OK, so it’s a Thursday and I’m yet I’m not late posting. I love this new system! Now we put our two knees close up tight, we swing them to the left and then we swing them to the right. Can it be done? Can. It. Be. Done? (And by “it” I mean, can we continue to lurch our deathmarch-posting-days over to the right, so as to land on Saturday 6/30?) I think Van Hagar put it best when they observed: “Only time will tell if we can stand the test of time.”
Friday 6/22: Shall we meet at the bottom of page 1039? “Thought you’re gonna ask.”
(which is to say…. please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 1039. 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
Visiting some of old friends from earlier in the novel, but back in the states. Hell, even moving westward. And the Chums of Chance have found some folks to get chummy with. Well, post-war Europe is a new ballgame. The old powers don’t have much power and the USA is on the rise. And as film rises as the new medium, the story moves to California.
Though this be madness, there is method in it.
today i get the feeling i’m reading a warped version of a michener novel. not sure what that means. but i did love whiling away time on those big bricks when i was in junior high school. they just seemed to meander, gave the impression that you were being fed some significant history when all you were really getting was a soap opera. i can’t remember if michener was preachy. was he? what pynchon does do enjoyably well is lurk around the big issues from very strange vantage points. does there need to be a point? i’m not a retainer of historical data, i don’t remember much of anything, which has been a significant obstacle for me, reading this book. but i am often (i used to say always) curious. long live capitalism. in tandem these days i’m reading cormac mccarthy’s ‘the road’ – just a few pages at a time because that’s all i can take – but what a gripper! something ‘against the day’ definitely isn’t. you think oprah and pynchon are talking these days? noop. it wouldn’t matter. i guess anyone can be cryptic, characterless, endlessly anti-climactic, throw in a red herring or three, say absolutely nothing, spend eons doing so, and be enjoyable. but there’s a fine line somewhere. for example, ‘la vie en rose’. positively excruciating!
I’m a bit behind this week, but creeping up on that milestone four-figure mark. Nice to have Gunther von Q. back in the mix, and running a coffee plantation, no less. Maybe that’s a career path I should consider?
I am happy–old friends returning, finding love, moving about under the influence of the Compassionate. In fact, I had to finish, but more on that later.
But here’s a question–does this make any sense from page 1020: “And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction is Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy”? It almost seems like I can grasp the concept, but not quite, and I’m wondering if it’s me or it that is opaque. Not a new feeling, of course.
Im not sure what it all means, cookie. I do remember reading in the first pages of the book “Randoph’s dark admonition that going up would be like going north,” to “another surface, but an earthly one… all too earthly.” Didnt get it then, dont get it now.
In this section, I found myself missing the Chums of the first few pages, as they here leave their working class roots and start to become a little unrecognizable.
Though they have their freedom from the National Office, “Their contractual operations began to bring in less revenue than sources unrelated to the sky – rent on surface properties, interest from business loans, returns on investments of many years standing.”
And Lindsay comments on people working longer shifts,”So much additional employment as to suggest a further expansion of an already prodigious American economy is certainly good news for us, considering the hardly negligible fraction of our capital invested therewithin.”
As Pugnax’s friend asks them, “Dont you boys have adventures anymore?
cookie, i’m not there yet, on the chilly heights of p1020, but maybe this is the same message he’s given us before: once you’re “there,” there’s no going back, no second chances. the future cannot suffuse the past with warmth. maybe that sounds grim, or maybe he just favors a now that isn’t muddied by speculation or regret.
checking in at 1016. i’m back on track from my barcelona distraction. the thing i noticed most this past week is how pynchon can wrap up the Vibe assassination in under two pages but can pontificate about something like aether for pages at a time. kind of like my favorite musician choosing to play a certain style rather than play in the classical sense.
Loved the Vibe assassination twist–loved the “almost growed up” Jesse even more. Can’t wait for the finish line….
Del: “what pynchon does do enjoyably well is lurk around the big issues from very strange vantage points” is one of the best descriptions of TP I’ve come across.
cookie: You FINISHED?? And lived to tell about it? So it can be done.
