if Pynchon is urging us to be redeemed, and recognizing we may not so choose.
“As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded …most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucintation, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them againt the day.” p 805. Doesnt sound half bad.
For much of the book, it seems like our preparations against the day are chronicled and mocked thru social commentary/humor – nothing like perpetual litigation to age a man before his time p. 794; Russians worried about their Rand stock and the bubble bursting, p. 795; obscenely rich card players losing enough money to absolve them of their sins against the working class p. 802; Anti semitism as a source of dark energy that could be tapped into for specific purposes, pp 807, 808; the Northern powers as administrators who manipulate histories but produce none of their own, p 828.
Then comes the Event, and some do seem to change. Reef is specifically called out, “Really Traverse you know you must abandon this farcical existence, rededicate yourself to real world issues..” and Reef emerges running for his life, “or anyhow the resumption of it.”
Like other marchers, I experienced a delicious hiatus of “againstness” while reading the pages where our cast of characters dangle from the bracelet of the Tonguska Event and the month-long nightlessness that followed.
“Was it, to be blunt, the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event?” (797). While welcoming the narratorial guidance, I wonder if TP betrays a certain lack of faith in his explicators with such “bluntness”?
Ebbingly, flowingly,
Heurtebise or Ramón or Steve
I agree with the Raptor Mage to a large extent. TRP has never been much for character development. But all this weird little stuff adds up to the story. As Lennon said, “life’s what happens…”
Finally passed 800–getting so close to Shambala I can almost see it. I’ve enjoyed the posts this week–since this is my first Pynchon reading, I don’t have the perspective y’all have. Not sure you’ve motivated me enough to read his juvenilia, though. (Does he have juvenilia?) I’m just slogging through trying to get to the end of this one without spilling any more coffee.