Well, my head is spinning. I woke up this morning 100 pages shy of the target. That’s no good. And I can’t say I caught all the way up either. But here we are, 11:30 PST, and I’m on page 396, so that’s something. About 30-40 pages short. But back in the game, I tell ya.
And I was having good fun too, right up until page 394, when I ran into this: “You are a good man, but kind of disgusting, with all that hair growing out of your face, and you always smell like coffee.”
What the hell is that? I mean, how can I not take that personally? He might as well have added “and your name is Cecil Vortex.” It was all I could do to not light the book on fire. But I resisted because I’m strong like that.
In cheerier news, happy to see the Chums are right around the corner (in the rear view mirror for those of you on track). I think you probably know by now how much I enjoy the Chums. Should make for good reading tomorrow morning over…coffee. Damn you Pynchon!
Happy also to see new ‘marchers on the trail. Welcome! And delighted to see that Steve Evans has baked up another batch of piping hot madeleines.
Tuesday 4/3: I’m hoping to meetcha at the bottom of page 488 where, ominously enough, nobody’s talking “to anybody for a while unless they [have] to.”
(which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 488. Aim 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…"
Been busy, and made the mistake of starting another book. I have to pry the covers of AtD open and jump back in.
conspiracy theories: i’ve recently begun to believe that the ‘death march’© is secretly a vessle for hustling a number of unwitting people to log into cecilvortex.com and fall pray to its subliminal messages scattered about.
other dan: “secretly”?
-Cecil
Funny, I also took that thing about the hair and the coffee to be about you, Cecil. My guess is that Pynchon found out about the Deathmarch and traveled back in time to insert that reference. You should be flattered that he went to the trouble.
A semi-heroic effort has me almost caught up again. One thing that’s been keeping me going is that AtD often reminds me of my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy (R.I.P. Robert Anton Wilson) — epic scale, conspiracies upon conspiracies, whimsy and mischief and anarchy everywhere. Are there any other marchers with Illuminati in their background?
Tossed-off genius line of the day: “Duels were fought, lawsuits brought, all for nought.”
There’s enough material in here for three or four books!
I think my favorite characters are still the Traverse clan. The reunion of Frank and Mayva is fairly tender for Pynchon. Will Frank be able to get Deuce Kindred? What about Lake? Got to keep readin’.
One of the things my persnickety mind loved best about this remarkable stretch is the way the story’s starting to spiral back on itself: our Chums of the air go under the sand; Merle returns to his home trade, upgrading to movies (light + motion + time) from old-time photo-alchemy; the Aetherists update themselves into Time nuts; and the Traverse Revenge Narrative circles round to catch things through the eyes of Deuce and Lake. Even the Chicago World’s Fair makes a reprise as the junk carnival on p. 476. Captain Randolph caught holding dynamite, Candlebrow’s campanile being identical to Venice’s, and Lake’s fertility issue twinning with Linday’s desire to be married—those little links were just icing on the cake.
That’s all I needed to keep me structurally happy. The humor (the Candlebrow tornado), imagination (sunken cities and negotiating sand fleas), and Pynchon’s seeming inability to write dull line took care of the rest.
I would so hate myself if I wasn’t on this march.
Jumped back into the book again, and it’s back in my head fluttering away. Is there a catch-up week scheduled? Or did I blow one already?
Hey Cap’n,
No catch-up week yet. We’ll probably need one somewhere along the way, but they seem to usually cause more trouble than they’re worth — people sort of phase out for that week. Mebbe what I should do is look for a good opportunity for a 30-40 page week or two in the next month.
I’m finally feeling back into the swing of things. Still a little behind (over at Candlebrow U.), but that big push the other night got me within within striking distance, and the pages seem to sparkle as a result.
-Cecil
The Traverse’s family has become an object study in how things convert. Now Mayva works for the enemy, Lake is married to one (who is now a lawman), Frank finds no satisfaction in satisfying his revenge, Kit find shis opportunities offer no opportunity…
I’m a little ahead at the moment, so I don’t want to inadvertantly reveal anything. I will say that a prediction made by someone else here will come true soon enough.
rk: My theory has always been, I should go ahead and hate myself… I’ll beat the rush.
RaptorMage:
I discern just one flaw in that theory–you’re among the most unhateable persons I know. And I know a lot of persons. 🙂
The Deuce-Lake infertility narrative was quite informative for me, if somewhat troubling. I kept thinking about what cartoon characters Deuce and Sloat seemed to be back when they murdered Webb, and even when they first started in with Lake. I’m almost caring about them now….(even the ghostly Sloat).
A good week’s reading this. The continuing radicalization of the Chums, who more and more seem to lament “being used to further someone else’s plans.” Maybe they will be the ultimate anarchists before all is said and done. Even Randolph comes close to doing damage. Et tu St. Cosmo?
