Still reading, still consistently posting late, still about 100 pages behind. But still enjoying the book too, and that’s something. A big something. And now suddenly thinking that yes, in fact, I too may someday sip from a dishwasher-safe “I Survived the Against the Day Deathmarch” mug.
I’m really enjoying reading all your comments as I catch up to the appropriate section. You guys are good company, even when you’re frozen in time.
By the way, speaking of ice and things that thaw, has anyone else noticed that we’re on track to finish just past the summer solistice? That’ll be around five months from the kick-off. And we all say: yoinks!
Tuesday 6/5 There’s a long chapter coming that doesn’t stop on a convenient 50 page line, plus or minus. So we’re going to try something a little different. The literary deathmarch equivalent of a triple lutz. We’re going to stop mid-chapter. How precise are our boots? Let’s find out on page 956. It helps that someone’s left out a cheery sign: “Welcome home.”
(which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 956. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil
it’s ashame we can’t finish on June 30th
it’s a saturday, but it’s dang good idea. And it’s not like I’ve been on track tuesday-wise. I’ll aim to chart that course.
I can’t help but think about the big question of is there an organizing theme here? My classic answer with TRP is the post-modern problem. Once you accept that language is based in personal and not absolute meaning and that chaos is the way of the world, how do you intellectually discuss the failjure of communication and this disorderly unkiverse in which we live? Pynchon’s answer is show by example.
Look at Dally’s thoughts on p. 903
“As if just having discovered a level of ‘reality’ at which nations, like money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable – the obvious example here being the immense population of the dead, military and civilian, due to the Great War everyone expects imminently to sweep over us. One hears mathematicians of both countries speak of ‘changes of sign’ when wishing to distinguish England from Germany – but in the realm of pain and destruction, what can polarity matter?”
The idea of naming things and ideas seems pretty silly in this case.
The discussion on p. 911 of Pera and the Deux Continents serves as a nice metaphor for our binary thinking. Reminded me a little of a discussion I once walked into among some fellow teachers. They asked me what continent Israel was in. I said Asia. A history teacher asked me why I thought that, and I said because geologically it was on Asia’s continental plate. She said that was not the right standard. The perfect Pynchon moment – labels are fine as long as we understand they may not be meaningful.
On p. 922 Ewball tells us “real nihilists are working for the owners, ‘cause it’s them that don’t believe in shit, our dead are nothing but dead.” Do you side with the people who follow your beliefs even if they are clearly the enemy of your cause?
In the end all the organizing forces in this book seem destined to fail – Vibe’s organization, the empiric powers pre-WWI, TWIT, the C of C’s controllers, even mathematical principles. And all those who favor a world without rules – the anarachists especially – seem to keep forming logical patterns and finding subtle forms of organization. The greatest failure consistently is the belief that one system – whether it is organized or anarchic – is going to explain things.
So the answer to the big question I started with is, why would you even ask? (hey, I’m Jewish – I’m allowed to answer questions with other questions.)
Reading Dr. Vitz’s comment about Israel and its bicontinality hit home this week for me regarding another location. I was in Maryland because my son was leaving to go to Kiev, Ukraine, to work for two years as a graduate school placement officer..he had spent two years in the late 90’s in the Peace Corps in Ukraine so this is a homecoming of sorts for him. As we were explaining the location of Ukraine to our grandson, the precocious 4-year smugly told us that Ukraine was both in Europe AND in Asia. Shortly thereafter I was immersed in the whole central Asia Captain Padzhitnoff narrative in ATD (somewhere in the late 700’s-mid 800’s pagewise) and ran across the Tschernobyl reference, which didn’t do my mother’s soul any good, since Tschernobyl is not so far from Kiev, and it certainly seems that the old “the more things change, etc. etc. “theme makes the book a tad depressing now and again. Once that moment past, however, I was able to totally catch up on my reading, and I must say, I have continued to appreciate the appearance of Cyprian whenever he shows up in the story, especially now that I can think of him as the Scarlet Pimpernel (p. 846). Sorry for the ramble here, but I’m totally excited about being caught up! I agree that we should all shoot for June 30 for the finale!
