The Elegant Variation

DELAYED POSTING

We're running a bit behind with today's Pynchon posts.  Please sit tight as we grapple with some tech hiccups.  Until then, pop over at take a look at the Forbes Fictional 15 - the fifteen richest fictional characters.   No Pynchon characters on the list ...

BREAKING: OJ CANCELLED

Apparently, Rupert Murdoch has done the right thing.  We didn't think Judith Regan could be shamed, but the AP reports the OJ book has been cancelled.

''I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,'' said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. ''We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.''

PYNCHON WEEK COMMENCES

Many thanks to Jim Ruland for providing the content for Pynchon Week.

It’s always exciting when a major novelist releases a new work; but when that novelist is Thomas Pynchon it is a rare and beautiful thing, a cause for celebration. Pynchon occupies a place in the literary zeitgeist that is unique in American letters. The breadth and scope of his novels surpass anything most reasonable novelists would even attempt and his intellect is outpaced only by his imagination. No one questions his Promethean talents, but we don’t quite know what to do with him either. He is, perhaps, the only literary genius this country has ever produced.

Two of the obstacles that confront the reader interested in summiting Mt. Pynchon are his reputation for writing difficult, encyclopedic books and his inaccessibility as a literary recluse. Make no mistake: he is difficult and he is a recluse, but for those who don’t fully engage his works that’s all he is. These hurdles don’t deter serious readers from delving into his books so much as distract them from considering what the books are actually about. A reader interested in offbeat approaches to early American history who might be predisposed toward a book like Mason & Dixon, for example, has to sift through a lot of noise before they encounter an appreciation of the novel and its merits.

That’s what you’ll find here this week: considerations of Pynchon’s work, not more commentary on the mythology surrounding the man and his motives. There’ll be reflections, reviews, discussions with people with unusual approaches to the books, and if we can rustle up a ukulele and a kazoo, we may even break into song. All together now…

PYNCHON HIGHLIGHTS

Like many writers with a reputation for difficulty, Pynchon’s books are often screamingly funny. I asked several of my esteemed colleagues to name their favorite scene from Pynchon’s oeuvre.  You're invited to join them and post your favorite scene from Pynchon’s previous novels in the comments section below. - Jim Ruland

Sean Carswell: My favorite Pynchon? Mason and Dixon smoking pot with George Washington while Washington's slave sits around making master jokes. Tyrone Slothrop escaping in a hot air balloon and fending of Major Marvy's Mothas with custard pies. Tyrone Slothrop dressed up as the pig-themed superhero stealing hash from Harry Truman's windowpane.

Louis Gallo: It's been quite a while since I've read V, I didn't like Vineland much at all, but two scenes stick out for me from Gravity's Rainbow: 1. The utterly gross, disgusting shit-eating scenes. 2. The sudden disappearance of Slothrop from the novel altogether, except for the sound of his harmonica in the distance. That bit was fantastic. Main character just disappears!!! Into the Preterite, I assume.

Susan Henderson: The scene that sticks out for me is easy. It's Esther's nose job in V. The doctor who does the surgery is an old war veteran who knows first-hand about the fraternity of freaks who have suffered deforming injuries in war. He's a rough man with old-fashioned techniques for plastic surgery; and there's Esther on the day of her surgery, medicated numb but not unconscious. And the whole scene is gruesome and oddly sexual. There's a line the doctor says as he's sawing and snapping bones about how frail we all are. God, it's wonderful, and you're not at all expecting what happens when she returns to his office for post-op, all wild-eyed and bandaged and turned on.

Dan Kaplan: Here's one that strikes me. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, in her quest to understand the operations and verify the existence of the mail-distribution organization Trystero, wanders into Golden Gate Park, where she happens onto "a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours." Such a simple, profound piece of oddity--Oedipa happening onto others' collective dream, which is apparently her own reality--that perpetuates the blurring of what does and doesn't exist, is "real" or imagined in the novel. Amplifying the spookiness is that these are displaced, spectral children who are on the outskirts of safety, hiding in surprising places and deceiving those who love them. Disturbing. Love it.

