(Click to enlarge.)
“Togetherness,” by Thomas Pynchon was published in the vol. 16, no. 12 issue of Aerospace Safety in December 1960. The byline reads “Thomas H. Pynchon” (for Huggles, presumably).
Full text of the article here (for completists only, of course).
Slow Learner. From page 641 of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Vineland. From the beginning of ch. 66 of Mason & Dixon.
Inherent Vice. From page 272, chapter 27 of Mason & Dixon.
Against the Day. From page 125, chapter 13 of Mason & Dixon.
“Whole problem ’th you folks’s generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap. . . .”
A critique (by Gen X punker Isaiah Two Four) of the Baby Boomers. From Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. The “Tube” is television, of course, but might be a placeholder for any passively-consumed entertainment.
THE NEXT TIME he saw Pléiade Lafrisée was at a café-restaurant off the Place d’Armes. It would not occur to him until much later to wonder if she had arranged the encounter. She was in pale violet peau de soie, and a hat so beguiling that Kit was only momentarily surprised to find himself with an erection. It was still early in the study of these matters, only a few brave pioneers like the Baron von Krafft-Ebing had dared peep into the strange and weirdly twilit country of hat-fetishism—not that Kit noticed stuff like that ordinarily, but it happened actually to be a gray toque of draped velvet, trimmed with antique guipure, and a tall ostrich plume dyed the same shade of violet as her dress. . . .
“This? One finds them in every other midinette’s haunt, literally for sous.”
“Oh. I must’ve been staring. What happened to you the other night?”
“Come. You can buy me a Lambic.”
The place was like a museum of mayonnaise. This being just at the height of the culte de la mayonnaise then sweeping Belgium, oversize exhibits of the ovoöleaginous emulsion were to be encountered at every hand. Heaps of Mayonnaise Grenache, surrounded by plates of smoked turkey and tongue, glowed redly as if from within, while with less, if any, reference to actual food it might have been there to modify, mountains of Chantilly mayonnaise, swept upward in gravity-impervious peaks insubstantial as cloud, along with towering masses of green mayonnaise, basins of boiled mayonnaise, mayonnaise baked into soufflés, not to mention a number of not entirely successful mayonnaises, under some obscure attainder, or on occasion passing as something else, dominated every corner.
“How much do you know of La Mayonnaise?” she inquired.
He shrugged. “Maybe up to the part that goes ‘Aux armes, citoyens’—”
But she was frowning, earnest as he had seldom seen her. “La Mayonnaise,” Pléiade explained, “has its origins in the moral squalor of the court of Louis XV—here in Belgium the affinity should not be too surprising. The courts of Leopold and Louis are not that different except in time, and what is time? Both monumentally deluded men, maintaining their power through oppression of the innocent. One might usefully compare Cleo de Mérode and the marquise de Pompadour. Neuropathists would recognize in both kings a desire to construct a self-consistent world to live inside, which allows them to continue the great damage they are inflicting on the world the rest of us must live in.
“The sauce was invented as a new sensation for jaded palates at court by the duc de Richelieu, at first known as mahonnaise after Mahon, the chief port of Minorca, the scene of the due’s dubious ‘victory’ in 1756 over the illfated Admiral Byng. Basically Louis’s drug dealer and pimp, Richelieu, known for opium recipes to fit all occasions, is also credited with the introduction into France of the cantharides, or Spanish fly.” She gazed pointedly at Kit’s trousers. “What might this aphrodisiac have in common with the mayonnaise? That the beetles must be gathered and killed by exposing them to vinegar fumes suggests an emphasis on living or recently living creatures—the egg yolk perhaps regarded as a conscious entity—cooks will speak of whipping, beating, binding, penetration, submission, surrender. There is an undoubtedly Sadean aspect to the mayonnaise. No getting past that.”
Kit was a little confused by now. “It always struck me as kind of, I don’t know . . . bland?”
“Until you look within. Mustard, for example, mustard and cantharides, n’estce pas? Both arousing the blood. Blistering the skin. Mustard is the widelyknown key to resurrecting a failed mayonnaise, as is the cantharides to reviving broken desire.”
“You’ve been thinking about mayonnaise a lot, mademoiselle.”
“Meet me tonight,” a sudden fierce whisper, “out at the Mayonnaise Works, and you shall perhaps understand things it is given only to a few to know. There will be a carriage waiting.” She pressed his hand and was gone in a mist of vetiver, abruptly as the other evening.
