new pynchon new pynchon new pynchon

i think it's probably the first time that pynchon tackles the kind of 60s 'politics' which rather underpins the first three, and maybe manages to get a lot of that out of his system: viz its not really being present in mason and dixon? well okay it totally IS present in mason and dixon but in different ways.

the popcult stuff - there's a scene in a mall at the end which was really formative to how i looked at this stuff myself, when i read this. it's a hard one to unpack, tho.

apart from the cyberpunk bit it seems to avoid the kind of uh structural and/or superficial parodies of various genres that underpin most of his novels.

the cop show / police procedural
godzilla movie
spy thriller with some kinda la femme nikita shit thrown in
a bit of road movie maybe?
the classic retreat-to-a-sanctuary-full-of-nuns-or-ninjas

i take it there are some more but those are off the top of my head.

and just to be clear, in what sense do you mean 'tackle'? in vineland he seems pretty argumentative and i suppose more direct about failures and weaknesses of countercultural/subcultural political action, and a bunch of other stuff, but isn't that kind of a big theme of part 4 of gravity's rainbow?

yeah, tackles needed a qualifier like "directly". it is the first time he writes about countercultural/subcultural etc by writing straightforwardly about campus protests and such.

the movie thing divides the movies that are real from the ones pynchon made up, or at least i thought so.

*n.b. pedants i am sure that the sweeney or whatever was awesome but it was long long long before my time

From Publishers Weekly. Starred Review. Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader's, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses. It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man. Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads. Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder. Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.). Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

LA Times review

Sans punctuation, the previous statement can be interpreted in more than one way. I think I interpreted it in a manner different from the original intent. (Kinda a caveman announcing his conquest of a large, war-like woman.)

So why's Amazon decided to bundle Against the Day with Life of Pi, emphasizing that if I purchase both I shall save an additional 5%?

this is gonna be the best thing since "the english assassin"

man FUCK amazon, i ordered new headphones on the weekend and they already showed up in my mailbox today!

Any other potential referents for the title?

AGAIN with the talking dog?

faulkner: "We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say: 'Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?'"

book of peter: "But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men."

tyndale (a 16th cent translator of the bible): "I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me."

Like you can have too many? Wait til you get to the runcible spoon fight in chapt... oh, but I've said too much already...

Ezra Tessler gives a summary:

the most striking example of Koch’s literary inventiveness is ‘The Red Robins’ (1975), the longest piece in the collection and perhaps the most well known of Koch’s relatively unacknowledged fiction. This dizzying 56 chapter, 150 page novel-like epic explodes into free-form prose, poetry, drama, and countless other incarnations of literary expression. Resiliently difficult to summarize, Koch’s hyperkinetic tale loosely follows the adventures of a group of pilots led by a morally ambiguous figure named Santa Claus as they swoop in and around Asia. The Red Robins inhabit—as if at random—jungles, cities, beaches, and clouds, while the story’s fantastical whims burst in and out of narrative, dialogue, list, rhyme, unconnected to specific time or event. There are no ‘characters’ in the traditional sense of robust personage. Instead, the reader meets a barrage of people, things, and places, some of which appear multiple times, most of which only momentarily. Together they get heaped in a spontaneous whirlwind so schizophrenic and bawdy as to rival the likes of Rabelais, Sterne, and Burroughs.

The only bit that threw me was the very end of the monster fourth section with Lew, which felt a bit tonally odd after the breathtaking wonders preceding it. But the subsequent coda restored matters at least

the part I had the most trouble with was the weird bit in the middle where the Chums Of Chance go undercover and lose their identities

― thinkmanship (sleeve), Friday, 15 April 2022 16:20 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pure literary magic iirc

The sections so far with Lake Traverse and Deuce Kindred are really great. Almost Faulknerian in spots.

I add for posterity my reflection that Oedipa Maas in CL49 is an oddly more obscure character than we might think.

We know that she calls herself a political Republican (but almost nothing she says or does corroborates this - it's like a label that Pynchon conveniently attaches, but doesn't fulfil), and that she is a 'suburban housewife' - all this part of setting her up as an orthodox figure who can then be shaken up.

We know that she studied at Berkeley in the 1950s - English I think - probably graduating in 1957. That's as good as the back story gets.

As far as I recall, we don't know:

1: how she met Pierce Inverarity or why she had an affair with him.*

2: why she married Wendell Maas - as they don't seem to have anything in common - and don't seem to have had any plans to have children.

3: why she readily begins an affair with Metzger -- but more to the point here: why, as a married woman beginning an affair, she is not more worried about the consequences of sex, above all pregnancy. The guess must be that she is on the contraceptive pill - which would in turn relate to her marriage and, again, a reluctance to have children together. But as far as I recall, this is not mentioned, though it would arguably be a very new, 1960s theme and would relate to the drug aspects of the novel. A more general point here is that it does not seem to occur to Pynchon that contraception of some kind would be important to a woman in her position.

4: what has happened to her parents. Are they alive? If so, why, in increasing desperation, does she not think to contact them - or alternatively, think "Mom, I wish you were still around - I could sure do with your advice now"? Pynchon has made her effectively an orphan, but as far as I know he doesn't explain this.

