Week 9 and and we’re hard-charging through the Zone… Despite the relative quiet on the blog this last week, I count around 14-15 people out on the trail. Not bad at all….
Speaking of quiet, we’re suddenly down to only around five or six folks qualified for Grand Poobah mug status. And here I am, still flush with the irresistible urge to fling GRDM mugs across the country when this is all over. And so I’ve arbitrarily decided to modify the rules of this experiment thusly: Both Grand Poobahs and Big Poobahs will qualify for mugness. In other words, it’s a a thin slice of general amnesty — them what may have missed commenting a week or two, there’s still a way for us to get you into that mug. (So what’s the difference now, you may ask, between Grand and Big Poobah status? Well, for one, Grand Poobahs will find it surprisingly easy to get restaurant reservations at hot spots all around town.)
I’m trailing our target by around 20 or 30 pages — got to page 404 (v) last night. Still swooning from the opening Rocket Man/Potsdam sequences. And now remaining pages are starting to get thinner than pages read. And I’m starting to think about how I’ll miss you, you old sonuvabitch.
Next week: Meetcha at page 482 (v), you know — over by the “glowing black mudslide of nausea…” -CV
I have to admit I was getting pretty exasperated by the whole Pökler detour—it was going on forever and I wanted to get back to Rocketman and his adventures. But of course Pynchon knows best, and just before the turn it becomes clear how it all relates.
Two favorite sentences from this week, p. 404: “We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.”
the pokler section yields this crisp take on the human condition: “The fear of extinction named Pokler” [p412]. tidy–i like it.
but my current favorite in that section is the bit that begins “Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide…” [p419] and shapes up to be a chemistry-soaked, nightmare, stand-up routine. even tidier.
GRDM TRAVEL ADVISORY
Hi all,
Have been loving The Zone and thereabouts, but have been at a loss for comments or questions lately. Thought I’d share a funny travel experience I had recently, and you can tell me if it’s relevant.
Took a quick trip to NY last week and must have fit the security profile for that week as I found myself pulled aside for special screening both outbound and return. Having been removed from my bag, the cover of my Penguin edition of Gravity’s Rainbow clearly caught the attention of the TSA agent. Apparently blueprint diagrams of surface to air missles are on the watch list. As she flipped through the book in search of my hit list, all I could say was, “It’s a good book. Bit dense. But good.” That lame comment, and my inane margin notes, must have convinced her that I was harmless, and she let me be on my way.
So watch out there, people. Especially those of you reading the Penguin edition.
— A Harmless Rib
(Aside: Neil, once you commit the target coordinates to memory, you’re supposed to burn all hardcopy evidence.)
Every couple of years, I go through a phase of listening to music. I dust off the Walkman during the commute, slip CDs into the computer drive at work, fire up the ancient amp at home… This usually lasts three or four months, then I go back to my regular tuneless existence.
One of the great dangers of this “amok time”—well, the chief danger is that my family is subjected to me singing the party scene from La Traviata, but let’s not get into that here. One of the dangers for me is that I suddenly start making more and new semantic connections. Song lyrics remind me of movie dialogue reminds me of old philosophy texts and so on.
And so it was that last night, They Might Be Giants morphed into Pynchon.
Triangle Man, Triangle Man
Triangle Man hates Particle Man
They have a fight, Triangle wins
Triangle Man
The triangulator hates everyone; he defeats both the points man and the person man. We’re unsure whether Person Man is depressed, or a mess, or just feels totally worthless; but we can all agree he’s degraded and defeated. If Mexico hits Slothrop on the head with a frying pan somewhere in this book, I’ll sue.
You can Pok the Erd all you want; all it will do is throw oil and magma in your face. If you can’t make oilmagmaade, then sour grapes to you.
(Don’t even get me started on “my story’s infinite, like the Longines Symphonette, it doesn’t rest”. If They weren’t thinking of GR as they wrote that, they should have been.)
e. and Bill, you read my mind! Those are the passages I marked too. There are these moments when Pynchon seems to step out from behind the story and drop his own philosophy, which often looks less complicated than the narrative labyrinth that encases it. No less profound for that, just kind of … 1973. The They, the System, the Zenny mysticism of the Zero. No problem with that—there’s a 1973 inside me too. Just sayin’.