I’ve been good and closed the book this week at 1039. Seems like Pynchon’s putting his house in order before we hit the back cover. “Accounts to be balanced” (1003)–Foley taking the life his own was once purchased to save; Frank returning to Webb’s Union roots in Trinidad & re-linking the generations via surrogate fatherhood to the “loose” (Stray?) Traverse, Jesse; the Chums (LOVE the Chums) finally teaming up with their Russian doubles, finding their female counterparts (at last! Everyone in this book seems to have a counterpart of the opposite gender) in the pleasingly weird “Sodality of Aetheronauts,” and, via Chick, reuniting with Dad (“Dick”). Merle (another dad) reappears with a machine to “liberate” lives from the photographs that trapped them in time, also a kind of “account balanced,” the double restored to its heretofore missing point of origin. (Dads, doubles, darlings).
It’s like the novel abandoned ordinary linear order so it could bring us to this other sense of symmetry–balance, not conclusion. The War’s handled beautifully, I thought. Not the climax all the plot lines converge upon, but a muffled “in the wings” sort of affair, too tragic for words.
Great to spend so much time with the Chums, too, who start to seem like our own fictional doubles in the novel, dropping in on the action from an alternate reality.
“Are ghosts dreadful because they bring toward us from the future some component–in the vectorial sense–of our own deaths? Are they partially, defectively, our own dead selves, thrust back in recoil from the mirrorface at the end, to haunt us?” (1023).
Reader, I’m starting to think the ghosts haunting this story are us.
Cookie, according to the second law of thermodynamics, some process are necessarily unidirectional. An ice cube in a glass of water could get colder while the water got equally warmer without violating the first law of thermodynamics, but it never happens. The second law says the ice will always warm as the water cools. This fundamentally guarantees heat death (the point at which the entire universe achieves a single temperature and no energy can be exchanged, so all life ends).
Metaphorically, the cooling of the universe represents increased entropy and heat death (which is a forward movement in time as that is the future), but I’m not sure it is really true. If energy is conserved (as the first law of thermodynamics assures us), then as much of the universe is warming as is cooling. Still, achieving an average temperature is a lousy metaphor.
if pause we must at 1039, at least it’s in the company of one of the loveliest visions yet: “In the years since they’d come up with the process, Merle confided, he had begun to understand that he was on a mission to set free the images not just in the photographs he was taking, but in all that came his way, like the prince who with his kiss releases that Sleeping Beauty into wakefulness. One by one, across the land, responsive to his desire, photos trembled, stirred, began to move….”
Hi e.,
I’m glad you point out the loveliness, partly because that sentence IS lovely, and I’d forgotten it, and we could all use a little more loveliness in our lives (I could anyway); but partly because it helped me think about something that bugs and confuses me about Pynchon.
He’s right up there with the great Modernists in pushing against what a novel’s supposed to be. Plot is Byzantine, non-linear, and often shockingly beside the point; characters waver between stock genre figures and flesh-and-blood hat tricks of naturalism; the novel slyly alludes to and plays with its status as a fiction; the medium mirrors the message, etc.
But the one thing Pynchon seems reluctant to abandon is Fine Writing. At the level of the sentence, he can pass muster–write circles around, really–all those venerable New Yorker types with their carefully poised incantatory clauses. He beats them at their own game without ever breaking a sweat, but also without (it seems to me) questioning the basic terms of the contest. Unless it’s to show how easy Fine Writing is, how you can churn it out for page after memorable page until it becomes unmemorable, hundreds of pages of polished machine-turned Fine Writing. So much for the scarcity value of Fine Writing.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that here at 1039, I’m finding Pynchon’s yen for the lovely sentence one of his most annoying qualities. It signals mastery, control, and a tacit approval of the conventional in a novel that seems in every other way to be about exactly the opposite. The loveliness gets tedious, starts to feel like a stylistic tic, the stutter of a man who can’t control his compulsion to generate well-balanced classical sentences of the “o, isn’t that lovely” variety in a kind of insane profusion.