Carolyn Kellogg:  So much of Pynchon's work is ridiculous wordplay to the extreme -- say, the shrink Dr. Hilarius in The Crying of Lot 49, paranoid and locked up while the police come to arrest him -- that it's easy to overlook how prescient he is. In that book, published in 1966, there's a bar near Yoyodyne populated with engineer-type conspiracy theorists listening to Stockhausen on the jukebox; Saturdays are live electronic music nights. Ridiculous and futuristic, maybe: but since the 1990s, I've been going to that bar. We've all been there. It's at the bar that protagonist Oedipa first sees a drawing that looks like a muted trumpet. It may symbolize a secret mail system, which might imply many other things (then again, it might not). I had the symbol tattooed on my wrist. Some people recognize it. One day I was at Trader Joe's and the checkout guy asked me about it. "It's from a book," I said vaguely, not wanting to sound too smarty-pants. He asked about the book and I told him. "Yeah, I knew it," he said, smiling. I asked what he thought of The Crying of Lot 49, but he hadn't read it; I was the third person who'd come to his register that week with the same tattoo. Either I'm a member of a vast conspiracy (so secret that I'm unaware of it), or there are legions of Pynchon fans out there, all wearing our affiliation on our skin.

John Leary: V, I read in 1994, when I was "stationed" in Vietnam. V is a book about paranoia, and I loved it, and it spoke to me deeply, it seemed. Then a few years after I left Vietnam I read in the newspaper that Lariam, the anti-malarial medication I was taking in Vietnam, had as one of its side effects paranoia. So, that didn't exactly ruin the book for me, but it maybe lost a little resonance. I no longer really want to go to Malta, for example.

Scott O’Connor: I’m a big fan of a sequence not far into V., where the two protagonists, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, cross paths for the first time in the NYC sewer system. Profane has gotten work with a shabby band of alligator hunters, all armed with 12-gauge shotguns and unreliable flashlights, navigating the narrow refuse pipes far below Manhattan. Stencil, following his own plotline (and the title character of the book), has also journeyed down into the sewers--disguised, unfortunately, as an alligator. In the course of Profane’s pursuit of the gator, we hear the troubled bureaucratic history of the alligator patrol, the story of the patrol’s boss, brief glimpses of other guys on the squad, and the hair-raising legend of a Depression-era Catholic priest who tried (and failed gruesomely) to bring religion to the rats of the very sewer system Profane is stumbling through. All this within the 20-odd pages of Chapter Five, and told from the perspectives of (among others) Profane, Stencil, Father Fairing, even a couple of the catechized rats in question. Profane finally catches up to Stencil (in what must be one hell of a convincing gator costume). Gunshots ensue. The density of imagination in Pynchon sequences like this always remind me of Silver-Age Fantastic Four and Justice League comics: each panel is so packed with action and ideas—a fight scene, lines of overlapping dialogue, a villainous diatribe, subplots lurking in the background—that it threatens to become completely overwhelming when, at the last second, it propels you off into the next panel, and the next and the next, careening hellbent to the end of the book. More bang for your buck, really, with this kind of stuff.

Karen Palmer: Pynchon himself dismissed 1965's The Crying of Lot 49, saying, "I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." But the book -- witty, sly, and absurd -- offers the melancholy pleasure of prescience. In an early scene Pynchon's heroine, Oedipa Maas, encounters the Peter Pinguid Society, a group of right-of-the-Birchers, drip-dry-suited Yoyodyne engineers whose Civil War hero commanded the Confederate man-of-war "Disgruntled." In 1863, Pinguid (Dubya) plans an attack on San Francisco (Iraq), to open a second front for the war (on terror). Meanwhile, Russia dispatches its Far East Fleet, hoping to discourage Britain and France from aiding the Confederacy. The "Disgruntled" may have sighted one of the Russian ships (WMD); shots may have been fired (9/11); some vessel or other may have been sunk (Mission Accomplished) . . .

