The Elegant Variation

REMEMBERING BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL

The very sad passing of Bebe Moore Campbell has been noted widely this morning.

Campbell died at her home in Los Angeles of complications from brain cancer, her publicist Linda Wharton Boyd said.

In her novels, she took up such topics as racism and the problems of mental illness. Her closely observed details about characters engaged in complicated relationships led reviewers to compare her to such literary masters as Anton Chekhov and Edith Wharton.

Several of Campbell's novels are set in Los Angeles, including "Brothers and Sisters" (1994), which explores the strained aftermath of the city's 1992 riots. The novel's main character, a black woman banker, is torn between her commitment to a white co-worker and the black man she accuses of sexual harassment.

h20boro lib blog has a nice collection of related links.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Our pal The Rake finds some significant differences between Dave Eggers' original impressions of Infinite Jest and his more recent take.

Should I even bother pulling a quote out here?  Just glance upstairs again.  Now we have all that "lexical diarrhea" to go with "extravagantly self-indulgent" and "incredibly verbose" and "exhausting...jargon" and "excess" (1996) up against "unpretentious" and "not one lazy sentence" and "drum-tight" and "relentlessly smart" (2006).

REMAINS OF AGAINST THE DAY

We're pleased to have Jim Ruland return to offer his parting Pynchon perspective.  And if you want to express your thanks to Jim directly, you can stop by Sunday night's Vermin on the Mount (of which more anon).  We're also pleased to announce that Stephen Elliott will be stopping by here on Thursday to take the reins as we head off to NYC, and he's got a very interesting announcement to make.  Stay tuned.

GUEST ESSAY BY JIM RULAND

Against the Day is a book of terrorists.

Bomb huckers, outlaws and anarchists lurk everywhere and—surprise, surprise—nearly all of them are likable. Against the Day is like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse but instead of the saga of the Sackett family moving westward, endlessly crossing the frontier, Pynchon’s Traverse’s travel from West to East, hurling themselves against the tide of history and humanity and into the teeth of American enterprise during the time when her fortunes were being made.

These are not basement anarchists building bombs with English dynamite but mavericks employing the very tools used to extract wealth from countless mines with little or no thought to the human cost. Yet in recent reviews by Kirsch and Kakutani, we’re led to believe that the Traverse family’s relationship to violence makes them morally inferior, as if the gears of Capitalism weren’t leaving a trail of corpses in its wake, as if violence was an instrument to be used only as a last resort, as if bombs don’t make sense, as if life wasn’t cheap and getting cheaper by the minute.

This is why some people hate Pynchon: because his history of the world reads like an English explorer’s lifeboat story—A terrible end is a foregone conclusion so let’s get on with the atrocities shall we?—but he’ll make you labor over the most groaningly awful puns and then break into song, usually featuring a ukulele or a kazoo.

After reading Kirsch’s asinine assessment and Kakutani’s predictable dismissal, I have reached the conclusion that neither is equipped to consider the counterfactual reality at work in Against the Day. One thing is clear from Kirsch’s review is that they don’t know how to read Pynchon. So many of Kirsch’s proclamations about Against the Day could easily apply to any of Pynchon’s novels, which makes one wonder what Kirsch is doing reviewing this book in the first place.

For example, he has no appreciation of Pynchon’s scope. When we open a novel we expect to be presented with a narrative. Even if the subject matter is long or short, familiar or foreign, compact or unruly, the expectation is that the writer will manage the material in a way that allows a story to be expressed. Pynchon does not follow these rules. If most novels are like nature narratives on the Discovery channel, Pynchon’s are like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm; at first their antics seem utterly random, but the more one watches, the deeper the suspicion that the participants in the drama are communicating with one another in meaningful ways. To put it another way, the organizing principle of the modern novel is the family; Pynchon is interested in systems.

