This is it! — the last week!
Although I’m still woefully behind (in fact, I’m pretty sure I’m the most behindest of all the many folks still marching), I’ve really enjoyed all the comments. This has been one of the best ‘marches yet (“I bet you say that to all the ‘marches”), and I’m hoping youse consider coming back for a future jaunt.
I ‘spect the next one will be Octoberish. Not sure what we’re going to read so please feel free to keep suggesting ideas. I’m pretty sure it won’t be a 20 week/1000+ pager this go around. I’m open to the new notion that’s been floated of doing a few books by one author, at a book every two weeks, or somesuch. Or perhaps some 600-page humdinger.
And then there’s this: mugs!
When you hit the back o’ the book and post your comment (assuming you’ve posted on most threads, yada yada) please be sure to drop me a line with your shipping address so you can get your very own “I Surivived the AtD DM Mug.” Saturday 6/30: We bring it all home. (Which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to the inside back cover. Aim to finish reading and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Saturday, give or take. Me, I’ll be more on the “take” side of that equation.)
Pugnax!
-Cecil
20 comments for “The Against the Day Deathmarch, Week 21”
Dr. Vitz
June 26, 2007 at 4:15 am
Finished – whew. Nice to see some familiar faces return and head west to Hollywood. I’ll try to be pithier soon. Just wanted to stake my mugnet claim. BTW – remember when cecil put a 30 mugnet ceiling on this thing at the start. No risk there.
Done and Done. Pynchon quickly ties things up and finishes with our good friends CoC. I get a life goes on sense as things calm down for the characters as they grow and raise families.
i’ll sure miss those sentences.
Done and Done. Pynchon quickly ties things up and finishes with our good friends CoC. I get a life goes on sense as things calm down for the characters as they grow and raise families.
i’ll sure miss those sentences.
Professor Vanderjuice – “Of course it was the Chums of Chance, not the first time they’d come to my rescue…But this time they had rescued me from my life, from the cheaply sold and dishonored thing I might have allowed it to become.”
Glad to be finished, especially before going on vacation. Glad to see Merle doing well. Glad to be getting a mug I dont need but will nonetheless cherish.
Thanks all for good comments. Thanks Cecil!
“There was music, mysteriously audible, tonal yet deliberately broken into by dissonances—demanding, as if each note insisted upon being attended to” (1080).
“May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the ‘imaginary,’ the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne, now carry only lovers and cheerful drunks, and music which cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night…” (1083).
I lift my future-tensed mug, which I see is filled with champagne, in salute to Pynchon, the Inconvenience, and all of you. Not so much a march as a dance, it turns out. I can feel myself missing it already.
Heurtebise, another of those Garcons de ’71, “there, but invisible.”
Pynchon loves his dysfunctional family, but he also believes in the concept of family. We see the formation of the Traverse-Becker clan that will reunite in Vineland as this book ends. And that family proves more enduring than the national family, communist family, and hippie families that infest that book. None of these families are perfect, but they all work one way or another. As Tolstoy said “All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.”
Looking at the line Steve quoted on p. 1080, I notice a couple of references to the other novels as well (we are told to draw a line at the end of V. and Thurn & Taxis figure often into Lot 49). I doubt there is much more to that than reader inspired echoes.
All things considered, the Inconvenience proved a worthy airship for this ride.
yeah, i’ll miss those sentences, too. i perked up considerably when we hit noir los angeles. but then. oh heck, the ending was gorgeous, too. oh veget-tariono, even the last song was the best. but i have a short memory, remember? well, i don’t remember. this was the way to do it, though. thanks for the company.
yes, that ending was lush….i am with everyone else–missing this voice.
so i’m trying to step it down slowly by looking at reviews, finally. and i read tp’s original promotional notes; liked this bit: “If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”
see you all on the trail again, i hope.
I’m afraid I was expecting Tunguska to re-happen in L.A.–I’m a sucker for big bang endings. I’ll miss the images, the sentences, but most of all the chums of cecil I’ve picked up on the way to mugdom. You folks are great companions on this type of journey. How many of us finished, Cecil? Can’t wait for the next one to start.
There were plenty of times I didn’t think I’d make it through the march. I often thought, as on the Quixote march, I’d end up in some mass grave with quicklime scattered over my decaying flesh. But now the scars on my book are badges of honor. I can take the flattened dustjacket out from where it has lingered between the copy of Legion of Superheroes and Astronomy magazine and reshape it reverently around my book. The logo of the Tibetan chamber of commerce is once again split, the letters of the title doubled–no, wait TRIPLED–through the iceland spar. The bent, but unbroken spine falls open to certain pages. Frank chats with Moss Gatlin about gunning down Sloat; Dally heads east for New York; Nigel & Neville drink opiated highballs at the premier of the Jack the Ripper musical about a musical; Lord Halfcourt meets an emmissary who talks like Elmer Fudd.