Rolf Potts: My strongest impression from his writing comes from the only book of his I read, V, where he's talking about how Benny Profane rides the subway and is weak with lust because there are so many pretty girls everywhere. I was like 21 when I read that, and it seemed so true. Still does, on spring days in NY or Paris.

Danna Sides: I loved Gravity's Rainbow even though experiencing the book was very much like chasing a rabbit down wormhole after wormhole, which leads to yet another wormhole. I enjoyed thinking about the mythological and occult connections conflated with world events, and how literally everybody and everything was in there: Andrew Jackson to Hansel & Gretel; genocide to seriously twisted sex. If I had to chose, I'd say I especially like the flashback of when Slothrop loses his blues harp down the loo and the Orpheus/descent into the Underworld allusions. I also enjoyed his oblique commentary on genocide: Herero/Jews. Lots of humor and serious rage right under the surface. His brain is like Google: his associations are limitless, fluid, wild interconnections galore. I remember thinking his prose made my brain tingle like when I drink a little too much champagne.

Benjamin Weissman: The bar scene in V with the bosom nipple spigots has never left me.

Antoine Wilson: My favorite/most memorable Pynchon moment is probably the visit with Washington in Mason & Dixon, where Washington is smoking hemp, being entertained by the proto-Sammy-Davis-Jr. slave, and Martha brings in the munchies.

PYNCHON'S INVISIBILITY

Many thanks to Theresa Duncan for contributing this essay.  She is a former video game designer and current cultural critic and filmmaker. She hails from Detroit, Michigan, but currently lives in Los Angeles. Theresa has written for Feed Magazine, Artforum, and Slate.

"My silence was the silence of ten men." --David Berman

I don't really think about Pynchon's invisibility, because somewhere in the back of my mind I know that like the Cottingsley Fairies he hides from THEM but reveals himself to US. So he's always there, you know, the game of fort/da forever over, because you can't lose what you never had. Pynchon's invisibility is so much more vivid, isn't it? Than seeing some warmed-over wonder read at the 92nd Street Y and you have to go "that's his voice?" matching it with the better one that comes like wind out of the great library of the uncollected unconscious to invisibly light up every book you've ever read. And then--God--listen to the sycophants in the audience titter at even the unfunny ones in order to prove that they are closer to the great man's mind and humor and vision.

Pynchon's disappearance then, is nearly as great an act of generosity as the wonder-books he himself writes. Like the Hebrew moment of Tsim Tsum where God first withdrew from the universe in order to make room for his creation the universe, Pynchon's withdrawal means that we get that much more mental real estate. You know that feeling? You wait and wait for a book like this, buy it, and when you get around to opening it, you just start expanding...There's not even any photos of Pynchon except that silly sailor one. Invisibility. Perhaps it's a vain celebrity peccadillo, but to me it works as an act of psychoanalytic silence, where what I really pay for is to have the great man with his mighty mind listen, not talk.

And in that silence (still so vividly shaped by compassion and humor and intelligence) we suddenly have a limitless place to put the best of ourselves. Have you ever had a session that was timed a half-minute off, and had to witness another analysand waiting in the tiny dim foyer off Central Park West, next to your leaded glass windows and the your long green velvet curtain, which you thought were perhaps imaginary, or maybe props placed just so to frame your mental stage productions and yours alone? I mean, you're basically paying to be an only child aren't you, not for this shit. And so by sparing us the sight of other readers, we get a book that has room enough not for just ten men, not just a limitless amount of them, but room for just one. And now I'm afraid that's all the time we have. That's not me you see brushing past as you climb from the waiting room outside into your own personal thought-kingdom. Dear Reader, (as they used to say) it's probably just some fake fairy from a photo, you know, or a trick of the literary light.

