Almost 2 months in (!) and on the one hand, bodies are droppin’. On the other hand, we have something like 17 or 18 folks still with us, which is certainly a record for this deep into the journey.
I think RaptorMage is right when he says its the nature of these DMs to feel impossible. We’re looking for books that aren’t page turners and then we’re reading those books slow. It’s a challenge for sure. The one book in the series that really flipped itself for me was Pale Fire, and that one almost felt like we were cheating.
I remember in Book I of Don Quixote feeling like it was just going on and on and slipping away from me. But Book II picked up and good Lord the ending of DQ was beautiful and worth the trip.
With Gravity’s Rainbow, there were points when I was downright angry with Pynchon. And the last 20 pages still sounds like dogs barking to my brain. But there are so many parts of that GR that I’m glad I experienced. With AtD, I’m still enjoying the individidual segments. I’m still not pulled to pick the book up from the shelf. I’m still, unfortunately, about 40 pages behind. (Ack!) But I’m still hanging in there, watching as old pals (Merle, Dally, Kit, Vibe) come back into play, as a few characters start to become borderline real. Maybe at the end it’ll add up to less than the sum of its parts. Maybe it’ll rise to some shockingly coherent crescendo. I’m game to find out.
Doubt ye not the Week-8-summarizing skills of so-called “Steve Evans,” whose madelienes await ye here.
Tuesday 3/27: Let’s hop, and/or skip, and/or jump on over to page 428, where someone with a silly name is leaving “the Mysteries of Time” to others.
(in other words: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 428. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
(I miss) Pugnax!
-Cecil
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
I seem to have forgotten how to read.
My (bad) habit these days, seems to be catching something from the last week that I want to comment on after we start the next section. So (warning – somewhat self-important trip to follow)…
I admit that what I see with regard to limits and possibilities is my particular hobby horse (well, Pynchon does drop that phrase about “there is the moment and its possibilities” into GR). But my dissertation topic was actually analog and digital imagery in Pynchon and my main argument was that he was not setting them as polar opposites but as necessarily amalgamated. While he always sets us up to see the increase in entropy and the limits of the cattle stockyard, he’s always showing us that the choice isn’t one or zero – it’s seeing only one & zero or seeing the infinite number of numbers between one & zero.
I also agree with Mr. Magoo that the comments in this group either make me nod in agreement or think in a new way – and have done so for all the Deathmarchs on which I have marched.
I seem to be falling behind more and more. But i will soldier onwards. My reading here seems to be in inverse proportion to the amount of writing I’m doing. On the other hand, I did make the maistake of picking up Harry Potter 6 again (need to reread before DH day) and that book definitely IS a page turner. Now I just need a time turner. (But with my liuck it would probably just shunt me off into a different direction.)
See some of you at Wilmotts.
I will post a little more substantial later, but…
Unlike so many others, I have not previously had a “favorite” Pynchon character name. I was fairly taken with Ruperta Chirpington-Groin–how can a guy dislike a woman with a name like that?–but no more so than half a dozen others.
But Dwayne Provecho? He’s my man. I want his name to turn up in my life, treason and all.
i’m still up to date officially. i’m 2 pages into this weeks reading and looking forward to finishing iceland spar. my bookmark is looking cuirously agressive.
i’ve only left the book at my apartment 3 or 4 times, it’s become a presence of sorts and although ATD is usually by my side i only seem to be able to devote small stretches at each sitting before i need to close it up until another time. i’m definiately enjoying this one, i feel like i’m not as much in the dark as any of the other marches i’ve done but it’s still slow going and i’m wondering if it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes my brain hurt after an hours effort. does the death march intimidate me unnecessarily? i’m recalling a comment pre-march by someone i didn’t recognize that noted you could sail through ATD. i’m not having that experience but i’m enjoying reading each sentence so screw that guy.