I’m jealous of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, who grasp a book as a four-dimensional entity. We humans struggleby means of memory through the interpretations of what each passage means, they would look through the experience as a gestalt to understand what the author was getting at. And if there was ever a book more suited to a fourth dimensional explanation. . . Perhaps AtD is a book that could be taken apart from it’s square-bound dimensions and re-assembled into a city the size of the sun. Or if it couldn’t, at least it would have the opportunity to try.
A few final thoughts. I’m now realizing Darby’s weird moan probably sounds like Bugs Bunny’s sound before What’s Up Doc? None of our heroes escapes the happy ending. Everyone finds the chance for heaven (grace) and is moving towards it. (Not just the dodoes are preterite, for those GR fans out there.) On the other hand, the world also ended in 1914, and they are living in hell. I guess that’s one of the paradoxes of life, that we are living in multpile overlapping worlds all at once. And trains seem to be able to go through the various aspects of the worlds if you allow yourself to become disconnected. I think, to me, this is a more mature book than Gravity’s Rainbow. Not necessarily better, but fuller. More the result of a life thoroughly lived. Who knows if he will write another.
Oh, and e, 1908 was the year the FBI was founded. Perhaps J. Edgar Hoover, that massivley macho cross-dresser, was one of those serpentine inhuman beasts at the center of the conspiracy, busting the heads of socialists and controlling our government for so many years until the Bush clan gained control of the CIA. Of course those countercultural hippies, the Clintons represent humanity’s last best hope. (Unless the ones we now see are counter-earth anti-Clintons drawn into our world through a void-window shaped like a certain blue dress.) Cheers all!
Computillo’s note went up while I was typing my missive. A theater in LA is hit by a V2 at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. I remember thinking how both books (almost) end in LA, as if it’s some sort of nexus for TP.
I’m stuck in a holding pattern on page 1039, but in truth I’m in no hurry to get this over with. I will miss the endless meandering adventures of the Traverses, Yashmeen, the Chums, etc. And since I have no expectations of a payoff there’s very little motivation for soldiering on at the moment. But maybe I will wrap it up in one gulp tomorrow.
When his post first went up, I was going to argue with Cecil about who was most behindest. But this week I finally got that Birthright of All Deathmarchers: a long airplane trip. So I’ve leapfrogged him, to about page 950; I won’t be done by June 30, but I will finish, which was pretty unlikely a month ago.
The couplings finally started to have some substance to them when Yash/Reef/Cyp and Kit/Dally were being compared and contrasted as Dark Side and Light Side respectively. I wish he had put some more effort into the sex scenes as character and meaning earlier in the book.
I find that, in the end, I’m glad I was so often lectured about minor countries and historical trivia. I’m a geography nut and a language buff, but even at that I was worried that P.’s obsession with the insignificant would bore me–never got to that point.
Granted that I’m short of the finish line, still: Cyprian is the character that I most would want to spend time with in public. I’d like to ask him about Britain, draw him out about his countrymen’s instincts and manners and thence how they contributed to our American decline. (Put me down for the redhead in private.)
My quotation of the day site came up with a fitting benediction from Lewis Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.” Looking backward, it’s been memorable; I wouldn’t have missed it, and might even do it again. Thanks to all for serving as the impetus to do something hard and for adding so greatly to my rewards. Cecil, whatever is next, count me in.
Just daubed my eyes and closed the covers. What a Beauty. Those last 40 pages or so, where everyone comes back and makes their peace, has babies, finds an Anarchist way to couple—it’s like Pynchon stepped into Merle’s time machine and showed us another option for the century, an alternate future of Life over Death, kids swarming the Inconvenience, not bombs completing their fatal arcs through the sky. Nice tip of the hand to Gravity’s Rainbow, too in that: “It is no longer a matter of gravity—it is an acceptance of sky.”
“Acceptance” seems like the tone & point (tone IS point?) of the whole shebang, the sheen of Apocalypse outgrown, the art now in imagining a future which, however fictional, still has its reality—its ghost-like claim upon the world—because we’ve collectively imagined it, redeeming the past from its murderous present. Which we did, together, for six months, like the Chums at their airship conventions, docking and swapping stories. I’ll miss that. And now we lift off to other adventures. Thanks.
