Still lagging behind the pack, but fortunately I’ve got two plane rides in the next few days, which seems to be the key to staying in this ‘un. In fact, if I didn’t already have those flights planned I’d probably have to come up with an excuse to go fly somewhere.
We’ve got a groundswell going for a wrap on Saturday, June 30th, which means slowing the pace down just a tad. Good news for laggards like me. If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs, this might be a good time to re-read and re-comment on the first 50 pages — sort of the AtD equivalent of fighting me with one 50-page segment of the book tied behind your back….
It’s a tricky maneuver, ending on a Saturday, but fortunately I’ve been slipping on my Tuesday-ness all along. Judo-style, my plan now is to flip that around and use the resulting momentum to our advantage.
This week’s entry is on a Wednesday. Next week, let’s meet on a Thursday. The following week a Friday, then the last week — hey presto! It’s Saturday the 30th. With all that said…..
Thursday 6/14: We dump the sand from our boots at the bottom of page 999, where “sod [is] giving way to shakes.”
(which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 999. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Wednesday, give or take)
Pugnax!
-Cecil
how i hate ‘fruit on the bottom’ of my yogurt. can’t all yogurt be smooth and creamy, or al least simple vanilla?
my posts have been deteriorating. i’ve been crying about how many pages i am behind. well, by tuesday i will be caught up. i give my word as a gentleman. goals, we all have them.
this western has turned into a spy thriller of some sort? maybe pynchon is paranoid that someone is out to get him and that is why he is so reclusive.
So is Andrew Speaker a Deathmarcher? That would explain everything.
In this stretch, I liked this, on Stray, “Her first rule became ‘Dont thank me.’ Her second rule was, ‘Dont take credit for anything that turns out well.’ One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do.”
On future Deathmarches, I agree with earlier comments. I read Bleakhouse awhile back and enjoyed it, though its long. Also, a Deathmarching friend, with whom Ive had issues but whose literary tastes I respect, likes Gogol. OK, I dont really have issues with him, and I dont know if he has good literary tastes, but he does like Gogol, I think. As for me, I think I will sit out for awhile. I want my life back.
Re the next ‘march, I’m sure we’ll wait until sometime in the Fall at the earliest. Summer travel and whatnot…..
Another thought, along the lines of the Vonnegut proposal, is a Philip K. Dick Deathmarch, in which we read a PKD book every week or two for 8 or 12 weeks. Certainly, that would do strange and probably permanent things to the brain.
-Cecil
a pkd-a-thon, kinda on the schedule in which he wrote them? i’d be very into that. he’s always a good read, but he gets more and more pertinent with every day. also, i too could do with a break; so much kipple, so little time.
one observation re ATD–every time pynchon cycles back to mayva, it’s with a sweetness and a depth i don’t feel with many of the other characterizations (or with the few female characters in GR). i take it as an expression of tenderness for someone he knows well, and i like that.
I hit this point on p. 993 in reference to the ceremonial arch – “the structure seemed to define two different parts of the City as incommensurate as life and death. As ‘Frank’ passed beneath it, it was seen to take on a ghostly light and to grow taller and more substantial.”
I was reminded of Takeshi in Vineland working for Wawazume Life & Non-Life. I think there is an important distinction between the division of life & death (two polar opposites) and life & non-life (one point & everything that is not that point).
Looking back, the book had a feel of being an American story and foreign incursions into it (the fair, FF’s visit). Now it seems more a novel about the world and America’s incursions into it. Arguably, WWI is the historical point when American moves from isolation to world player. I’ll toss out the idea that the process of that change is at least part of the theme here.
BTW – I didn’t really read last week – got ahead in view of upcoming exam preparation-grading-graduation activities, but I’m back with the group now.
Pynchon may be in Albania with our dear president, but I’m still in a lovely foreign country of another sort, which is by far taking center stage with me. I did rather enjoy this section, especially until we left Albania. nothing really sticks out in my mind elsewise about this section, except there is almost a sense of tying up loose ends. and I’m thinking more about the irony with which Pynchon addresses ‘anarchy’ or ‘randomness’ or ‘postmodernism’ in that he’s really insanely predictable, isn’t he? I feel blasphemous writing that. nah. and these transient relationships. and all the various additional vectors (railroads, explosions, war, gender issues, menages a trois). a veritable supermarche.
Page 922: Frank’s feverish request from Estrella for disenfectant…”as many tank cars as you can find. Plus pain medicine, any kind, laudanum, paregoric, hell, anything’s got opium in it, damn country’s in way too much pain.” Wondering why, now that we have 8-hour Tylenol and Advil P.M. over the counter, and plenty of Vicodin online, our country is still in “way too much pain.” Hmmmm….
P.S. Cecil: Cannot do a succession of Philip K. Dick novels, no sirreee. I may be relative newbie to you long standing marchers, but I have my standards. Yes I do.
Maybe it’s the break I took, but the 100 page catch-up this week felt more focused, less showy and picaresque, and more generously studded with Big Philosophical Statements suggesting where this narrative ship might be headed and why it needed all these languorous zig-zags to get there. Seems like Pynchon’s picking up the different threads of his story in the rush toward the End and showing us how easy it would have been for him to tie them together all along. But what would have been the fun in that? On the good stretches I start to think Pynchon’s trying to teach me why to be an anarchist. (How much of this novel, btw, has been like playing Anarchist golf?)
