Until two days ago I was 70 pages behind, but a pair of flights got me (finally) caught back up. If you’re one of the many good folks stuck a bit back on the trail, let me just tell ya, all you need is a stop over in Houston (real or metaphorical) and you’ll be right back in the game.
In general, I’m finding AtD‘s kind of like Chutes and Ladders. Sometimes I move slowly. Sometimes I’m zipping on ahead. Occasionally I’m fumbling backwards, trying to figure out just what it was that I must have missed somewhere, somewhere….
This week I used a way-back chute to revisit the attempted hustle in Chapter 3. “At times there were too many cards to count, at others none at all were visible, seeming to have vanished into some dimension well beyond the third, though this could have been a trick of what light there was.” (23) That seems a fair description of the way Pynchon uses throwaway characters — a blurred sleight of hand designed to force us into keeping our our eyes open a little wider than usual.
One of the kicks of the book, I think, is that every once in a rare while all this frenzy leaves us with that Blundellian feeling that we can sense “how everything fits together, connects.” Sure, as with Miles, it doesn’t always last long. And more often than not, we end up “just back to tripping over [our] feet again.” (24) But that’s OK. I’m happy to stick around to see if some T.W.I.T. is going to pass around another batch of brain explosives.
Hope you all stick around too. While I’m required by law to love all the ‘marches just the same, I’ll confess between us that the commentary this go-around has been particularly swell.
Speaking of which, the mighty, the mighty, the mighty Steve Evans has come through with another invaluable batch of madeleines — the perfect way to flash the previous week’s reading into your lizard brain before ambling back onto the trail. And speaking of that…
Tuesday 3/13: Let’s meet at the bottom of page 335 and the glory of a “mean, nervous, scheming servitude to an enfeebled conscience.”
(which is to say: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 335. Aim to get near that target and add a comment by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
I regret to inform everyone that we’ve lost the Old Man. I mean, he’s still With Us, he’s just no longer with us. But then, it wouldn’t be a Deathmarch without casualties, would it?
This is really a leftover comment from last week.
Re: Rodney K’s mention of ethnic humor. I’m never sure what to do with TRP’s use of this. In many of his works, he does the sort of Yiddish humor Jews indulge in. The scene in Mason & Dixon at Mount Vernon smacks of black charicature. And several of the Japanese bits in Vineland scream ethnic stereotyping. I’m always a little torn between laughing along and being aware that he is somewhat too un-PC.
In other holdovers – I had meant to mention earlier the laugh I got fromt he Vulcan salute finding its way into the text. Forget the page – probably about 2 weeks ago in the reading.
Well, Cecil, You inspired me. I got caught up while on a flight from Indy to Maryland for my grandson’s 4th birthday. Due to snow circling, I had plenty of time to catch up. I’m actually playing the real Chutes and Ladders, but I think AGD is more like Candyland. But what it’s really like is a Richard Scarry book. Richard Scarry’s characters are stereoptyped, outrageous, and damn funny.
Cecil says keep marching even if I am what is to me woefully, embarrassingly behind. This march will be good for my character, since falling short drives me nuts, and catching up seems impossible. Here are two phrases from way back (week two) that I loved:
“deputy of Wealth”
“Tithing…giving back to the day.”
in rome, posting in case i’m not near a computer by monday.
I can’t believe it! Pynchon’s stuck with pretty much the same narrative arc since we left the Chums in Venice and Lew with T.W.I.T. It’s all Traverses, all the time, with nary a scene change from the seamy minetowns of Culurada. Got a wee bit weary of Webb’s progeny by the end, and sadly, Vibe Scarsdale’s such a celluloid B-movie fatcat that I’m hardly scared of him anymore, Pynchon usually being so good at keeping me scared, & keeping his bad guys in more obfuscatory shadows. But the sheer fun he’s having with the prose, that good ol’ fashioned authorly kind of fun where the lines push out so elegantly and effortlessly into other lines, studded with improbable imaginative details, that I hardly care what happens next, forget it’s a “deathmarch” at all, 30, 40 pages down in a swoosh and I’m ready for more. More!
Cecil: See some bands that begin with the letter ‘A’!
yeah, rodney, or he could just re-file “adrian belew”!
(thanks for this letter “A” on which to hang my magnet post. i’m too far behind to say anything substantive…although i’m still loving every bit of this book.)
