The trail is thick, I say thick! with boots. Great to have such a rich collection of folks to share the journey with. And nice to feel like we’re starting to make some real forward progress.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the way that Pynchon plays us. He’s got a great feel for when he can bring on the thick stuff, and when he should throw us some candy. I remember Part II of GR starting beautifully (was it the Casino and the Octopus mebbe?). Like a reward for getting past the first 100 pages or so. Similarly, the first big stretch of Iceland Spar was a great run of “yeah — that’s why I’m reading this book!” Around page 150, my head started to cave in. I was reading sentences three times. Felt a little bit like I was back in GR‘s London with the rockets falling. And then right as the pressure behind my eyes started to build, we’re off to Yale, meeting the various Vibes, humming along with Mischief in Mexico.
Another kind of manipulation: Around page 167, as Yitzhak Zilberfeld began to lapse into a stereotype, I wrote in the margin: “is he trying to make us uncomfortable?” And yeah, I’d have to guess he is.
Don’t forget to search for “Steve Evans” in the W3 comments to find his hugely helpful fly-over of last week’s reading. You can also jump straight to it right here.
Tuesday 2/27: Let’s dry our socks out on page 232, where someone’s “pretend(ing) to lament.”
(in other words: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 232. Try 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…"
Strolling through Mountain View Cemetary this morning, I saw a perfect Pynchon name: Robert Snowball. (Or Bob Snowball, or Bobby Snowball; they’re all good.)
Lew’s cyclomite habit! The dynamite Lazarus!
Something about this particular plot speaks to me. I am reminded of those scattered last sections of GR in which we hear about the kids mainlining electricity. But the idea of jumping into the blast to get inside the shockwave as it spreads outward is totally reminiscent of the cause-effect reversal that runs through GR. It is seeming abundantly clear that the science of choice for this book is not thermodynamics, but demolition.
In my rapt attention toward Lew’s story, I forgot the whole section on the Webb Traverse’s untimely end and the town of Jeshimon. Fascinatingly descriptive place, that Jeshimon.
I find myself thinking about the names more. Pynchon’s names are always something of a mystery. They often suggest and confound meaning at the same time. Webb Traverse makes some sense as he is the center of the family that (so far) seems to link this story (as much as it is linked). Reef Traverse almost sounds like an Australian diving adventure holiday (though I do like that he is called “Reefer.” But Estrella/Stray really appeals to me. I find myself thinking of her as “Stray Star” which sounds to me like something from Keats or Shelley.
I read this section with last week’s comments in mind (e.’s and steve’s?) about the ‘broken family narrative’ linking so many of these plot arcs, which fits this week’s Traverse clan to a T. It may be the (IMHO entirely effective) domestic pathos that marks the 21st century Pynchon most clearly from his ‘60s & ‘70s versions, not that it was absent there, just—I FEEL for these people in a way I don’t remember doing in earlier works. Anyway, just about wept when Reed came to peace with his father and decided to become the Kieselguhr Kid: straight-up Stan Lee hooray-for-the-good-guys weeping. Fits too with the novel’s suggestion that individuals are really just nodes in obscure larger structures, but gives that notion heart. What’s the Kieselguhr Kid but the collective wish that we had one? And what if that wish did real work in the world?
Props too to the dandified Wildean cowboys, but they come into their real glory in London next section.
hey, i wandered off, thought it’d just be a little while, and then i couldn’t find my way back to the trail. glad to be back on the march.
Hey, where do we place our dibs for the various tarot roles? I sure want a stint as The Lover. The idea that the tarots have real-life counterparts or inhabitances goes back a long way, but my favorite version of it was Charles Williams’s _The Greater Trumps_. The Fool is Christ, seen only by a select few who are disbelieved by everyone else.
Every time I see Neville and Nigel, I wonder how they escaped from Hogwarts. Fops with stereotypical British–no, English–names; every town in a post-1900 work about the pre-1900 West seems to have a dandy, and leave it to Mr. Thomas Excess Pynchon to have a pair.
(There’s an artist named Nigel Neville online…)
Apropos only of a comment, not of AtD: Stan Lee had a cameo (complete with a spoken line) on last week’s episode of _Heroes_. Of course, he was driving the bus.