A final(?) note. Scientists have found what may be the impact crate of the tunguska event. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071107-russia-crater.html
Although you know National Geographic was formed by a cabal of cartographers trying to hide several hidden kingdoms from the rest of us.
very interesting, captain. and it was an italian team that made the discovery (team leader: gasperini–wasn’t he a character in the book?). hypotheses, hidden kingdoms…from the look of things, i’d say you’re right–this isn’t the final note.
Finished – whew. Nice to see some familiar faces return and head west to Hollywood. I’ll try to be pithier soon. Just wanted to stake my mugnet claim. BTW – remember when cecil put a 30 mugnet ceiling on this thing at the start. No risk there.
Done and Done. Pynchon quickly ties things up and finishes with our good friends CoC. I get a life goes on sense as things calm down for the characters as they grow and raise families.
i’ll sure miss those sentences.
Done and Done. Pynchon quickly ties things up and finishes with our good friends CoC. I get a life goes on sense as things calm down for the characters as they grow and raise families.
i’ll sure miss those sentences.
Professor Vanderjuice – “Of course it was the Chums of Chance, not the first time they’d come to my rescue…But this time they had rescued me from my life, from the cheaply sold and dishonored thing I might have allowed it to become.”
Glad to be finished, especially before going on vacation. Glad to see Merle doing well. Glad to be getting a mug I dont need but will nonetheless cherish.
Thanks all for good comments. Thanks Cecil!
“There was music, mysteriously audible, tonal yet deliberately broken into by dissonances—demanding, as if each note insisted upon being attended to” (1080).
“May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the ‘imaginary,’ the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne, now carry only lovers and cheerful drunks, and music which cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night…” (1083).
I lift my future-tensed mug, which I see is filled with champagne, in salute to Pynchon, the Inconvenience, and all of you. Not so much a march as a dance, it turns out. I can feel myself missing it already.
Heurtebise, another of those Garcons de ’71, “there, but invisible.”
Pynchon loves his dysfunctional family, but he also believes in the concept of family. We see the formation of the Traverse-Becker clan that will reunite in Vineland as this book ends. And that family proves more enduring than the national family, communist family, and hippie families that infest that book. None of these families are perfect, but they all work one way or another. As Tolstoy said “All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.”
Looking at the line Steve quoted on p. 1080, I notice a couple of references to the other novels as well (we are told to draw a line at the end of V. and Thurn & Taxis figure often into Lot 49). I doubt there is much more to that than reader inspired echoes.
All things considered, the Inconvenience proved a worthy airship for this ride.
i began another book, one of my favorite authors, margaret atwood, and after several months of pynchon i’m going through i bit of withdrawal.
yeah, i’ll miss those sentences, too. i perked up considerably when we hit noir los angeles. but then. oh heck, the ending was gorgeous, too. oh veget-tariono, even the last song was the best. but i have a short memory, remember? well, i don’t remember. this was the way to do it, though. thanks for the company.
yes, that ending was lush….i am with everyone else–missing this voice.
so i’m trying to step it down slowly by looking at reviews, finally. and i read tp’s original promotional notes; liked this bit: “If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”
see you all on the trail again, i hope.
I’m afraid I was expecting Tunguska to re-happen in L.A.–I’m a sucker for big bang endings. I’ll miss the images, the sentences, but most of all the chums of cecil I’ve picked up on the way to mugdom. You folks are great companions on this type of journey. How many of us finished, Cecil? Can’t wait for the next one to start.
There were plenty of times I didn’t think I’d make it through the march. I often thought, as on the Quixote march, I’d end up in some mass grave with quicklime scattered over my decaying flesh. But now the scars on my book are badges of honor. I can take the flattened dustjacket out from where it has lingered between the copy of Legion of Superheroes and Astronomy magazine and reshape it reverently around my book. The logo of the Tibetan chamber of commerce is once again split, the letters of the title doubled–no, wait TRIPLED–through the iceland spar. The bent, but unbroken spine falls open to certain pages. Frank chats with Moss Gatlin about gunning down Sloat; Dally heads east for New York; Nigel & Neville drink opiated highballs at the premier of the Jack the Ripper musical about a musical; Lord Halfcourt meets an emmissary who talks like Elmer Fudd.
I’m jealous of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, who grasp a book as a four-dimensional entity. We humans struggleby means of memory through the interpretations of what each passage means, they would look through the experience as a gestalt to understand what the author was getting at. And if there was ever a book more suited to a fourth dimensional explanation. . . Perhaps AtD is a book that could be taken apart from it’s square-bound dimensions and re-assembled into a city the size of the sun. Or if it couldn’t, at least it would have the opportunity to try.