Hey Computilo,
I had the good fortune to travel to the Soviet Union back when there was still a USSR. I must say, Kiev is among the most fascinating & beautiful cities I’ve ever visited. The Ukranians we encountered were also incredibly sociable and kindly. Good luck to your son in his work there – there is a great deal to love there. Though I would also recommend a trip to Yalta for the beaches (and I hear there’s some history associated with the place too).
I get the feeling that just as we try to make sense of and find meaning in the book, the characters in it are going thru a similar exercise – trying to make sense of and deal with the chaos of the world.
“It was her old need for some kind of transendence – the fourth dimension, the Riemann problem, complex analysis, all had presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose terms she could not accept.. Now…Yashmeen wondered if she hadnt found some late reprieve, some hope of passing beyond political forms .. ‘This is our own age of exploration,’ she declared, ‘into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what weve seen. What are these ‘utopian dream’ of our but defective forms of time-travel?”
People as seeking their own transcendent paths to deal with a crazy world. There may be no right ansewrs, but to me it seems class consciousness, loving relationships and balancing out bad deeds with good ones get favorable treatment from the author, at least some of the time.
I can’t tell you how glad I am that the Gravity’s Rainbow experience conditioned me not to expect any great coherence to emerge from this book. This has freed me to enjoy it bit by bit and day by day without worrying about Where It’s Going.
As I said with GR, I don’t think he has a plan. I don’t think he meant for Cyprian, Yashmeen, and Reef to take over the book the way they have–it just happened that way. This is not classical literature, it’s jazz–far-out, freaked-out, drugged-out bebop. And I admire it on that level, for its sheer sentence-to-sentence brilliance.
Frank Black Francis once said, “I write lyrics to take up space on songs, and songs to take up space on albums.” And that’s the creative imperative in a nutshell: create a space and fill it up with something.
I think that Pynchon’s answer to a chaotic world is to create, keep creating, and hope the occasional moments of transcendence make it all worthwhile. I am reminded of this nugget from Ye Olde Virginia Woolfe:
“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
(Oh, and on a whole other, sentimental level: Nice to see Kit and Dally together at last.)
ok, let me first admit, only because everyone has been speaking of their world travels and i’ve mostly been jealous, and also wondered how in the heck anyone can READ on an airplane (me, i’ve got to dose up on several xanax before i can even get into an airplane), that I’M IN PARIS. and i’m loving it. and it’s my first trip abroad anywhere. and that i will turn 40 here. but also that i HAVE been keeping up with the reading. this book. and. well. i’m in paris and paris is by all means much more exciting than this book, so i don’t really have a lot to say this go-round about against the day. except i’m still reading it. and i must be enjoying it, but it’s hard not to be critical. when kit and whats-her-name get together it’s so anti-climactic. um. if i could focus more i’d speak further on the anarchism/sex/war hysteria tangent. really, i think the most astute line from this segment was when yashmeen tells cyprian “oh, you’re overthinking it all…as usual.” he throws one of those lines in every 50 pages or so just to remind us everything is simply random? and what a joke it is to try to imagine more developed trajectories as we go along (yes, i’m feeling the pain, there, but i think i got over this one several weeks ago). but honestly, that randomness somehow makes reading this book ever more a waste, which is a bit of a cruel joke. especially since the joy in the lines seems to have mostly disappeared. are you with me on this? someone argue in another direction. i am listening to the ‘it’s postmodern’ and ‘it’s jazz’ buttresses, and truly, i’m willing, but it’s just not enough for me. but anyway, i’m here, i’m reading it. and i’m still thankful for the company. love, from paris!