*5: how old was Pierce Inverarity? Note that he died a few months before the novel begins, and changed his will a year earlier. He MAY have been killed by sinister forces (she wonders this near the end) - which would obviously be significant for the plot. Or he may have just died of illness (but then what illness?) or old age - but if the latter, how old was he? 70? That would make him over 40 years older than Oedipa!

I suspect that a few of the points above may in fact be addressed in the novel and that I have forgotten or missed them.

The most general point to emerge from these observations is that in this short novel, Pynchon rigged up something that feels quite plausible (Oedipa the housewife and her adventure), but in a way that actually has lots of holes and gaps that we probably don't notice because he keeps it moving fast. This principle could possibly be true of lots of other novels.

i don't know if this is helpful but this is the painting that oedipa remembers seeing = remedios varo's (embroidering the earth's mantle aka bordando el manto terrestre

https://nickholdstock.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/mantle.jpeg

I know it well and was thrilled to see it in person at Tate Modern this year !! (this is the centre of a triptych with two other parts - as you may know.)

Especially as someone who was raised as a Republican in the 1950s, and tended to think of myself that way into the early 60s---between the fall of McCarthy and the rise of Goldwater---I'm among those who think of it as being more inclusive back then, and a Berkeley grad who is curious, open-minded, has some educated sense of agency---but of isolation, of being a traveler, and is attracted to glimpses of the meaning of things, the order, the true System, whether it's something she's going to try to embrace or not---that sounds like a plausible Republican-identifying character to me.
She could eventually take it in a more Right or Left, John Birch or Aquarian direction, to where they might merge, in terms of conspiracy theories and "organic" pre-Covid anti-vaxxers etc, or not. Part of the attraction to Wendell "Mucho" Maas ("Mucho baby," as she addresses him at one point, indicating that he may well have mucho sex appeal), is the intensity and curiosity, idealistic tendencies, that they share, which he takes in the Aquarian direction, with LSD. Disturbing to her initially, but she may join him later, or go on a parallel path.
I think at this point some form of birth control could be understood by the reader as a given, ditto the sense of isolation I mentioned, in big old and modern California, with its own traditions of transition, whether she's literally an orphan or not. She's married, but not a period-stereotypical American Wife, incl. Mom, forever fixing dinner etc. He's currently preoccupied, maybe always has been to some degree, which may even be part of their compatibility, so far.

Also, it's hard to picture, unless she had a really open-minded and Cali-savvy Mom, consultations about Thurn Und Taxis and Wendell's adventures with LSD.

Hard to picture in that era, but doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Could have been good, but maybe taking away from the tension of her isolation, of mysteries left along the road to revelation, as can also happen off the page.

And of course California, the Promised Land and so on, is such a complicated place, grids and sprawl and sunshine and smog and so much else. Even if you just want to keep your head to yourself and write code or pan for gold or smoke it, you have to have a plan, develop it or find it, for The Purpose-Driven Life, even one with cruise control as your goal.

A leading physical metaphor for shore.

at some point in the last decade i realised i was kind of reading oedipa maas against joan didion: not that they're identical but there are some useful points of similarity (social background, sensibility perhaps) which help triangulate the differences (tho they don't really answer any of PF's questions)

(oedipa's husband briefly turns up again in vineland, the second in TP's "californian trilogy")

I strongly agree about the common ground between the texts ie: between Maas and Didion. There are a number of specific points of such common ground.

I had forgotten about the Vineland appearance, though did know of it. But I only ever read half of Vineland, and do not think it is my kind of novel.

re poster dow's post: it's not that I think CL49 should have a scene with OM's mother (though it could have been interesting for sure, and reminds me of another question: what was Oedipa Maas's maiden name?) -- rather that in 120 pages in which we feel intimate with this character and experience all her concerns, hopes and traumas, it's odd that she never once thinks of the existence or non-existence of any of her family (save her husband).

My general observation, again, is that there is an element of smoke & mirrors in the fictional process, in which OM feels quite a full and compelling character, but in some ways isn't; is a facade with less depth then we might think, who exists as a function and role ('actant'?) in the fiction and is less fully thought through and realised than she may seem.

I also reflected that the one novelist who WOULD, for good or ill, have thought through family backstory and brought it in, is ... Franzen.

Maxine Tarnow in Bleeding Edge is possibly TRP compensating for the underwritten aspects of Oedipa - she's a much more fully drawn mum-gumshoe. Though funnily enough Mike Davis thought this was a virtue of CoL49 in comparison to Didion - he praised the novel for "wasting no time grappling with the alienation of its subject".

That sounds a good comment from Davis (whom I've almost never read).

I agree that Bleeding Edge comes over like a return to CL49 territory (I suspect that INHERENT VICE did too), though I also thought it was dire.

On the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow’s publication, it’s worth remembering that Laurie Anderson once asked Thomas Pynchon if she could stage it as an opera. His answer? Yes, as long as the whole thing was scored solely for banjo pic.twitter.com/jh0REahy0O

— David Hering (@hering_david) February 28, 2023

Paging Bela Fleck…

Lol

Part of the attraction to Wendell "Mucho" Maas ("Mucho baby," as she addresses him at one point, indicating that he may well have mucho sex appeal)

"Mucho" means "Lot." Oedipa is Lot's wife.