A passage from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day; I don’t think you need any context to appreciate this passage.
A great shout went up near the doorway, bodies flowed toward a fattish pale young man who’d appeared carrying a leather mailsack over his shoulder.
“Mail call,” people were yelling. Sure enough, it was, just like in the army. The fat kid, looking harassed, climbed up on the bar and started calling names and throwing envelopes into the crowd. Fallopian excused himself and joined the others.
Metzger had taken out a pair of glasses and was squinting through them at the kid on the bar. “He’s wearing a Yoyodyne badge. What do you make of that?”
“Some inter-office mail run,” Oedipa said.
“This time of night?”
“Maybe a late shift?” But Metzger only frowned. “Be back,” Oedipa shrugged, heading for the ladies’ room.
On the latrine wall, among lipsticked obscenities, she noticed the following message, neatly indited in engineering lettering:
“Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only. Box 7391. L. A.”
WASTE? Oedipa wondered. Beneath the notice, faintly in pencil, was a symbol she’d never seen before, a loop, triangle and trapezoid, thus:
It might be something sexual, but she somehow doubted it. She found a pen in her purse and copied the address and symbol in her memo book, thinking: God, hieroglyphics. When she came out Fallopian was back, and had this funny look on his face.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he told them. He had an envelope. Oedipa could see, instead of a postage stamp, the handstruck initials PPS.
“Of course,” said Metzger. “Delivering the mail is a government monopoly. You would be opposed to that.”
Fallopian gave them a wry smile. “It’s not as rebellious as it looks. We use Yoyodyne’s inter-office delivery. On the sly. But it’s hard to find carriers, we have a big turnover. They’re run on a tight schedule, and they get nervous. Security people over at the plant know something’s up. They keep a sharp eye out. De Witt,” pointing at the fat mailman, who was being hauled, twitching, down off the bar and offered drinks he did not want, “he’s the most nervous one we’ve had all year.”
“How extensive is this?” asked Metzger.
“Only inside our San Narciso chapter. They’ve set up pilot projects similar to this in the Washington and I think Dallas chapters. But we’re the only one in California so far. A few of your more affluent type members do wrap their letters around bricks, and then the whole thing in brown paper, and send them Railway Express, but I don’t know . . .”
“A little like copping out,” Metzger sympathized.
“It’s the principle,” Fallopian agreed, sounding defensive. “To keep it up to some kind of a reasonable volume, each member has to send at least one letter a week through the Yoyodyne system. If you don’t, you get fined.” He opened his letter and showed Oedipa and Metzger.
Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I’d drop you a note. How’s your book coming? Guess that’s all for now. See you at The Scope.
“That’s how it is,” Fallopian confessed bitterly, “most of the time.”
“What book did they mean?” asked Oedipa.
Turned out Fallopian was doing a history of private mail delivery in the U. S., attempting to link the Civil War to the postal reform movement that had begun around 1845. He found it beyond simple coincidence that in of all years 1861 the federal government should have set out on a vigorous suppression of those independent mail routes still surviving the various Acts of ’45, ’47, ’51 and ’55, Acts all designed to drive any private competition into financial ruin. He saw it all as a parable of power, its feeding, growth and systematic abuse, though he didn’t go into it that far with her, that particular night. All Oedipa would remember about him at first, in fact, were his slender build and neat Armenian nose, and a certain affinity of his eyes for green neon.
So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero.
From The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.
A few years ago I posted a brief excerpt from Jules Siegel’s March 1977 Playboy profile “Who is Thomas Pynchon… And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?” The excerpt came from an excerpt posted on the Pynchon-L forum, but most of the article had been removed at the (apparent) request by Siegel. A few people sent me the whole article though (thanks!) and I read it.
Jules Siegel was briefly a Cornell classmate of Pynchon’s in 1954, and they remained friends (in Siegel’s recollection) for at least two decades after. During this time, Siegel claims that Pynchon wrote him dozens of letters, which were ultimately sold at auction (along with much of Siegel’s property) to help pay for a hip replacement. Material from the letters soak into Siegel’s sketch of Pynchon’s progress, along with several stoned/drunken adventures that would not be out of place in V. or Mason & Dixon or Gravity’s Rainbow, or really, any person’s young life.