And a troika of memorable commentary (tender, mocking, tender?) on parents/teachers and their relationship to their kids:
Merle again at tears, this time as Dally leaves.
Linnet Dawes, still a local belle, still teaching school, but had picked up a kind of glaze, as if part timing now in more adult areas.
My favorite image so far – “All the time growing up,” Frank said, “you wanted to run away and join the carnival?” “Yes, and there I was with all o’ you, right IN the carnival, and didnt even know it.” And he hoped he’d always be able to recall the way she laughed then.
this week (and not quite halfway thru the book!), against the day really gelled for me. not sure how to articulate it better than saying i finally am really working with (instead of just trying to get into) the writing style, able to enjoy the story as a story, appreciate the nuances, etc. while writing some of the best and most engaging sentences/paragraphs/pages that I’ve ever read, he obviously wants to divert expectations, splice genre, and all that good postmodern garb. what a unique voice, though, sampler that he is. some random notes i made along the way: i think i’ll use the word ‘jake’ as ‘ok’ henceforth. that’s jake with me. i love that. as many wacky saloon names as people names in this book. the most touching moment in the book thus far (for me) was the enounter with frank and mayva on 471. all the wonderfully slippery but also often blatant allusions to events of our present century continue. the one that recently seemed especially poignant to me is deuce’s excuses for killing anarchist/terrorist webb – pynchon is really working the terrorist as misunderstood (or what kind of crazy idiots are we) angle in this book. last night i dreamt that i was organizing a calendar for myself (i’m an executive assistant, this is my forté) in which i could double-book myself in the future so long as i left a slot of time open previous (or past) to teleport INTO that timeslot for one of the two meetings (the other meeting i’d be taking in real time). calendaring with an additional dimension. it was pretty cool. this book is definitely influencing my dreams.
A rewarding week for those of us still around to see it: plot lines beginning to braid, one-sided characters gaining dimension, an all-over sense of being “in the thick of it” that promises to last a while. Some initial (initiating) labor feels finished with. And now some payoff, with interest. (But that makes us petty Plutes of meaning?)
The plotting is really pretty conventional: summaries and scenes alternating in a pretty seamless rhythm; the low-entropy blocking out of chapters as unified and discrete narrative material; the relative fidelity to character p.o.v. once it magnetizes (say, Lake in the last of this week’s chapters). So the “difficulty” is mostly in keeping up at the sentence level, keeping located at major break points (between chapters), and, of course, trying to follow the high-concept stuff.
Not to say I envy the person who tries to put all the “one days” (usually a Saturday, it seems) on a stable, linear time-line. Still, it’s interesting how the narrative maintains its forward momentum, despite the commitment to Eternal Returns and extra-temporal excursivity in general.
Oh yeah, and how bout that shift in cutting tempo for the two Deuce-Lake chapters we’ve had so far? Eleven, twelve sections to each of them, mostly quick takes. Creates a real different feel that the usual chapter of three, four, or five sections.
Merle and Roswell’s reciprocated engineer crushes on one another—sweet, no?
I was behind all week, only catching up on Sunday, so I’m surprised to have any madeleines to offer. But they’re there.
Thorvaldically,
Heurtebise (aka steve evans)
I can see it now: “The Petty Plutes of Meaning and the Extra-Temporal Mystery of the Mines.” (!)
Boy, this presses a deft finger against a feeling I’ve had but didn’t know how to express: that TP has his cake and EATS IT TOO–postmodern gen(r)e splicing (pace Del) and high-concept derring-do (Quaternions, anyone?) on the one hand, conventional novelistic pleasures on the other. I like very much the mix, even where form doesn’t always strictly follow function. For all the hi-jinks and extra-temporal nuttiness, so far I’m left more with a feeling of mastery than anarchy. Even though the anarchists seem to be the ones who have all the fun.
It’s helpful in some ways to be consistently a week behind; I get full use of everyone’s commentary as I forge ahead, and I come across images that are already old friends.
I felt a pang when I read this paragraph, thinking of my own aging process:
“It was an optical problem, I thought it would be completely reversible. but according to Professor Vanderjuice up at Yale, I forgot the element of time, it didn’t hapen all at once, so there was this short couple of seconds where time went on, irreversible processes of one kind and another, this sort of gap opened up a little, and that was enough to make it impossible to get back to exactly where we’d been.”
Hot damn! I’ve caught back up to the main marching force. So glad to ride with the CoC for a spell, even if they did go under the desert sands. This really is a good book for airports. But, unfortunately, my 737 bore scant resemblence to the Inconvenience…
that’s encouraging bradh. i hope to be back in the thick of it after my next plane adventure. for now, inching along, still enjoying it all, down to the tiniest of character sketches (like “Dieter, intimate with concoctions nobody’d even named yet”).