Pynchon challenges the reader to think about the novel is different ways. That should be a given. It was, at least for a while, but not anymore. This is puzzling because hasn’t it always been the hallmark of great writers to change the form? One could even say their greatness is measured by the extent to which they succeed. Melville was a washed up travel writer before he shattered the boundaries of classification with Moby Dick. Joyce seemed doomed to repeat the story of his adolescence until Leopold Bloom emerged in the fourth chapter of Ulysses. Their struggle/progress is immaterial because they not only wrote great novels, but they changed the way we think about and respond to them.

Strangely, Kirsch and Kakutani don’t cut Pynchon any slack even though Pynchon has always written like Pynchon. His novels have been dizzyingly dazzling from the get-go. His first novel V. has all the earmarks of his mature work. His early stories, his self-proclaimed juvenilia, were celebrated for his astonishing maturity to the same degree that his most recent work is being castigated for its outrageous silliness. Embedded in Kirsch’s and Kakutani’s criticisms are their disappointment at Pynchon’s refusal to come around to the fluorescent side of the moon and commit to hyper-realism; Pynchon cultivates such extreme fandom because his readers understand that they have to come him.

Take this line from Kirsch’s review: “The gaudy names Mr. Pynchon gives his characters are like pink slips, announcing their dismissal from the realm of human sympathy and concern.” This is the equivalent of saying One Hundred Years of Solitude is trite and banal because so many of the characters have the same name. Still, one can’t help but wonder where Mr. Kirsch has been all these years. This has been Pynchon’s shtick since before 1962 when he opened his O. Henry prize-winning story “Entropy” with the appearance of one Meatball Mulligan. When a certain stoker by the name of “O.I.C. Bodine” appeared five hundred and seventeen pages into Against the Day, I all but stood up and cheered. (O.I.C. stands for Officer in Charge, interpolate the “n” and O.I.C. becomes “oink.”)

Kirsch is also at a loss for how to make sense of Pynchon’s now-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t cast of thousands, which tells me the man has never waded through the Slothrop-less sections of Gravity’s Rainbow or the Zoyd Wheelerless patches of Vineland. It’s a penchant of Pynchon’s that makes experienced readers wary of latching onto characters because their time in the novel is bound to be short-lived. I think this is something Pynchon picked up from his travels in the U.S. Navy. Most war movies would have you believe that when you enlist in the armed services you bond with your buddies in boot camp, you serve together, fight together and die in each other’s arms as the credits roll. In reality, the average soldier/sailor/airman/marine comes into contact with more people in their first three months of duty then in the sum of all of their previous experience on the planet. People are constantly coming and going, signing on, shipping out, moving along on orders to the next duty station—to say nothing of disappearing, deserting, going AWOL or getting killed. It’s a cyclone of human activity that is so puzzling that there are people in the Pentagon whose jobs are to predict how many people they need to enlist today to meet the needs of the armed services tomorrow. In other words, an impossible system to base a narrative around; but that’s precisely how Pynchon operates.

Veterans of the military enjoy Pynchon on an entirely other level than ordinary civilians. There’s an entire plateau of understanding that veterans, particularly naval veterans, intuitively inhabit. For example, when I first picked up V. and encountered the barmaid with the propeller’s tattooed on her buttocks I felt like someone was speaking directly to me through the novel, someone who’d walked in my boondockers, for embedded in this mundane reference is an even more profane pun: the propeller, as any sailor will tell you is also known as the ship’s screw. This knowledge is not essential to understanding Pynchon’s work any more than one needs to be Irish Catholic to read Joyce, but it’s the place where Pynchon revels in revealing himself. Perhaps gleefully so.

Nowhere in all of Pynchon’s work is this more true than in the Chums of Chance sequences that open Against the Day and stitch many of the disparate episodes together. The Chums of Chance are simultaneously characters within the novel and characters in a series of boy’s adventure books called The Chums of Chance (the first of literally dozens of doubles at work in the novel). Both appear to be modeled after the Frank Merriwell series—an early precursor to the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys narratives that were used for intellectual entertainment and moral instruction.