“I don’t know ‘nothin ’bout ‘no dynamite.” I’m currently trudging through Mexico with the Kieselguhr Kid as envisioned by Flaco. Recent reading also reminded me that I had read The Temple of Music by Jonathan Lowy which is a novel about Czolgosz and the McKinley Assassination. All you marchers who can’t get enough anarchy should look it up. I’m wondering whether Czolgosz references are going to continue to pop up in ATD. Now that guy was some anarchist.
I was reading and my wife asked what it was. I showed her the cover and said, “the latest deathmarch.” She asked, “Is is any good?” and the answer that leapt to my lips had to become a DM post.
Pynchon ejects some of the most wonderful phrases ever written in English. I was just yesterday marvelling over Chick feeling “as if positive expressions of silence and absence were being deployed against him”. He writes things that make you see not just the character and setting but all of life in a different way. Another for me was “at the edges of sleep’s blessed vegetable patch.”
And, at the other end of the scale, he constructs among the best epics written in English. Many people could produce 1,000 pages of story, few can make the whole thing worth printing and binding, and fewer still can make you want to absorb it all and wrestle with it and rage against the parts you enjoy and so much more.
But in between, I despair. A long scene, let alone a chapter, he simply cannot finish without some measure of illogic or gratuitous shock. I have no problem with the laws of physics being somewhat different than in my dimension, but stop wasting my narrative time. Stick in a louche character just because you’ve promised yourself you’ll use that word a dozen times before the book is done? Why not. Have a parrot make observations that in truth belong to a shaman, or at least a layabout in a four-foot sombrero and woven blanket? Hey, whatever.
Separately from all that… When he represented the World Trade Center as a frozen-in-Arctic monster burning the city, I thought the message was almost too bald, too bare. But to say that the mysterious people lurking behind all things 1903 are actually time travellers, “seekers of refuge from … a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty–the end of the capitalistic experiment” feels to me like pulling his punch. I wouldn’t want Pynchon to step in front of the proscenium, but by rattling it in this generic way he seems to be making noise for noise’s sake. In a book clearly designed to advance the Anarchist cause, would a slightly more pointed criticism be so far out of place?
I just stumbled upon your deathmarch. Is it too late to pipe in? I’ve been reading Against the Day since sometime in January. I just finished a side trip looking up the Stony Tonguska event of 30 June.
Ditto to drplacebo. Am in Tunguska as well. Felt an urgent need to google “colfax vibe” to try and cipher out the Pacific Coast Leagure reference, but 2am brain still can’t connect to S. Koufax.
A-and so anyway, would love to join you all.
drplacebo and mm — absolutely — welcome aboard! If you’re curious how this all works, just drop me a line at vortex@mediajunkie.com (you can also find info by going back to the start of the ‘march).
The gist is, new threads posted on Tuesday (usually end o’ day), aim to post once (or more) a week. Avoid spoilers re info ahead of that week’s target. Finish book. Rest brain.
Glad to have fresh feet on the trail,
-Cecil
My new favorite section – P. 376-383 Frank’s “prison” experience. The new running theme seems to be whats going on under the earth. Be it mining, facing the tommyknockers, or some sort of imprisonment (and let’s not forget travel!) – something is going on with this. Maybe the frontier has reached its limits, but we have barely begun to search beneath the earth’s surface.
Favorite unused acronym: from p. 411 “Finding of Unusual Circumstances Questionnaire” or the FUCQ, I assume (reminiscent of Mucho Maas’s radio station – KCUF). I’m not sure what to make of the CoC sections at the end. Time travel? Time immigrants? But there’s Pugnax guarding the Inconvenience at least.
Suggestion to Cecil for new masthead quotation:
p. 426 “new elements analogous to vortex-formation would enter wave history”
Honestly – I really enjoyed this week’s reading. Onward to the Bilocations!