A competitive anxiety reverberates under the piece. “We were friends, maybe at some points best friends, very much alike in some important ways,” Siegel writes. “We were both writers,” he boldly writes. Siegel reminds us that “In Mortality and Mercy in Vienna, Pynchon’s first published short story, the protagonist is one Cleanth Siegel,” but protests he doesn’t see himself in that hero.
The competitive anxieties culminate in the big reveal that (spoiler!) Thomas Pynchon had an affair with Siegel’s second wife Chrissie. There’s probably a Freudian reading we can append to the details that Siegel offers about Pynchon’s sexual prowess: “He was a wonderful lover, sensitive and quick, with the ability to project a mood that turned the most ordinary surroundings into a scene out of a masterful film—the reeking industrial slum of Manhattan Beach would become as seen through the eye of Antonioni, for example.”
Or maybe these unsexy details are just a sign of Playboy’s editorial hand. Wedged gracelessly between ads for vibrators and nude greeting cards, Siegel’s lines often reek of 1970’s Playboy’s rhetorical house style, a kind of frank-but-(attempted)-sensual glossiness that contrasts heavily with Pynchon’s own sex writing. At times I found myself reading Siegel’s prose in one of Will Ferrell’s more pompous accents.
Even worse is the casual sexism of the piece—which again, may be attributable to Playboy’s editors. Siegel, on his first wife (sixteen when he married her): “She was so wonderful a lover, generous and easily aroused, but I was too callow then to appreciate her.” Of his second wife: “It is easy to underestimate her intelligence, but it is a mistake. She is obviously too pretty to be serious, conventional wisdom would have you believe.” Of one of Pynchon’s girlfriends: “Susan has red hair and is breathtakingly beautiful, with the voluptuous body of a showgirl. Like Chrissie, she is much brighter than she looks.”
More interesting, obviously, are the (supposedly) real-life details that inform Pynchon’s fiction. Siegel notes some of the contents of Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach apartment: “A built-in bookcase had rows of piggy banks on each shelf and there was a collection of books and magazines about pigs.” Pigs, of course, are a major motif of Gravity’s Rainbow. Another detail that seems to connect to GR: “On the desk, there was a rudimentary rocket made from one of those pencil-like erasers with coiled paper wrappers that you unzip to expose the rubber. It stood on a base twisted out of a paper clip.” Siegel lets us know that he knocked the rocket down. Pynchon puts it back together; Siegel knocks it down again.
(Parenthetically: Siegel’s evocation of Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach days fits neatly into my picture of Inherent Vice).
In accounting details of Pynchon’s alleged affair with his wife, Chrissie, Siegel shares the following:
Once, out on the freeway, she told him that we had all gone naked at the commune, he professed to find that incredible and dared her to take off her blouse right there. She did. A passing truck hooted its horn in lewd applause. He loved her Shirley Temple impersonations—On the Good Ship Lollipop sung and danced like a kid at a birthday party. They talked about running away together.
It is hardly possible here not to recall the episode early in Gravity’s Rainbow wherein Jessica Swanlake removes her blouse in the car on a dare from Roger Mexico. Is Siegel daring the reader to extrapolate further? Extrapolation, paranoid connections—isn’t this part of Pynchonian fun?
In that spirit, I’ll close with my favorite moment from the article.
“You know the W.A.S.T.E. horn in The Crying of Lot 49? The symbol of the secret message service? Every weirdo in the world is on my wave length. You cannot understand the kind of letters I get. Someone wrote to tell me that the very same horn was the symbol of a private mail system in medieval times. I checked it out at the library. It’s true. But I made it up myself before the book was ever published, before I ever got that letter.”
The lines are supposedly from Pynchon himself. Siegel even puts them in quotation marks—so they must be real, right?
[Ed. note: Biblioklept ran a version of this post in 2015. Enjoy Pynchon in Public Day tomorrow!]
“Solid Objects”
by
Virginia Woolf
The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs; and moment by moment it became more unmistakable that it was composed of the persons of two young men. Even thus in outline against the sand there was an unmistakable vitality in them; an indescribable vigour in the approach and withdrawal of the bodies, slight though it was, which proclaimed some violent argument issuing from the tiny mouths of the little round heads. This was corroborated on closer view by the repeated lunging of a walking-stick on the right-hand side. “You mean to tell me . . . You actually believe. . .” thus the walking-stick on the right-hand side next the waves seemed to be asserting as it cut long straight stripes upon the sand.