The Chums fly around onboard airships filled with an assortment of impossible gadgetry. Each of the five Chums is defined by their role on the ship and Pynchon seems to delight in applying every idiomatic expression of his two-year stint in the Navy. From singling up all lines to the brightwork that always needs polishing, the Chums are proof that not even Pynchon can refrain from romanticizing his time at sea. Like a modern-day Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Pynchon abandoned his studies at college for “two years before the mast.”

But as the years wear on and the Chums become salty old vets in their own right they come to question where their orders are coming from, and why they should carry them out the way they’ve always carried them out when their work seems not to make a bit of difference on the ball of confusion below. Like the Flying Dutchman, they become the stuff of storybook fantasy while the world erupts in total war.

Perhaps in some way Kirsch and Kakutani see their own situation here: assigned a tiresome chore, they carry it out without relish or zeal because the results fail to register an impact on the landscape.

Critics: abandon ship; Pynchon fans: full speed ahead.

THREE-MINUTE INTERVIEW (3MI): JONATHAN LETHEM ON DANIEL FUCHS

We first became aware of Daniel Fuchs via last year's collection The Golden West from Black Sparrow Books, which was urged on us by none other than Sam Tanenhaus himself, who felt we'd respond to the Los Angeles subject matter of this fine collection.  He was right, and thus we were excited to receive a copy of Black Sparrow's Brobdingnagian one-volume paperback reissue of Fuch's three novels - The Brooklyn Novels, as they're now known, written before he decamped for the sunnier climes of La-La land.  The book sports a fine introduction by the talented Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude), so we thought we'd drop him a line and see if he wanted to chat about Fuchs for this latest installment of 3MI.  Remember the rules - three questions custom-designed, the last two the same for all comers.  And we're off.

TEV: The shelves of Yaddo seem to be a spawning ground for rediscovering authors, especially the practitioners of realism. (Fuchs for you, Fox for Franzen.) Given that Fuchs' work is so steeped in a tradition of 1930s realism, what do you think his relevance and value to contemporary audiences is (especially for those Beyond Brooklyn), and what case would you make for giving his work a second look? (And this is from someone who is more generously disposed to the realist tradition than a lot of readers and writers seem to be these days.)

JL:  Well, not to begin grousing at your questions right out of the gate, but I feel obliged to try to undermine the categorical imperative infesting your question about my stumbling across Fuchs in the Yaddo library all those years ago. I'd never describe my response as being: "Hey, wow, this example of 1930's realism is a promising one, possibly of interest despite/because of its relation to that tradition..." (Nor was I thinking "Franzen found Fox in here... gotta get something of my own... maybe it's in the "F's" too..." -- though I mention it because this self-generated image made me laugh...I'd forgotten until you reminded me that J-Franz located P-Fox on those same shelves.) What happened instead is I fell, swooningly, in love with Fuchs voice. A simple thing, that, though it needless to say can't and doesn't happen enough. His screwy, intimate, fresh and utterly persuasive evocation of a Williamsburg tenement sang to me, beckoned across the dusty years. The Yaddo library is a good test of such things, since they've removed all the dust jackets from the books, so you're not triangulating your reader's response to an unknown name like Fuchs against flap copy, blurbs and the like. No claim of importance or relevance to any tradition, either from Fuchs' peers and contemporary reviewers or any retrospective critical authority, was there to nudge me and my encounter into this or that intellectual continuum -- I was merely reading. And if, say, his sweet and seamy New York characters had begun donning alligator suits and descending into the sewers, or been harangued by a prophetic talking bird, or (ahem) found a magic ring and begun attempting to use it to fly, I'd have gone to those places with them, however surprising those turns might have been. And his glorious language, and the way he uses it to express the dreaminess in his ghetto-bound characters, contains its own element of fantasy, hinting everywhere at life's possibilities of rapturous strangeness and escape. I wasn't, then -- or, actually, now -- so clearly aware of what the '30's realist tradition' was, so I couldn't be holding him against it. Hemingway? Not close. I don't mean I wasn't, inevitably, making comparisons, but they were my own eccentric and anachronistic ones. He seemed like a precursor to Jerome Charyn, a non-graphic Will Eisner, a less-neurotic Henry Roth. His portrayal of inner-city childhood reminded me of certain of my favorite Lenny Bruce routines (do you know the one about the kid who goes into the toy store for airplane glue to sniff?).