My regularly scheduled comment was interrupted by one of the most remarkable narrative arabesques I’ve ever read—pp. 418-424, where the story pulls itself inside-out like a glove, wiggles its fingers in the lush oddities of the Marching Academy Harmonica Band, which bears a genetic resemblance to that family of other mysterious organizations moved by the promptings of inscrutable Commandants (T.W.I.T., the Chums of Chance, Traverse’s Union, Lew’s Anarchists, the ill-starred Iceland expedition, Vibe’s multifarious expeditions and enterprises, the unsettlingly timeless Time Travel Conference, etc.), then snaps itself back to shape over the Inconvenience and its murky pursuit of the Sfinciuno Itinerary.
The proxy idea that governs this section—the Chums as stand-ins or patsies for some grimmer, less innocent Chums—has been on the bubble for a while. Reed and Frank as proxies for the Kieselguhr Kid; Madame Eskimoff as mediumistic proxy for the dead; Foley as Vibe’s Civil War draft proxy; Merle as proxy father to Dally; Kit as proxy son to Vibe, und so weiter. Even those vast underground shadow populations we keep getting glimpses of suggest themselves as a kind of proxy society for the surface world (or vice-versa.)
What Pynchon does with that idea here though, where Time goes off the rails and the present stands revealed as proxy (patsy?) for a much darker future, and where the Chums become essentially proxies of themselves, pretty much bilocated my mind: half of it’s fried, the other half’s rarin’ to be delivered into the next section.
P.S. Steve, thank you for the steady diet of madelines, and for declaring your love for Dally. Does this mean we won’t have to duel for Yashmeen Halfcourt?
P.P.S. RaptorMage & Del, your views of the landscape these last couple stretches especially have helped me a lot with mine.
P.P.P.S. e., thanks for the reminder of life inside the Rainbow!
ah, so i suppose THIS STUFF is what people mean by pynchon. or pynchon means to his cult and otherwise. all i can say after reading this brain-pinching stretch is i was happy to be out of colorado. it got fun with frank in mexico. but the nose-hairs and boogers in the harmonica academy were… ??? a brilliant move to move me further toward the brink of insanity. on to bukhara.
Yikes! I’m about 100 pages behind, but still plugging away at a rate of 3 to 4 pages/day.
Debra
…ferally purring stridencies passing overhead… (404)
It’s that “stridencies” that gets me. Le mot juste is the one you can’t have expected, nor, once it’s there, wish otherwise.
The Hook extraction one paragraph later made me laugh, once for real, and again in homage to a cheap trip that works. The silly sublime.
Rodney on proxies made my (against the) day. And Raptor Mage, I should say your very name drew appreciative “ahs” the other night when I was talking about the deathmarch with some envious fiction writers.
On the “is it any good” front, the whole time I was reading GR (and it took me forever), I was so comically unable to respond intelligently that my partner delighted in asking me every few days, just to drink in another installment of the spectacle I’d make of myself in answering. Ah, love!
Oh, and welcome to drplacebo and mm!
Pugnaxiously,
heurtebise, aka so-called Steve Evans, baker of madeleines
had to look you up, heurtebise, and now i am wishing my memory could be refreshed for the pages i haven’t yet read. well, perhaps as rodney describes, if the present is proxy for the future, the unread pages can be accessed somehow, oh if i could only find the key (other than, you know, reading. every. day.)
for now, i like this description of the nature of the crime: “the invasion of Time into a timeless world.” [223].
or is that simply a description of reading a great book…on a schedule???
There are definitely times when I fell that I am against Against the Day. Or that it is against me. But I keep reading. Why? Do I think it will make me smarter? Or is it that Im too far into it to quit now? That I must keep reading as alter Magoo so that the real Mr. Magoo can achieve his destiny? Or that finishing the book will finally earn me the affection of Cecil Vortex that I so clearly crave? When I am most honest with myself, I think I read because of the promise of a mug that I clearly do not need. This gives me pause.