A thing that’s happening in the narrative, for which someone probably already has a better name, but which I’m scrawling “moment seen in retrospect” (MSIR) next to in my copy (such nice paper for marginalia-making, isn’t it?, though my pencil marks do smear a bit in the shutting and opening). Reef has one at bottom of page 212 (last full graf that page). Mayva has on on 192 (midpage). Frank maybe has on on 206 (looking into Stray’s face). You get the picture. Just jostling the timeline a little, letting some future into the present, leaning it up “against the day.”
On the whole, easier to keep oriented this leg of the march (than last). Like RK & others, I’m digging the “Oscar Wilde Influence” (N & N & TWITs). And I’m still collecting (have been since GR) those instances where Pynchon describes sound/noise–and the various devices we invent to preserve same (wax cylinders chez the comely ecstatica, e.g.). Another thing he’s good at: why we have ears.
I posted a fresh batch of “madeleines” to the site Cecil mentions in his headnote. But I won’t tax this woozy server with them here!
“‘Hours can be consumed,’ she pretended to lament, ‘by hatpin issues alone.'”
SE
Talk about broken family narratives! During the server meltdown/hiatus, I threatened Cecil in private about changing my handle to “Edwarda Beef from Indianapolis.” Although many colorful ladies have hailed from our fair town (Faith Popcorn, the Washington pundit and prognisticator is from Indy, and by the way, she does have a Pynchonian name, dontcha think?), I’m partial to Ms. Beef and her progeny this week.
“individuals are really just nodes in obscure larger structures”
Yes. I, for one, would like to see some of these larger structures.
I was sorry to see Webb go, but if he continues to speak with Reef, maybe it doesn’t matter.
Palindromic Orientalists! Good Lord!
i should have pushed for 10 more pages where he switches gears again. almost every section is a cliffhanger and i can’t wait to see if they all converge somewhere interesting. i don’t feel at all like i’m watching a dave matthews concert. i’m still pining for more dittany.
I never thought Id say this, but thank God the site is back up. At first I thought, this is great, I wont have to worry about what to post. Then, I started to feel guilty. They came for the website, but I was not a website, so I did not protest. Then, I started to suffer withdrawal, sending posts to coworkers, crazy emails about being willing to go as far as Mortalidad, but no further… Welcome back Cecil. Yes, I missed you.
Anyway, despite my best intentions and better judgment, I see 2 recurring themes in the readings:
Watchfulness (is that a word?) of people and things, past and present – Rocks as post-godhead that have watched travelers and times gone by, reacting to weather and predation (love that word). Reef reassuring his pa that the Chums of Chance are watching them. In prior sections, the ice and moon and Thing as watching. In this section, a trifecta of veils – the Traverses at Bridal Veil, the Traverse daughter with veil at funeral, and Lew and Yashmeen trekking alongside a vegetative veil behind which sits ancient London.
9-11 (with a nod to Raptormage). The Thing and its carnage. Even the discussion of the Kid and Traverses who I find myself rooting for. But the Kid aalso reminds me of someone else, targeting evildoers, acting on principle, not connected to the workaday world. And Reef’s reaction to the killing of his dad by vowing to become the Kid, so that maybe those pulling the strings wind up fueling the very flame they think are dousing.
Separately, I liked the connection made between the way detective agencies treated unresolved cases, and the way bankers sell of their high risk debt to hungrier operations.
i’m finding it difficult to make my way through these lengthy readings, and when i do, i find i don’t understand what was written. not enjoying it at all. i’m speaking of course of mr. magoo’s posts. in the spirit of maintaining a reasonable per household posting limit, i will end here, for now.
Bilocation
The [Vormance Expedition] Mission Document described “the present journey as being taken ‘at right angles to the flow of time'”–which is to say, it was a journey into “another, torodial dispensation, more up-to-date topologically than any simple disk or spheroid” (p. 128). I gather that is so because the fourth dimension, time, is always perpendicular–that is, at a 45 degree angle–to the other three dimensions.
This seems to fit together well with Hasting Throyle’s explanation of bilocation, “which enables those with the gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely separated, at the same time” (p. 143), and his distinction between Christian time–“a simple straight line from past, through present, into the future”–and shamanic time–“time spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which exist in a single, timeless instant.”