Forgive my curmudgeonliness. This morning I also feel like an enemy of the word *relevance*. (In fact, it may have been at least partly the fear that he was insufficiently 'relevant' -- a value "proletarian" writers were supposed to exhibit, back in Fuchs' day -- that drove him from continuing to write fiction.) Save us from relevance. Read Fuchs for Fuchs, he's like no one else, that being the only relevance literature requires.

TEV: Fuchs headed to Hollywood but unlike Fitzgerald and Faulkner (with whom he collaborated), he neither imploded nor became embittered.  Rather, he seemed to thrive in the vanilla sunshine and wrote without disdain about being a writer for the studios. (I love his "A Hollywood Diary" from last year's collection The Golden West; it's a wonderful bit of freeze-frame of a bygone era when screenwriters were contract workers.) Do you think his unwillingness to at least bite the hand that fed him contributed in any way to his marginalization by East Coast Literary Types?

JL:  Yes, he's refreshingly clear-eyed and good-humored about the advantages and disadvantages of writing for the movies in the great era of the studio system, and provides a much less hysterical window into the fate of a studio writer than the pervasive Barton Fink images suggests. And I don't doubt (as a writer who's flitted from West Coast to East in my own subject matter, and is now about to flit back again) that there can be a self-reinforcing fascination in New York intellectual circles with local topics -- a leaning that may sometimes overrate certain dullish books that happen to be P.C.

"Read Fuchs for Fuchs, he's like no one else, that being the only relevance literature requires."

(provincially consonant) and either overlooks or patronizes books from elsewhere -- and which, even more specifically, might fail to disguise disappointment when one of its 'own' violates Eastcentricity (I remember some memoirist of NY in the '50's, though I can't remember whom, saying that a certain segment of the New York scene had never forgiven Bellow for fleeing to Chicago). But then again, how can we blame the marginalization of Fuchs-as-novelist on anyone but himself? I mean, given that he A: basically quit, and B: persistently, for decades, whenever anyone asked, downgraded his own accomplishment, claimed he'd used up what little he had to say and hence was no particular loss to the reader?

TEV: One of the attractions of the Fuchs story seems to be speculating about what might have been, the novels he might have written had he not "gone Hollywood." In his review of The Golden West, Sam Tanenhaus suggested that Fuchs had "run out of things to say," working on yet more variations of the Brooklyn novels. What's your take on all this?

JL: Well, as I mentioned above (before I'd read this next question), Tanenhaus was only quoting Fuchs. My guess is that selling in the three figures could blunt anyone's sense that they had more to say. I don't know that my wish is for more Brooklyn novels, per se -- but it would have been lovely to see where Fuchs could have grown next, if something or someone had really insisted to him that his voice was remarkable and that he ought to exercise it on any subject that came to hand. Since he ended up in Hollywood, it's hard not to fantasize about a really encompassing and ambitious Hollywood novel from him -- but who knows what else was possible? Many writers are greatest *after* they use up the first thing they have to say, and take a second draught of inspiration.

TEV: Who's the best author we've never heard of?

JL: This is a perfect time to mention my favorite dark horse -- in my mind, the best postwar U.S. novelist still untouched by the present revival boom (is it because he's Left Coastish?): Don Carpenter. Berkeley born and raised, lived most of his life in Mill Valley -- except, yes, for stints in Hollywood, where he wrote in the fading days of the studio system, squeezed out one great proto-indie movie (PAYDAY, with Rip Torn), and stuck better than Fuchs to writing fiction. Hence produced, after first two great novels HARD RAIN FALLING (a terrific prison novel which helped inspire THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE) and BLADE OF LIGHT (which, incidentally, looks to have been an uncredited source for the movie SLINGBLADE), a string of lean and effective novels of '70's show business: THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF JODY McKEEGAN, A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS, and TURNAROUND. Carpenter was among other things, a great writer on the subject of gambling -- pool and poker, specifically -- and that made him particularly apt in his depiction of the fate of art, including his own, in a money town.