Little ditties I enjoyed:
“..they were hit by a polyaromatic gust, as if exhaled from the corrupted lungs of Depravity herself” (why a she?)
Smegmo – “… the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats”
“a technique learned years before in Japan, among the Zennist mystics of that country.. known as ‘just sitting.'”
Chums “mustnt jeopardize a perfect record of doing as youre told. Sheep can fly too, after all.”
“left the Mysteries of Time to those with enough of that commodity to devote to its proper study.”
Still catching up, but this line on p353 caught my eye; a little detail from Dally observing her mother, who
“…kept her hair in a Psyche knot, out of which the less governable tresses continued, with the day, to escape.”
Nice.
Still in Colorado, but actual people are having semi-normal interactions and I’m enjoying it. Who else could be a better Conscience of Telluride than Oleander Prudge?
Hooray! Pugnax is back! And he’s a Buddhist! Cecil: The image of Pugnax on the balloon, tail wagging, waiting for the chums (late 300’s; early 400’s in pages) is magnet design perfection!
Reading this after noon the phrase “Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats” sent me scurrying to my computer, only to find that Mr. Magoo had beat me to it. Damned Mr. Magoo.
But there, Cecil, you have your obvious next masthead. Unless you prefer, from the same page (407), “endless quagmires of the metaphysical.”
Meanwhile, for anyone who hasn’t gotten yet to the occurrence of the Latin phrase “Imum Coeli,” I will save you the trouble of looking it up for yourself:
“In astrology, the Imum Coeli (Latin for “bottom of the sky”), IC, is the point in space where the ecliptic crosses the meridian in the north, exactly opposite the Midheaven. It marks the fourth house cusp in most house systems (this is reversed in the southern hemisphere).
“The Imum Coeli is said to refer to our roots and also to the least conscious part of ourselves. It symbolizes foundations, beginnings in life, what may have been experienced through parental inheritance and homeland influences, need for security and relationships with the home and family life. It also may describe the circumstances that we will encounter at the end of our lives. Because this house was the most distant point possible from the visible part of the horoscope, Hellenistic astrologers considered the IC to be the home of the underworld, or Hades.”
SCB and Dr. V: re the tagline, those are excellent candidates all. I have to confess that I’ve gotten sort of attached to being like some Lloyd’s of the high spectrum. I know I’ll have to let go soon. But not without tears…..
-Cecil
I’ve finished the book, I live off Piedmont Ave and want to connect with this local group. I have questions and comments.
1) How come no reviewers talk about Hunter Penhollow?
2) or Cyprian Lakewood?
3) Anybody thought about reading Pynchon in Chronological order? Not that chronological order this one; Mason/Dixon, Against the Day, V, Gravitys Rainbow, V(ll), Lot 49 and Vineland. Since he hasn’t written directly about anything post 1984 I think there IS another book to come.
4) Did you know there is an Oscar Wilde poem that mentions “Against the day” and Cyprian in it? Now that’s a bg coincience.
hi fluent_thinker. you’re about 600 pages ahead of us, so you’re absolutely welcome, but be gentle and aim to keep comments to what we’ve read ifn you can.
I like your idea of reading P. in time-sequence. We read GR as our first deathmarch. Of the rest, I’m especially drawn to (finally) tackling V some time in the not-too-distant, if only because years and years back a teacher of mine (a brilliant fellow who looked a little like Doc on the Love Boat, but that’s another story) gave a spellbinding lecture on the book. OK, not quite spellbinding enough to get me to read the book that semester. But still, very very spellbinding.
-Cecil
It’s pee-culiar, but I can’t seem to get my assignments in on time. If only I had a time machine… Liked the whole ghostly, sci-fi Chums of Chance alternate universe thing. Such a breath of fresh air from the galloping cowboy pee-party of the previous chapters.
I actually welled up when Deuce/Sloat/ Whoever-the-fuck got blown away by Frank, I was that happy.
Boys. Hmmph.