A few final thoughts. I’m now realizing Darby’s weird moan probably sounds like Bugs Bunny’s sound before What’s Up Doc? None of our heroes escapes the happy ending. Everyone finds the chance for heaven (grace) and is moving towards it. (Not just the dodoes are preterite, for those GR fans out there.) On the other hand, the world also ended in 1914, and they are living in hell. I guess that’s one of the paradoxes of life, that we are living in multpile overlapping worlds all at once. And trains seem to be able to go through the various aspects of the worlds if you allow yourself to become disconnected. I think, to me, this is a more mature book than Gravity’s Rainbow. Not necessarily better, but fuller. More the result of a life thoroughly lived. Who knows if he will write another.
Oh, and e, 1908 was the year the FBI was founded. Perhaps J. Edgar Hoover, that massivley macho cross-dresser, was one of those serpentine inhuman beasts at the center of the conspiracy, busting the heads of socialists and controlling our government for so many years until the Bush clan gained control of the CIA. Of course those countercultural hippies, the Clintons represent humanity’s last best hope. (Unless the ones we now see are counter-earth anti-Clintons drawn into our world through a void-window shaped like a certain blue dress.) Cheers all!
Computillo’s note went up while I was typing my missive. A theater in LA is hit by a V2 at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. I remember thinking how both books (almost) end in LA, as if it’s some sort of nexus for TP.
I’m stuck in a holding pattern on page 1039, but in truth I’m in no hurry to get this over with. I will miss the endless meandering adventures of the Traverses, Yashmeen, the Chums, etc. And since I have no expectations of a payoff there’s very little motivation for soldiering on at the moment. But maybe I will wrap it up in one gulp tomorrow.
When his post first went up, I was going to argue with Cecil about who was most behindest. But this week I finally got that Birthright of All Deathmarchers: a long airplane trip. So I’ve leapfrogged him, to about page 950; I won’t be done by June 30, but I will finish, which was pretty unlikely a month ago.
The couplings finally started to have some substance to them when Yash/Reef/Cyp and Kit/Dally were being compared and contrasted as Dark Side and Light Side respectively. I wish he had put some more effort into the sex scenes as character and meaning earlier in the book.
I find that, in the end, I’m glad I was so often lectured about minor countries and historical trivia. I’m a geography nut and a language buff, but even at that I was worried that P.’s obsession with the insignificant would bore me–never got to that point.
Granted that I’m short of the finish line, still: Cyprian is the character that I most would want to spend time with in public. I’d like to ask him about Britain, draw him out about his countrymen’s instincts and manners and thence how they contributed to our American decline. (Put me down for the redhead in private.)
My quotation of the day site came up with a fitting benediction from Lewis Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.” Looking backward, it’s been memorable; I wouldn’t have missed it, and might even do it again. Thanks to all for serving as the impetus to do something hard and for adding so greatly to my rewards. Cecil, whatever is next, count me in.
Just daubed my eyes and closed the covers. What a Beauty. Those last 40 pages or so, where everyone comes back and makes their peace, has babies, finds an Anarchist way to couple—it’s like Pynchon stepped into Merle’s time machine and showed us another option for the century, an alternate future of Life over Death, kids swarming the Inconvenience, not bombs completing their fatal arcs through the sky. Nice tip of the hand to Gravity’s Rainbow, too in that: “It is no longer a matter of gravity—it is an acceptance of sky.”
“Acceptance” seems like the tone & point (tone IS point?) of the whole shebang, the sheen of Apocalypse outgrown, the art now in imagining a future which, however fictional, still has its reality—its ghost-like claim upon the world—because we’ve collectively imagined it, redeeming the past from its murderous present. Which we did, together, for six months, like the Chums at their airship conventions, docking and swapping stories. I’ll miss that. And now we lift off to other adventures. Thanks.
So I guess in the end, Against the Day is a comedy after all.
And today, descending from a dirigible and gently settling on my dusty front porch, a mug!
A final(?) note. Scientists have found what may be the impact crate of the tunguska event.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071107-russia-crater.html
Although you know National Geographic was formed by a cabal of cartographers trying to hide several hidden kingdoms from the rest of us.
very interesting, captain. and it was an italian team that made the discovery (team leader: gasperini–wasn’t he a character in the book?). hypotheses, hidden kingdoms…from the look of things, i’d say you’re right–this isn’t the final note.