TEV: And, finally, ask yourself any question you like - but be sure to answer it.

JL: Any other introductions or afterwards coming out? Well, I've just written a new introduction for Penguin to a book that so far as I know has never been out of print, but doesn't have the stature I think it rates: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, by Shirley Jackson. In the new edition I compare the book to Charles Portis, Henry James, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and Beckett, which suggests pretty well what I think of it. I also just wrote an introduction for a small-press limited edition of a great surrealist noir novel called THE DEADLY PERCHERON, by John Franklin Bardin. Finally, I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select. After that, I'm out of the scholarship game, for a while: time to start a new novel (unless someone rescues Don Carpenter...)

NOW PAY ATTENTION, 007 FANS

We're certainly pleased with all the editorial attention the literary Bond is receiving these days but the editors at Salon - about whom we've always had our doubts - need a bit of help in the fact-checking department.

Even Chandler never got a plug from an American president. Yet, nearly 45 years ago, when asked why the bedroom lights in the White House were on so late, JFK (like James Bond, a naval commander in World War II) replied that he was "up late reading 'From Russia With Love.'" Fleming returned the compliment in 1965 when he had Bond take a copy of "Profiles in Courage" on an assignment.

Given that Fleming dropped dead of a massive heart attack on August 12, 1964, it's unlikely he sent Bond anywhere at all in 1965.

MAKEOVER

Maud has unveiled a spiffing new redesign.  As usual, we wish we'd thought of it first.

HITCHENS' REIGN OF ERROR

The London Review of Books unzips and piddles all over Christopher Hitchens' Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man".  Ouch.

... this book ... reads like the work of a tired man.

Too tired, to begin with, to check his facts. Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke, along with Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One of Rights of Man by the rough treatment he received at the hands of a Parisian crowd following Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead for seven years and Ricardo, not yet 20, had published no views that required endorsing. Paine was charged with seditious libel for publishing Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and according to Hitchens the future prime minister Spencer Perceval ‘opened for the prosecution’; in fact, though Perceval read the indictment to the court, the prosecution was much too important to be left to so relatively junior a barrister, and was opened by the attorney general himself. In 1794 Paine published The Age of Reason, ‘probably’, thinks Hitchens, in reaction to a sermon by Richard Watson, the bishop of Llandaff, though, as Paine himself tells us, he had not heard of the sermon until it was advertised in Watson’s reply to The Age of Reason, An Apology for the Bible.

HOT FOR PYNCHON

We're shutting down for the holiday weekend so don't expect much in this space until Monday when we return with a special edition of 3MI featuring Jonathan Lethem on the subject of rediscovered '30s great Daniel Fuchs.  Jim Ruland also promises continuing Pynchoniana (see below), and we might even have a special day of Stephen Elliott guest blogging.  A fun-filled TEV week ahead, so enjoy your holidays, be safe and come back rested and ready for action on Monday.

Who was that that said “I contain multitudes”? I think it was either Walt Whitman or Traci Lords, but I’m feeling a little lost in the multiverse that is Against the Day. It’s not that I’ve run out of things to say—on the contrary, I’ve barely scratched the surface, but this short week is already over. Maybe I’m still hungover from the Pynchon release party on Monday night. Maybe I’m still peeved about the negative reviews. Whatever the case may be, it’s obvious we’re going to have to continue this conversation next week.