So far on our March we seem to have had at least three examples of “bilocation”: The first when folks on the Vormance Expedition slopped on the Salsa Explosiva: “The luxuriant world of the parrot on the label, though seemingly as remote from this severe ice-scape as could be imagined, in fact was separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes. To get from one to the other one had only to fill one’s attention unremittingly with the bird’s image, abasing oneself meantime before his contempt, and repeat “Cuidado cabron!” preferably with a parrot accent, until the phrase no longer had meaning” (p. 130).
The second when the Narrator describes Hunter Penhallow’s return to the island with the food he picked up at Narvik’s Mush-It-Away Northern Cuisine: “And in the ceaseless drift of the ice, the uncountable translations and rotations, meltings and freezing, there would come a moment, maybe two, when the shapes and sizes of the masses here at this ‘Venice of the Arctic’ would be exactly the same as those of secular Venice and its own outlying islands. Not all of the shapes would be dry land, of course, some would be ice, but, considered as multiply-connected spaces, the two would be the same, Murano, Burano, San Michele, the Grand Canal, each small waterway in painstaking detail, and for that brief instant it would be possible to move from one version to the other” (p. 136).
The third is Fleetwood Vibes’ dream of “some portal into another world”–until he discovered it was Queens–“but by the time I had that sorted out, it was too late” (164).
Fleetwood subsequent comment: “There are stories, like maps that agree. . .too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking. . . .It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything” (165)–can almost be taken as a commentary on bilocation. Come to think of it, it’s a pretty good description of reading as well.
Being extremely mugnet motivated, I will say I’m here, I’m catching up, and am happy to be along. I belong to an email group concentrating on having daily fun for the Lenten season, and AtD is fulfilling my quotient.
Looking at the flood of recent comments, I am re-reminded of how much TRP’s themes don’t so much repeat in different works as infuse everything.
On Rodney’s thoughts on family… there is no doubt a movment. In V., Herbert Stencil is largely on quest (started by his father Sidney’s work) to find the V. – the mysterious woman who may be the center of all 20th century violence and may also be Herbert’s mother and Sidney’s murderer. Not what I would call a functinal family. Of course, th idea of family permeates Vineland, from Prairie’s mother quest, to Frenesi’s rejection of familial values, to Brock’s ability to see 60’s radicalism as an attempt at protracted childhood “safe within some extended national family.” Weird to think the AtD version of the Becker’s might be the least dysfunctional.
On to Mike C’s bilocations… I’m also reminded of GR in which Pig Bodine saves his ship (The USS John E. Badass) from a torpedoing by putting Oneirine in the coffee, thus shifting the crew’s experience of time. As a result, the path of the torpedo and the ship transect in space, but not in time.
very glad the site is back up! i’ll get some comments along soon, but one comment is that this section got darker and more morbid (at times), and i loved it when the two ‘worlds’ start to seem like really different realities that are somehow intertwined.
Sorry about being a bit late, but my arm’s still sore from trying to heave this &?*$!@ book out the window. Why is it when his narrative calms down and takes a pill, I find it really tedious? Is it too many cowboys (of all stripes, but generally involved in breaking things down or blowing them up)? And it’s not just a guy thing, because I’m all over the Pinkerton man were his Lew more like his namesake, Lew Archer.
But then I read ahead to the twits, etc… MUCH more my speed, doncha know. Spiffing, even, what what?! 🙂
I suppose with a million pages, 70 or so … eh. Just a rub of the eye.
snap, ms. magoo. snap x 10!
i got a headache and it’s not from the book…concerns of mortality prevail..until next week..maybe
Jeshimon: love the scalding talk of religion and lawlessness in the same region; how the two converge as a business venture for souls.
in lax right now, flying to colin’s
Like the dynamite lazarus, the deathmarch has reentered it’s corporeal (er…cybercorporeal?) home.
And, like Dr. Vitz, I devoured the description of Lew’s shameful cyclomite habbit (Beavers of the Brain!) and the metaphysical implications of his explosive rebirth. Just a pawn of destiny, that Lew.