I also had trouble getting into Pökler at first, but in the end found his story totally convincing, and finally poignant (the ring!). How does Pynchon keep doing this? Making situations so far out from my experience feel “true to life”? Is it the empathy or universality or whatever we expect from great art, Terence’s “Nothing human is alien to me”? Or a skillful management of clichés? Take everything the average Joe knows about Argentina—Borges, gauchos, the pampas, tango, etc.—shake it in a bag with a few esoteric details (e.g. 19th century gaucho slang), and … Voila: the reader buys in.
Just wonderin’.
i’m gonna take “great art” for $1000, rodney k., because this stuff is reverberating all over the place for me….unless…unless he wants us to feel manipulated and paranoid. just. like. slothrop….
had a family emergency this week, i feel like i’ve entered pynchon’s novella, it prepared me. ha, i called gravity’s rainbow a novella, take that pynchon. approaching 400…
Pokler is difficult stuff. I prefer Leni to Franz, but Franz gets more time. But if you think back to Leni’s attempt to explain her mysticism (parallel, not series) and Franz’s fundamental belief in cause and effect, you see an important issue. Going back to his early short stories he set up “The hothouse vs. the street.” Either you live with perfect order which can stand no interference, or you except terrible uncertainty.
But Franz falls asleep at movies and has random meetings with his “daughter” so his cause and effect world is threatened by radical discontinuity – just like Pointsman’s control is out of control and Mexico’s random chance is eerily ordered.
Dr Vitz
not sure what to make of these order vs. uncertainty clues. sometimes i think pynchon’s nudging us toward a buddhist embrace of uncertainty, but then he takes such delight in a scene like evening on the anubis–an orgiastic rube goldberg machine that looks like mayhem, but reads like a chain reaction. control, manipulation, pattern vs. abandon, spontaneity, chaos. and then there’s the passenger quietly watching the night and the river from one deck up…
For the first time in several weeks, I’m actually on target page-count-wise
For a while there I was thinking it was shaping up to be an excellent week. Pokler was difficult at stretches, but after it was all over, it seemed like a fantastic standalone piece. A little pop-out novella stapled just off the center of the book. And then Enzian’s interrogation, followed by Bad Karma and the initial mayheam on the Anubis.
But then I hit the Bianca/Slothrop section.
Ugh. Ugh. Just when I think I’ve grown accustomed to the porn-factor. Ugh. It read to me like a mistake. Like in his effort to keep us shocked, to keep us from growing accustomed to the porn-factor, he finally went farther than even artistic license can justify. And then you finish that section and you look at the book and go: “what the hell are you?” And then on to the next episode.
Well, here’s hoping he has now hit his maximum perversion. Bring back the Rocketman! Or Pirate Prentice. Or Tantivy.
Or even Pudding, for crying out loud.
Oh, cecil, you are so insular. Keep in mind that for great swaths of human history we relied on breeding 13 and 14 years to keep the species going. Anyway, there’s a nice section in the Hyperarts page pegging Bianca’s age well within the realms of palatability. http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/bianca.html
That said, I’m only up to the Anubis part right now. I kept flashing on the boats of the dead theme that runs through mythology & here too. Of course Thanatz is a play on death. Is this dead Europe? I dunno, It’s 2 in the morning. I do think the whole slothrop /bianca thing is a doubling of the Pokler/ “Ilse” thing. (Will one of these girls push a witch into the oven? But now I’m waiting for the book to take off again.
I will say, that when I hit the halfway point, I certainly felt joy like unto a rocket at brenschluss. Now let’s see where I land.
And thanks to Raptor Mage for TMBG input. As the current greatest band in the world (although their last non-kid album bit it) I’m always glad to hear them discussed.
Hey, gang — still hanging but dragging. Now you’ve got me afeared of Pokler, but I’m enjoying the early zone, just caught up in accepting a new job and such…