So stand-by for a response to Kirsch and Kakutani. Hold fast for an ass-clown proof Pynchon primer. Prepare yourself for a look at Against the Day that doesn’t completely suck. And since my agitated state has left me all but useless for careful considerations, I turned to Duncan Murrell, a writer, editor, journalist and recovering Marine, for a more sober assessment of Pynchon’s merits. Murrell’s perspective is interesting as he collects Thomas Pynchon first editions and has a personal connection to the writer.

TEV: How long have you been collecting Pynchon first editions? How did you come to start collection Pynchon first editions?
DM: How long have you been on fire? (I kid.) I think I've been collecting his first editions since I was 19 or so, after I'd read something else he'd written, the introduction to another writer's novel. That book had been my mother's parting gift as I went off to college. I wanted to know Pynchon after that, and since this is impossible, I went and found Gravity's Rainbow in a used bookstore in Ithaca later that year. It was years after that, after buying others, that I realized I had a collection. I should say that it was also years before I actually read one of those shiny, fine, untorn and only slightly discolored books. My mother is a collector, if by "collector" you mean someone who collects things so she can understand herself. She has countless collections: christening cups, apple peelers, Sandwich glass, wind-up toys, 18th-century Maryland silver, Japanese woodblock prints, Danish landscape painters, and an edition of Salvador Dali's "Alice in Wonderland," which has never left the fucking box. It drives me crazy. But I'm my mother's son, so I began collecting books. My mother started collecting books after I began, and now she has a fantastic collection, all gems that she found for cheap. (It's not worth it to her unless it's cheap, or fairly so.) So, among other things, she's got a complete Saul Bellow collection, which she won't let me read. I have to go out and find used paperbacks of Bellow. I now collect rattlesnake rattles, and I have four handmade hot dogs that are now more than twenty years old. They live in my freezer.

TEV: What's your best "find"?
DM: The first edition of The Crying of Lot 49 that I found in the Library of Babel, next to "The Plaster Cramp." I just snatched it, kicked an Inquisitor in the mouth, and jumped into the hexagonal emptiness beyond the rail. That's how I roll. I also found my Vindication there, but it fell out of my pocket.

That would have been cool. Truly, though, I've had no great finds. I don't have my mother's patience. She makes great finds, I just find. Since Vineland, it's been easy: go out to the store, get the first edition, wrap it in plastic, put it on the shelf. I've stumbled on all of the rest but one. I went out looking for a good first of The Crying of Lot 49. (You wouldn't believe how many people apparently used that book as a trivet. Lesson: do not put your pot of stew down on your books, that's what I'm saying.) I'm happy to have it because I love that cover. The sidewalk, the horn drawn in chalk. It's pretty. That's my best find, the one that I actually wanted. The others just threw themselves at me. There are supposed to be some extraordinary editions of Gravity's Rainbow out there. Accounts of them are something like myths. I'd like one of those. Also, anything in Danish.

TEV: Why Pynchon?
DM There's something about Pynchon that's very sweet. Sweet like a fox. I have to admit that the bit of Pynchon I go back to more than anything else is not one of his works of fiction, but the introduction to his friend Richard Farina's book Been Down So Long Looks Like Up To Me. You might remember Farina from that Positively Fourth Street, by David Hajdu. Farina was married to Mimi Baez. Influenced Dylan, who was a little jealous of Farina. Farina also influenced Pynchon, who was not jealous of him, during their time together at Cornell. Farina-like figures pop up all over Pynchon's fictional worlds (Tyrone Slothrop, from Gravity's Rainbow, is one), and although BDSLLLUTM is obviously an apprentice work, it's fairly obvious that it had some impact on Pynchon. Considering that Farina died on Carmel Valley Road after riding a motorcycle away from a book party celebrating the publication of that first novel, Pynchon's introduction to that novel -- only available in subsequent editions -- is moving and funny and self-deprecating. I love it. Book collectors, by the way, generally consider the edition of BDSLLLUTM with Pynchon's introduction to be more valuable than the first edition.