“Politics be damned!” issued clearly from the body on the left-hand side, and, as these words were uttered, the mouths, noses, chins, little moustaches, tweed caps, rough boots, shooting coats, and check stockings of the two speakers became clearer and clearer; the smoke of their pipes went up into the air; nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill.
Continue reading ““Solid Objects” — Virginia Woolf”
The Letter, 1926 by Agnes Goodsir (1864-1939)
Lords and Ladies, 1936 by Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein, 1895-1978)
With the end of the spring term (and, frankly, a renewed commitment to weeknight sobriety), I’ve been reading a lot more and a lot faster the past few weeks. Top to bottom:
I pulled Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations out a few nights ago and ended up reading all of it over two nights and two mornings. Not the best starting point for Acker but strangely super, super readable.
Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions: I actually haven’t even done one of those silly “book acquired” posts for this one: I picked it up and just kept reading. Totally zapped me, fantastic stuff: a brash, sharp, sardonic animal rant against god his own self. Loved loved loved it.
I’ve got about a third left of Trey Ellis’s first 1988 novel Platitudes, and it’s really good—reminds me a lot of Ishmael Reed’s middle period stuff, Fran Ross’s Oreo, David Foster Wallace’s early fiction, and even Bret Easton Ellis. Platitudes is a send up of coming-of-age novels conveyed through linguistic channel surfing.
I finished the audiobook of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft) this afternoon. I’d been switch-hitting between the novel and audiobook, but gave over to my earplugs during a week of long commutes and longer chores—but returning to the print version for the images, maps, and, uh names. This is a novel larded with names and names and names. The Books of Jacob is a (and I don’t use this hackneyed bookworld word lightly) kaleidoscopic biopic of the 18th-c. messianic cult leader Jacob Frank. Close to 1000 pages/36 hours, The Books of Jacob is exhaustive, exhilarating, and exhaustive. Best of all, at the end of all, we don’t really know Jacob—we just get picture after perspective after point of view on the self-proclaimed savior.
I wrote about Drew Lerman’s Escape from the Great American Novel yesterday, right?
I also managed to get out a review of Lawrence Venuti’s new English translation of Dino Buzzati’s novel The Stronghold, which is strong holding the bottom of the stack above.
“The Three Castles”
an Italian folktale retold by Italo Calvino
translated by George Martin
A boy had taken it into his head to go out and steal. He also told his mother.
“Aren’t you ashamed!” said his mother. “Go to confession at once, and you’ll see what the priest has to say to you.”
The boy went to confession. “Stealing is a sin,” said the priest, “unless you steal from thieves.”
The boy went to the woods and found thieves. He knocked at their door and got himself hired as a servant.
“We steal,” explained the thieves, “but we’re not committing a sin, because we rob the tax collectors.”
One night when the thieves had gone out to rob a tax collector, the boy led the best mule out of the stable, loaded it with gold pieces, and fled.
He took the gold to his mother, then went to town to look for work. In that town was a king who had a hundred sheep, but no one wanted to be his shepherd. The boy volunteered, and the king said, “Look, there are the hundred sheep. Take them out tomorrow morning to the meadow, but don’t cross the brook, because they would be eaten by a serpent on the other side. If you come back with none missing, I’ll reward you. Fail to bring them all back, and I’ll dismiss you on the spot, unless the serpent has already devoured you too.”
To reach the meadow, he had to walk by the king’s windows, where the king’s daughter happened to be standing. She saw the boy, liked his looks, and threw him a cake. He caught it and carried it along to eat in the meadow. On reaching the meadow, he saw a white stone in the grass and said, “I’ll sit down now and eat the cake from the king’s daughter.” But the stone happened to be on the other side of the brook. The shepherd paid no attention and jumped across the brook, with the sheep all following him.
The grass was high there, and the sheep grazed peacefully, while he sat on the stone eating his cake. All of a sudden he felt a blow under the rock which seemed to shake the world itself. The boy looked all around but, seeing nothing, went on eating his cake. Another blow more powerful than the first followed, but the shepherd ignored it. There was a third blow, and out from under the rock crawled a serpent with three heads. In each of its mouths it held a rose and crawled toward the boy, as though it wanted to offer him the roses. He was about to take them, when the serpent lunged at him with its three mouths all set to gobble him up in three bites. But the little shepherd proved the quicker, clubbing it with his staff over one head and the next and the next until the serpent lay dead.