(for those who don’t know what e and Rodney are talking about, I have a list of bands-I’ve-seen scrolling down the lefthand side of the site. I really should have gone to see AShe/DShe or whatever they’re called. Or Adam Ant. Or Aztec Camera. Or even Bryan Adams. Anyways, if anyone out there happens to remember seeing a band with me that started with the letter A, please shout out and put an end to this madness.)
(-cecil)
hey, there’s arcade fire–coming to a town near you!
the old man! a good skate…
Well, it seems like Dally was the focus of the passages I enjoyed best on this week’s leg: that bit about the tommyknockers, the really great paragraph devoted to her sexual education (with California Peg at the Silver Orchid). Glad to see there’s more of her tale forthcoming.
I’m with Rodney, both on the slight weariness that the Traverse Family Players are inducing in me and on the hyper-cartoonish depiction of murderous Scarsdale Vibe. But things like the gunfighter doomed to live in Butch Cassidy’s shadow dropping himself onto a settee with an emotional sigh, the stormy visit with Tesla: these keep me marching along.
Onward,
Steve
While I agree with the screen evildoer description of Scarsdale Vibe (you can almost picture Sidney Greenstreet with a Sniveley Whiplash mustache), I did find myself feeling some sympathy for ‘Fax when he & Kit met with Tesla. Fax is the perfect rich son, and his father hates him for it. Of course, Kit is the perfect example of the nobody who could rise in accordance with the Horatio Alger myth, and his father hates that about him. Whatcha gonna do?
And whereas I would gladly head to an Arcade Fire show if they were playing Milwaukee or Madison, I’m pretty sure the only “A” band to my credit is Asia (of which I am no longer any too proud).
Wandered off the path a little–but am back on now.
When I came across Darby’s exclamation (p. 246) thought for a moment I was in Casablanca: “Thundering toad-spit,” exclaimed Darby Suckling, “with all the spaghetti joints in this town to choose from, are you saying those dadblame Russians have come in here?”
wondering about how pynchon goes about writing, how and where he gets his ideas. thinking about this while using wikipedia quite a bit while reading this section which kind of dragged on a bit too much for me, especially in colorado. thinking about what character development means in a novel with so many characters, how adding new layers onto character can come to detract and defeat. or is it that he’s just not much on character? but anyway, reading wikipedia on tesla, finding how so many things mentioned in the entry have important play in against the day. i didn’t know much about tesla, tho i did watch bowie play him in the prestige. “many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, ufo theories and new age occultism.” he thought he picked up extraterrestrial radio waves in colorado springs, and tried to contact mars throughout his life. exacting revenge. made-up words (how many have i missed?) like the galandronome. oh, and have i mentioned how i keep thinking of stephen king while reading this? the stand, which pitted good versus evil, colorado being a primary setting in that book. the tommyknockers of little hellkite. seems to be a lot of strange gaps missing from the narrative.
oh and eugenics, which tesla apparently believed in. and weapons of mass destruction. etc. and now that i’ve read the notes above, particularly the problems with scarsdale, that’s sort of what i was getting at with pynchon’s character conundrum. there is so much caricature, understandably, yet pynchon seems to want to throw in these levels of character that differentiate–then throw in his method for introducing a new character which almost always includes a splashy description.
The Scarsdale Vibe section set a good backdrop for Kit’s desire to escape into the mysticism of Vectors.
Like Rodney and Steve, I was glad to leave Frank Webb’s quest for revenge and escape into the absurdity of Pancho the Galandronome player who trusts the good will and bad ear of the gringo hellraiser.
And it turns out the the only non-AtD reference that Google knows for “Galandronome” is review of Lyndesay G. Langwill’s “The Bassoon and Contrabassoon” from a 1967 issue of “The Galpin Society Journal,” which states that
“…flared brass bells were made not only by Austrian makers, but also by at least one British maker, William Milhouse, also by several Bohemian makers; and in Franci, too, the most conspicious French one being Galander’s Galandronome.”
Irrelevant? Maybe. Another piece of flotsam for the march? Certainly.
Odd, I didn’t see Scarsdale Vibe as Snidely Whiplash (melodramatic) or Sidney Greenstreet (suave and slick). The model has to be a robber baron, Carnagie or Rockefeller, crude but self-assured. Power and money have so protected him from failure that he has forgotten it is possible. Maybe Sam Simpson–the power behind the “Judge”, the baseball team owner in “The Natural”–except he’s a little too crass and public.
When we hit the “Jew” comment, I didn’t at first register another racist note. I was too busy registering the fact that Kit didn’t know what it meant to be called a Jew at Yale.