TEV: There’s always a tendency to overstate Pynchon’s influences because we know so little about them, would you agree that some things – Pynchon’s stint in the Navy, his friendship with Farina – have been understated?
DM: In the introduction, Pynchon seems to suggest that without Farina's "dangerous presence, not wearing a jacket or tie, more hair than was fashionable, always sitting with the same group of people. Quiet, but intensely there, checking things out," he might have always been a buttoned up, repressed writer without Farina's influence and friendship. And Lord knows, there's nothing repressed about him now. Yet, you can still detect that tentative, shy, self-deprecating person in much of Pynchon's humor, and in his concerns as a writer.

TEV: You went to Pynchon’s alma mater, Cornell. Did that help foster a connection to Pynchon and Farina?
DM: Pynchon and Farina were among the first students of Cornell Prof. James McConkey ( "Court of Memory," many others) and I was one of Jim's last students. (He's still alive, but not teaching so much.) McConkey couldn't be more different than those two, but I used to enjoy hearing him talk about them, particularly Farina.

TEV: What sets Pynchon apart from other writers? That sounds like a lame question, but I guess what I’m driving at is what makes Pynchon unique?
DM: I have always loved Pynchon's bits, his set pieces, his contained moments of theatricality, his bullshitting, his musical comedy. I'm not talking about his style and attitude toward narrative, which also contains these elements. I'm talking about the dropped in moments, self-contained and ephemeral. They're unnecessary, of course, if you're the sort of person who has to always be moving from here to there at the most efficient rate possible. I think these moments are part of Pynchon's greater idea for novels, that the best become obsessions for the reader, and it's out of kindness that he gives us a break. These are the moments when you're encouraged to engage your primitive brain, take a breath, get high.

TEV: Like Byron the Bulb?
DM: Exactly. I remember best the little things, such as that excerpt in Gravity's Rainbow from a fictional philologist's work, called Tales of the Schwarzkommando, in which the spiritual leader of a group of rocket-worshipping engineers resolves a conflict between observed and divine knowledge:

"Proud man," said the Nguarorerue. "What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value."

Pynchon at his best: wry and in love with the farcical potential of gnomics, religionists, and scientists.

TEV: I love that your favorite scene is from one of the counterfactual histories embedded in the novel!
DM: While we're at it, we should admire some of the other book titles Pynchon has invented over the years (thanks Wikipedia):

An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr. Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of that Outlandish and Fantastical Race

The Courier's Tragedy, by Richard Wharfinger (a Jacobean revenge play in five acts)

How I Came to Love the People, Anonymous

The Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari

King Kong: 18 vls. by Mitchell Prettyplace (a 'definitive study')

Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults, The Nayland Smith Press, Cambridge, 1933

On Preterition, by William Slothrop ('among the first books to've been not only banned but ceremonially burned in Boston')

Plotting the Stealth and Intrigue of the Jacobean Revenge Plays, by Dr. Emory Bortz

Things That Can Happen in European Politics, by Ernest Pudding

The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots (with illustrations by Walt Disney) That list not only cracks me up, but I think it's a pretty good introduction to the Pynchon attitude.

TEV: Like breaking out in song.
DM: I love that little musical number from Gravity's Rainbow, sung by Seaman Bodine of the U.S. destroyer John E. Badass (Jim Ruland served on that ship, right?), [Ed. Yes.] who is supposed to be Saure's contact. It's a little song about drugs and genies, and discovering that your generous, hash-happy genie is "a narco man, and he busted me right whur I lay." It's funny sad. Who hasn't been betrayed by their genies?

DISPATCHES FROM THE COUNTERFACTUALLY CHALLENGED

Jim Ruland's Pynchon coverage resumes.  Thanks for bearing with us.

Adam Kirsch is a hater. Here’s a shocker: so is Michiko Kakutani. Discuss.

NINE OUT OF TEN GREY HEADS AGREE

Zak Smith is an artist who has illustrated a scene from every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. No one asked Zak to do this but he did it anyway, which says a great deal about the kind of artist he is. The art inhabits territory between the Raymond Pettibon and comps for magazine ads in the 1970s. These illustrations were exhibited at the Witney Biennial in 2004 and are in the permanent collection at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis. His book, will be available next month from Tin House Books.