Shameless ‘just for the mug’ comment, except that I AM ashamed, b/c Del’s keeping up from Paris (happy birthday, Del!) while alls I did was fly to NYC for a few days and come home depleted, sticky, headcoldy, and unable to press past the 9 hundred-teens. Promise to be up to the triple lutz next week. See you all there.
Quick note with the longer one to come later. It is still officially Monday, 6/4 here, for another 40 minutes, and I’ve finally CAUGHT UP! Yahoo! And Massive congrats to Del for getting to the city of lights. How Exciting! Have fun, and don’t take any wooden croissants.
Thanks Dr. Vitz about your Ukraine comment–I hope to make it out there next spring….
Cecil: Just reminding you that it’s TUESDAY! Are we going to make it by June 30, fearless leader?
A big tome by Dickens is an interesting idear — that hasn’t come up before….. I’m also woefully under-read when it comes to oversized Russian classics.
Another way to go would be to look for something more in the 5-600 page range so the next one isn’t a 6 month commitment.
And then there’s the micro-march option. I’ve been meaning to read portrait of the artist and never got around to it.
Any thoughts on those options or others?
-Cecil
Personally, I’m going to need 3-6 months off from Deathmarches after this. I have fallen woefully behind on my TV watching.
Down the line, I will toss out again the name Tristram Shandy (sp?), which is something I’ll likely never tackle on my own. And what about the Complete Novels of Kurt Vonnegut Deathmarch?
i know the dust jacket says “a novel,” but maybe this is more like an honest science experiment, staying loose and open to new evidence, an investigation of time; and to explore on this scale, perhaps the book has to give up some of the satisfying certainty of a work of fiction….
there were many lovely things on this stretch of path. here’s a perfect rendering of a mortal–
“All he’d ever known how to do really, like Webb and Mayva before him, was move from one disappointment to another, dealing with each as best he could.” [929]
and of the mythic–
“Orpheus might once have sung it to Eurydice in Hell, calling downward through intoxicant fumes, across helically thundering watercourses, echoing among limestone fantastically sculptured over unnumbered generations by Time personified as a demiurge and servant of Death.” [946]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_Melancholy
I had meant to say something about the Orphic theme. Pynchon has made Rilke references in several works, usually to “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Dwight Eddins, in his book “The Gnostic Pynchon” describes Pynchon’s style as “Orphic Naturalism.”
I’m not sure what reference point TRP was going for here, but it made me think of many other aspects of his work.
On a Dickens DM – from the “scholarly” persepctive, “Bleak House” remains the essential read. That said, I would probably skip that march.
From the Russian novel persepctive, well, Dostoyevsky is the greatest writer IMO, but Gogol has a sense of humor (rare in Russian novels). I might consider a “Dead Souls” DM.
Let me add my birthday wishes for Del to the marching chorus.
In relation to So Called Bill’s comment, though I didn’t read GR on the death march, I felt the novel had some structure in retrospect – or at least that it had an exoskeleton. I was lost while muddling through the pages, but once I read it all, a sort of crystalization of ideas happened. I hope there is something similar with this one.
As as for Pynchon music analogies: there’s Ornette Coleman and then there’s John Cage. Reading AtD, I do get a little of that sense of a few instruments playing their separate lines, riffing off one another, and forming an impromptu composition. But I also get the maddening sense that I’m just listening to a word or phrase echo and feedback around the inside of my head.
Just to where I should have been last week.
Near random association: The mention of “a pipeline for illuminating gas” (904) brought Duchamp to mind.
And I miss the anarchists who used to so thickly populate this book. Now its mostly masturbationists? Ah, the “fog of self-pleasure.”
Rrose Ramòn Heurtebise, former baker, formerly smitten with Dally, now dalliance-free, c’est la vie
mme. selavy–saw that piece a few years ago; potent. also perfect for this book. thanks for refreshing my memory.
No Paris, no New York, just a bus to the Tenderloin and back for me every day. The straight social commentary speaks to me this week: “Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs….” The Pynchon jazz is tonic–maybe I’ll even go back and enjoy the math again.