All the Traverses but Lake got satisfying airtime in 900-999. Most of them come closer to forming the True Love molecule they seem destined for; paths start to cross & re-cross, improbably but fatefully; previous rambles & misadventures resolve into semi-spiritual ‘remits,’ a la Cyprian in the genderless Gnostic convent. The Traverse boys too find some purpose: Frank’s back with the Anarchists, Kit finally takes a roll in the paprika with Dally, Reef’s a daddy, and as the whole world moves to war there’s a strange calm settling over the story. It’s like Europe—the planet—finally sees its choices: either binary thinking, or senses of space/time (premodern, nomad, tribal, Reimannic, Orphic, maternal, shamanistic, telepathic, Anarchic, mystically ‘bilocated’) that work “against the day,” resisting that forward push through history that’s moving us to permanent midnight.
“If the earth were alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness, then the ‘Balkain Peninsula’ might easily map on to whatever in this consciousness most darkly wishes for its own destruction.” (939)
vs.
“For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was.” (975)
Onward. Or something.
On page 963, Yashmeen says, “It’s what we were sent out here to stop. This must mean we’ve failed, and the assignment is over.”
I started thinking about all the “assignments” that populate the book. Everybody is off on some assignment to do something, working for whom?. assigned to go where?, to accomplish what? It’s always cloudy, changeable, uncertain, contradictory.
Then I started thinking about our assignment. How are we supposed to react to this thing? What are we supposed to take away? How many of the references are we expected to look up? Can there be any hope that we can keep track of all the characters? Yes, I can get to page 999 (probably soon…), but what is the real assignment?
Cookie:
I’m with you, comrade! What’s the real assignment? I’ve been asking myself the same thing.
When I’m feeling open and generous, I tell myself that Pynchon’s tearing down the ‘fourth wall’ of the novel to make me, the reader, a character within it, putting me through the same questionings, frustrations, and doubts about my ‘remit’ as my fictional counterparts. Reading the novel then starts to seem like a kind of education–like Pynchon’s not just trying to entertain, or impress, or impart his truths, but actually CHANGE me, working to get me to a place where I finally see the need of being an anarchist and abandoning all assignments, even (especially) the ‘assignment’ of following the plot.
The day, like a plot, moves in its linear fashion from beginning to end. “Against the Day” might mean–I don’t know, just guessing–learning other ways of experiencing time. Wherever I want to say ‘this should have been cut’ or ‘Pynchon’s being indulgent’, it seems like Pynchon turns the book around on me to ask: “Who gave you that remit? Why can’t you learn to see plot as a contrivance, in bed with all the other contrivances like history, nationalism, corporate control, colonial domination, etc. that threaten to destroy the earth?”
I want to be one of the Chums of Chance, up above the story, clear outlines, distanced and easily mapped. But it seems like Pynchon keeps wanting to drag me down to earth to be a nomad, wandering through the novel, learning to take the fleeting moments of comfort and humanity while moving without a map.
I’m not an easy student, and there’s something invasive about his method–a little dominating in its own right–but as we inch forward I find myself asking the same question as you, with the feeling it’s exactly one Pynchon wants me considering. And maybe I learned more along the way than I thought, b/c suddenly I’m not looking forward to the book ending.
Thank goodness you mentioned the Chums, Rodney, or I would have forgotten this tidbit I read in “Free Will Astrology” this week:
“In their translation of a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell write, ‘I’m the chimp of chance, the champ of chance, I’m a chum of chance and a chump of chance.’ ”
Coincidence? Survey says unlikely.
I am well and truly behind. I walked a lot farther on this DM than I expected to, but I’ve been slogging for two weeks now and certainly would have dropped the book around p.800 if not for the march. I blame my coworker for taking a two-week trip to China. No, it’s not her fault but I’m an American and therefore deserve somebody to blame.
Raptor, keep going…the 900s are much more rewarding. So rewarding, in fact, that the thought has crossed my mind more than once that I really might need to read it again.
Made no forward progress this week, but did have occasion to remember this passage:
“Dally had imagined once that if she ever found Erlys again, she’d just forget how to breathe or something. But having been gathered into the family chaos with little or no fuss, soon, like some amiable stranger, she was only looking for chances to scrutinize them both–Erlys when it didn’t seem she was looking, and then herself in one of those mirrors that stood or hung everywhere in these rooms–for signs of similarity” (353).
Rodney K. will correctly interpret this passage, quoted at this time, to mean that I just met my biological mother for the first time. And she brought a half-sister with her. There was lots of furtive–and not so furtive–scrutinizing going on all ’round, let me tell you!
Heurtebise
wow, steve–and how cool, a sudden sibling!
What a great synchronicity, So-Called-Bill.
Shame I completely missed posting on this extended march section. Who’d’ve thunk Cecil would be on time?
Just putting two words here’cause I’m not sure where the heck we are. I’ll post more if this is the right spot.