TEV: What drew you to Gravity's Rainbow?
ZS: My grandmother called me when the pictures started getting a lot of attention, she said "Well I picked it up, and I read the very first page and I thought to myself--'I can see why Zachary likes it, it's so full of details.'" So, yeah: If you're like me and your head's always eight places at once you kind of need a lot of things going on at once to stay entertained. The plots are intricate, the logic is intricate, and the sentences are intricate. I would also say that there's a lot of hidden subtlety in Pynchon but then everybody thinks there's hidden subtlety in the writers they like.

TEV: Do you find it a difficult book to read?
ZS: There are parts that are, intentionally, difficult to understand, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're difficult to (italics)read(end italics). It's like a puzzle--part of the fun is being dropped into a mysterious situation and thinking your way out. When I went to this Pynchon conference in Malta to talk about the illustrations I was talking to all these lit academics and I said part of the reason I wanted to draw what happened in the book is because you sometimes read stuff in Pynchon and then go--"Wait a second, did that just say what I think it did?" And all these grey heads who've been reading him for years kind of nodded.

TEV: What were your favorite scenes to illustrate?
ZS:  I had a lot of fun with the more freakish and hallucinatory stuff, but the more realistic scenes were more of a challenge to make interesting. I remember the first scene I saw clearly was the one near the end where, after running from cops for 50 pages in a pig suit, Slothrop collapses in the seat of a truck and pulls the head of the suit up and smokes a cigarette "wishing he could just sleep." I saw that one very clearly. It's nice--Slothrop's tired of all the running around and absurdity but he is still irretrievably absurd. It reminds of that Social Distortion line--"You can run all your life and not go anywhere."

TEV: Did your series of paintings depicting women in sexual siuations with an octopus come from the scene in Gravity's Rainbow where Slothrop rescues Katje from the devilfish Grigori? ZS: When I started that project I was actually looking for an antidote to Gravity's Rainbow--I'd just spent a year trying to make pictures which followed someone else's words very closely. I wanted to create a project that was just the same image over and over so I could concentrate on just making the pictures look good. Try a blue one, try a red one, y'know...

Believe it or not I'd done about 10 of them before I realized: "Duh!--this is in Gravity's Rainbow. And also Octopussy, and Leautreamont and Klimt and all those Japanese tentacle-porn movies you like and you have an octopus tattooed on your fucking arm, you moron." I'm not sure what it's about, I've never personally had a relationship with an octopus or any kind of cephalopod.

TEV: Which word is better descriptor of Gravity's Rainbow: kinky or slapstick.
ZS: What's a better descriptor of you: "some guy in LA" or "some guy who's not on fire"?

TEV: Presently not on fire, but that could change at any moment. Do you think the hundreds of hours you’ve spent illustrating the scenes and meditating on the book yield any special insight into Pynchon's processes?
ZS: On his processes, no. I mean, if you're a person in the creative business you're always hearing from people with their weird assumptions about how you work and they're always totally wrong. So I would feel like a total chump if I was gonna say I had any special insight. I think the annotaters have done a pretty good job tracking down Pynchon's sources, but I just tried to come at the thing like "Hey, I'm a reader, I picked up a book and it made me imagine this and this and this. Let's compare notes."

TEV: What’s your favorite image?
ZS: It changes. Today maybe it's 634--the text describes someone falling into a dream, at first it's just colors and then it forms into an island--the picture's pretty abstract. 186--Katje and the Octopus, is also a favorite.

After illustrating Gravity’s Rainbow, Smith was approached by Benny Profane, an L.A. pornographer, who wanted to use some of Smith’s art work in his films. This led to Smith’s appearance in the film and emergence of Zak Sabbath. Here’s Smith/Sabbath discussing the meeting with Profane.