THE END OF MR. Y

Not too long ago, I complained about PopMatters' review of Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y, and promised my own official take.  It runs today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Here's an excerpt:

That hoary workhorse, "the novel of ideas," gets an invigorating kick in the pants in Scarlett Thomas' imaginative new novel The End of Mr. Y. Among the ideas on offer for our reading pleasure, one can choose from the works of Samuel Butler, Schrödinger's Cat, Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, relativity vs. quantum mechanics, the power of prayer, Jacques Derrida, homeopathy, the search for LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor), Victorian science (luminiferous ether, anyone?), Heidegger's Being and Time, and the genetics of laboratory mice. And that's a partial listing.

But The End of Mr. Y is considerably more than a precocious recitation of seemingly disparate ideas. It is, above all, an exhilarating, breakneck narrative that leaves the reader dizzily impressed with Thomas' brio and talent as she takes each new preposterous plot development (an 8-foot-tall mouse god? a secret government plan for mind control?) and makes it utterly convincing.

You can read the rest here.  The book is garnering deserved positive attention among litblogs.

UPDATE:  Harcourt has set up a website for The End of Mr. Y that's worth checking if you'd like to know more about this fascinating title.

A bit of housekeeping.  In honor of this week's release of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, TEV will be running three days of devoted posts courtesy of our very own resident Pynchon Scholar Jim Ruland.  There will be no posts on Thursday and Friday and I'll be back in the saddle on Monday.  (Of course, as ever, I reserve the right to randomly pop in from time to time.)  Please do make you sure you check out Jim's work - he's got some awfully cool stuff planned, not your typical bag of Pynchoniana.  And you can use the new email feature (top right corner) if you'd like your posts mailed to you.

Happy holidays one and all.  See you back here in a week.  (Oh, and to all those who've asked, Casino Royale was absolutely terrific.  This Bond fan is pleased, indeed.)

BETA TESTING

We've added a new feature, the email updates thingy there in the upper right corner.  If we've set it up properly (and that's always a big if), it should email you daily updates of TEV.  We have no idea what to expect, so perhaps a few brave souls might sign up and then let us know when/if you see updates and what you think of the service.

Always looking for ways to improve the TEV Experience around here ... We live to serve.

TEV GIVEAWAY - PRIDE AND PREJUDICE DVD

We're awfully pleased to offer a special TEV Giveaway today.  We've got a copy of the 3-DVD edition of Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle's memorable BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice for a lucky reader. It's all digitally remastered and inludes a behind the scenes documentary.

The DVDs will go to the first person to email us with the subject line "UNIVERSAL TRUTH".  As always, please include your full mailing address, and previous winners are ineligible.

UPDATE:  We have a winner:  Congratulations to Laura Strachan of Annapolis, MD.   And many thanks to all who wrote in.

HITCHENS. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.

It's Casino Royale day here at Chez TEV.  We're off to the movies but we leave you with Christopher Hitchens' NPR  discussion about Kingsley Amis's The Book of Bond, written under the pseudonym William (Bill) Tanner - M's chief of staff, as loyal fans will know.

PROPHET WITH (BELATED) HONOR

The first full collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's works is finally being published in Russia.

It was a cherished moment for the aging writer, who has been through prison camps and exile and, Natalya Solzhenitsyn said, feels the "draining of the life force" as his 88th birthday approaches. He was not at the presentation.

"Alexander Isayevich told me that the French have a saying: 'Nothing comes too late for he who is able to wait,'" Natalya Solzhenitsyn, who has nurtured her husband's work and protected his privacy, told a news conference, using his first name and patronymic.

With financial support from a state-owned bank, the 30-volume project marks the latest twist in what Solzhenitsyn's wife called the "very dramatic fate of Solzhenitsyn's books," which helped reveal the brutality of the Soviet system and dictator Josef Stalin's labor camps.