Then he cut off the three heads with a sickle, putting two of them into his hunting jacket and crushing one to see what was inside. What should he find but a crystal key. The boy raised the stone and saw a door. Slipping the key into the lock and turning it, he found himself inside a splendid palace of solid crystal. Through all the doors came servants of crystal. “Go
od day, my lord, what are your wishes?”
“I wish to be shown all my treasures.”
So they took him up crystal stairs into crystal towers; they showed him crystal stables with crystal horses and arms and armor of solid crystal. Then they led. him into a crystal garden down avenues of crystal trees in which crystal birds sang, past flowerbeds where crystal flowers blossomed around crystal pools. The boy picked a small bunch of flowers and stuck the bouquet in his hat. When he brought the sheep home that night, the king’s daughter was looking out the window and said, “May I have those flowers in your hat?”
“You certainly may,” said the shepherd. “They are crystal flowers culled from the crystal garden of my solid crystal castle.” He tossed her the bouquet, which she caught.
When he got back to the stone the next day, he crushed a second serpent head and found a silver key. He lifted the stone, slipped the silver key into the lock and entered a solid silver palace. Silver servants came running up saying, “Command, our lord!” They took him off to show him silver kitchens, where silver chickens roasted over silver fires, and silver gardens where silver peacocks spread their tails. The boy picked a little bunch of silver flowers and stuck them in his hat. That night he gave them to the king’s daughter when she asked for them.
The third day, he crushed the third head and found a gold key. He slipped the key into the lock and entered a solid gold palace, where his servants were gold too, from wig to boots; the beds were gold, with gold sheets, pillows, and canopy; and in the aviaries fluttered hundreds of gold birds. In a garden of gold flowerbeds and fountains with gold sprays, he picked a small bunch of gold flowers to stick in his hat and gave them to the king’s daughter that night.
Now the king announced a tournament, and the winner would have his daughter in marriage. The shepherd unlocked the door with the crystal key, entered the crystal palace and chose a crystal horse with crystal bridle and saddle, and thus rode to the tournament in crystal armor and carrying a crystal lance. He defeated all the other knights and fled without revealing who he was.
The next day he returned on a silver horse with trappings of silver, dressed in silver armor and carrying his silver lance and shield. He defeated everyone and fled, still unknown to all. The third day he returned on a gold horse, outfitted entirely in gold. He was victorious the third time as well, and the princess said, “I know who you are. You’re the man who gave me flowers of crystal, silver, and gold, from the gardens of your castles of crystal, silver, and gold.”
So they got married, and the little shepherd became king.
And all were very happy and gay,
But to me who watched they gave no thought nor pay.
I’ve long been a fan of Drew Lerman’s Snake Creek strip, and eagerly look forward to each new collection. The latest is Escape from the Great American Novel, which I’ve tried not to read all at once. I should have a full review in the next few weeks, but so far, Great Stuff—Escape is funny, erudite without being precious, and soulful. It also shows an expansion of Lerman’s narrative development (without sacrificing the kind of gags and send ups that one wants out of a great strip).
Here’s publisher Radiator Comics’ description:
Escape from the Great American Novel by Drew Lerman follows best friends, Roy and Dav, as they find themselves on opposite sides of a battle between apocalyptic oil barons and bomb-chucking anarchists. But Dav just wants to write the Great American Novel, while Roy wonders what the big deal is—after all, their world is only another fiction.
And here’s a nice little throwaway Gaddis gag:
After an early spring purge n’ clean, I took a few boxes of books to my local used bookstore. I had intended to browse just a bit and not pick up anything (apart from a few Jeff VanderMeer novels my son had asked for), but I wound up getting three books: a pristine first U.S. edition of J.G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, Alasdair Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly, and surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun’s ostensible biography of the occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (of the Golden Dawn).
I had never heard of Colquhoun’s book, but I’m a fan of her paintings and the cover struck me. The book seems to be a history of the occult organization the Golden Dawn, or, more to the point, the roots of that organization. It’s filled with photographs and diagrams and charts. Like this one:
Alasdair Gray’s collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly is also crammed with illustrations—Gray’s own, like this one:
Like Gray’s 1984 novel 1982, Janine, the collection is filled with typographic experiments, a kind of concrete poetry in prose I guess. The “About the Author” blurb on the flap is great stuff (still can’t top the blurb for 1982, Janine though):
On the Contrary, 1952 by Kay Sage (1898-1963)
Biblioklept 