I am so slowing up to get back on track… I had to refrain from complaining about Wolfe Tone O’Rooney because that’s on p.371. (My complaint? Damn, man, I don’t know whether he’s pointing to Wolfe Tone or to the Wolfe Tones, but either way he’s skating on the edge of messing with my childhood!)
I’m having trouble not so much with character as with motivation. More and more all are aligned one one side or the other of conflict, but not for any idealogical reason. Except (maybe) Scarsdale. Lew Basnight, for example, switches sides, sort of, when he realizes who he’s working for, but he never seems to identify his new team. Is he even in the same war?
Also, I guess I’m the only one, but I could spend the whole book with the Traverse clan.
“thundering toad-spit” and a toast of “red blood, pure mind” gives me fodder for many occasions. I’m plugging away but a bit behind still.
Debra
bradh, i missed that there was an actual non-pynchon google reference to galandronome. why am i disappointed by that? i think i’ll picture pynchon sitting somewhere creating these false references and floating them out into the aether…
I’m a bit fed up for the reasons so eloquently listed above, as well as with the teeth-grindingly knowing and smug tone of the Narrator (narratus omnipotippatamus).
I think I’m still here because of the Aztec Camera reference. Oh, Roddy, had I only seen you live, back in the day.
Back in the day.
I thought I was catching up. I’m at about pg 250. Looks like I’m about 85 pgs short. Had a nice chat with Cecil over Mexican food about humanity’s love of sub/extra-human creatures to blame IT all on. I just was perusing an old Pogo Possum book, where the Turtle is scared by a comic book story where they goes to Mars & brings back Martians what help dee-stroy the whole Earth. The porcupine replies contemptuously, That’s ridiculous–as if we needed their help.
Perhaps it’s me, but I’m getting a little tired of overarching conspiracies to explain everything. Granted, there are more things on heaven & earth. But as I’ve said before, I think the are is a bit mined out.
I AM enjoying the story. (I personally like following the Traverses. To me it’s the heart of the book so far, and a time & landscape that seems genetically familiar & worth exploration.) There’s plenty of drugs, but I’d love a little more sex & rocknroll.
As far as the racial stereotyping that he dabbles in so often, it’s probably me, but as one of our societally currently forbidden topics, I think it’s fair game for him to muck about in. I trust him more than I do some of our PC crusaders.
A little note about the Star Trek joke. I’d heard in an interview with Nimoy that he lifted it from a semi-secret Jewish blessing he peeked at in his synagogue. That it really DOES mean a wish for long life & prosperity. Still fun to read. Anyhoo, See ya next week.
haven’t seen mr. magoo’s post to comment on, and not having read up to the alloted number, i am at a loss for words. but since cecil was so generous to allow a tuesday morning post, and kind enough to let me know, here it is. god speed…
On the fence about pressing on, and a couple weeks behind when I got on a plane and read, “But its still a fool’s bet and a mug’s game, and you might not have the will or the patience.” As with much of the book, Im not sure what that means exactly, but he said “mug” and the next thing I know, Im caught up.
One thing I do know, however, is A bands. Air Supply anyone? Thought so.
wow. mind-numbing. frivolity. looking for the light. neither blinded nor completely lost. just sort of bored. maybe if/when i catch up i’ll share some of the enthusiasm here 🙂
I’m really late so this may not count. I’m still abotu 100 pages behind but am working my way through!
Two examples of TRP narrative technique:
From straight narration to possible interior monologue back to narration; the description is of Frank on his way to the Little Hellkite assay office (p. 297): “The little Basin swung into view. He trotted on in through the scatter of cabins and sheds, whose boards were all ragged lengths owing to having been dragged up here crossed over mules’ backs, arriving ground down a foot or more shorter than when they’d left the yard in town and bleached in all the sunglare subsequent, till he found the assay office.”
Self-reflective omniscience to possible interior monologue; the paragraph begins a new section (p. 322): “Not a word from any of the Vibes about his father, not even from Colfax–no condolences, inquiries as to Kit’s current sate of mind, nothing like that. Could be they believed Kit hadn’t found out yet. Could be they were waiting for him to bring it up. Could be they didn’t care. But there was the other possibility, growing more probably the longer the silence continued. That they knew all about it, because–but could he afford to pursue that line of thought? If his suspicions proved to have anything to them, what would that oblige him to do about it?
When Scarsdale Vibe speaks, I hear the voice of Mr. Burns, from The Simpsons. Especially when Vibe says things like, (pg. 332) “What happened to us, Foley? We used to be such splendid fellows?”
I keep waiting for Smithers to answer.