Am I totally riding a crotchet? Or has anyone else felt something along these lines?
Forgive me if this sounds insane–I’ve been living with Thomas Pynchon for six months straight. 🙂
the cadence and the flow of the book is the draw for me. ideas second.
There are so many cool comments this week, I only have little bits to chunk into the stew. There are so many comments about the CoC, I wanted to look at Trinidad, since that’s the closest thing we’ve seen to an on-stage war. I found no mention of the massacre on the Trinidad page, but it’s known as the Ludlow Massacre. The CO national guard killed a number of miners during skirmishes, and then went on to kill a number of children with their mothers. The Wiki Ludlow page has a photo of the armored death-mobile, and I thought about those men in the photo being freed to go off and kill again. Oddly Trinidad CO was known as the sex-change capital of the world in the 1960s, and was parodied on South Park.
Odd to think of LA as an exotic locale the boys had never visited. You’d think with Hollywood there, they might’ve. Of course the whole idea of Hollywood capturing millions of images, and Merle releasing them, this sounds like the next battlefront between the slavers and those seeking freedom. Each frame would come alive, the actors would perfom their scene, and then they’d strike the set and go home. What would be left to show but empty film of old backlots?
Perhaps it’s just me, but were the first TV transmissions that “Dick” (must remember the quotes) was picking up already re-runs of Gilligan’s island?
I do find it absurd that the CoC have traveled from one world to the other, just met gals with Aetheric flying packs, have Teslatic equipment using infant shrouds and lighters using focused radioactive isotopes, and Chick (no qoutes) still find labs with radio tubes & gutta percha to be cutting edge. Of course, like the time in the Harmonica Corps, they may be living in a world dominated by the intruders. I think it more likely TP’s just chucking stuff out there.
I need to finish Vineland, and re-read some sections, but there is a flying conspiracy of some sort that never lands and takes what it needs from other planes. Since the Traverse clan is in both books, maybe the flying pirates are some descendants of the CoC and Sodailty. I haven’t seen connections to other books, but maybe somebody else knows them. I know GR has a descendant of Mason & Dixon in it.
A final thought– The Tunguska event took place 0h 14m 28s UT 30 June 1908. That translates as 3:14pm Jun 29 PDT (adjust for your locale). Theoretically, if you wanted to finish reading the book at that exact time, that’s what you’d shoot for. I think it’s exciting that we are the first people to be able able to finish the book on the 99th anniversary of the arrival of our alien masters. Next year will be the 100th anniversary, and will presage the next level of humanity’s submission, when they arrive in force, not just as colonists. Enjoy!
I’m a tick of the odometer from 1000–and superstitiously avoiding all those tempting comments above, for fear of spoilers (proof there is something like a plot threading through this thing–or that I’m just nuts?).
Feeling kind of docile at this point (after some fits of impatience and resentment in the 800s, and long after the bursts of early enthusiasm have worn off). Watching things unfold from a comfortable readerly distance. I can hardly remember _not_ reading this book, by now, and notice that some part of me just figures it (and our “march”) will go on forever.
And then I see how few pages remain–and that the 30th is nigh upon us.
Heurtebise
Thanks to all for the responses–I feel ever so much clearer now.
And Rodney, I think your phrase “insane profusion” just about covers it all.
rodney, your question deserves a thoughtful answer, but i’m just going to bunt with an emotional one for now: it doesn’t annoy me; i feel lucky.
captain, love the things you dig up. i’ve got a question for you: what’s the theory behind the wait–why didn’t our alien overlords hit hard in 1908? were we just the best little reality show in the galaxy?
Found it interesting to see how the Inconvenience has “conveniently” transformed itself into a Noah’s ark of sorts, minus the two-by-two animals (excepting Pugnax and his missus) but with practically the entire human race on board. I’m having trouble visualizing the size and shape of it, though….