We shall call him Vladimir, since it is a rare name and in point of fact he was unique. Those to whom he appeared foolish tried to win a glance, a word from him, which he rarely gave. In inferior clothes he behaved more sanguinely than in elegant ones, and was basically a good person who merely made the mistake of falsely attributing and affixing to himself faults which he did not have. He was hard primarily on himself. Isn’t that inexcusable?
Once he lived with a married couple and was impossible to drive away. “It is time that you left us alone,” was intimated to him; he seemed hardly able to imagine it, saw the woman smiling and the man turn pale. He was chivalry itself. Serving always gave him a lofty notion of the bliss of existence. He could not see pretty women burdened with small boxes, packages, and so on, without springing forth and expressing the wish to be helpful, at which he first always fought back the slightest fear of intruding.
From whence did Vladimir descend? Well, certainly from none other than his parents. It seems peculiar that he admits when down on his luck to having often been happy, when successful to having been morose, and that he says the driving force of his existence is his industriousness. No one ever saw such a satisfied and at the same time dissatisfied man. No one was quicker and in the very next instant more irresolute.
Once a girl promised to meet him at such and such a time and then kept him waiting. This came as a surprise to him. Another asserted, “It befits you to be swindled. Do you not have a peculiar predilection for jokes which border on disregard?”
“You are mistaken,” is all he answered.
He never bore a person a grudge, because “I, too, have often played unfairly with people.”
At the ladies’ cafe he was amused by the mimicry and expressions of the customers. By the way, he was no friend of too many diversions, as much as he valued them by way of exception. He thought about everything only to forget it in an instant, was a good reckoner because he did not permit his feelings to have power over his mind.
The women thought little of him, but not without always becoming interested in him again. They called him timid, but he likewise them. They played with and feared him.
To one lady, who flaunted her wealth before him in perhaps too clever a manner, he was most courteous, as one is when one feels for that person nothing. He found uncultured girls inspired by their need for instruction and on the other hand also such who have read everything and now wished to be almost ignorant. For injustices suffered he never avenged himself and perhaps avenged himself sufficiently in just this way. Those who did not treat him as he had wished, he let go, dropped; that is to say, he accustomed himself to not thinking about many unpleasant things. That’s how he protected his soul from confusion, his thoughts from unhealthy hardness.
Music put him in a tender mood, as it does most people. If he saw himself favoured by a girl, it seemed as if she wished to hold him down, and he kept clear of her. He was as suspicious as a southerner, of himself as well as others; frequently jealous but never for long, because his self-respect quickly freed him from the persecution of envy, envy which to him seemed hardly awakened, unfounded, and of no substance.
Once he lost a friend, and said to himself, “He’s losing as much as I.” He worshipped a woman until she made one error, and it was no longer possible for him to pine for her. A rash remark from her had the result that he laughed at her, and he was happy about it. Feeling sorry for her, he no longer needed to be sorry for himself.
He stayed young and used his strength for the acquiring and exercise of attention to people who most needed not to be glanced over insensitively, the feeble and the aged. Do we speak too highly of him?
Sometimes he carries on like a gad-about-town, visits so-called vulgar dives. There are people around who rebuke him for it, but who would themselves gladly be mirthful, which their spheres so seldom allow. He has had imitators, but the original remains himself. Imitation, by the way, is quite natural.
Copies can also be appealing, but only from the original can great value come.
“Rollerettes Against Change!” by Melinda Gebbie. The piece is the back cover of Wimmin’s Comix #8, March 1983, Last Gasp. Reprinted in The Complete Wimmin’s Comix, 2016, Fantagraphics.
I don’t know why Against the Day hasn’t been banned. In one of the most remarkable scenes penned by an American writer, Pynchon cites events that the anti-woke crowd would want deleted. Referring to the Blacks and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies who are present in that scene, the character Lew Basnight “gradually understood that what everybody here had in common was having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about directly — a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S. government.” Those with prominent media megaphones today are denying that such cataclysms took place.
Chapter 15 opens proximal to Xmas time, presumably 1931, still–although it’d take a reread for me to pin down the timeline better. Hicks is in the grip of mild paranoia, feeling like he’s the target of some unknown They. The feeling is a haunting: “light as delusional bugs, the ghostly crawl of professional finger-eye coordination, somewhere above and in the distance, tightening in on whatever is centered in its crosshairs, which at the moment happens to be Hicks’s head.”
Hicks’s paranoia is well-placed. He’s “handed a parcel wrapped in festive red-and-green paper whose design features Xmas trees, reindeer, candy canes, so forth. Ribbon tied in a big bow. Something to do with Christmas” by miscreants claiming to be “Santa’s elves.”
Skeptical Hicks denies the supernatural, natch, despite the “ghostly crawl” that’s come over his aspect this haunted season. The so-called elves protest that they are cousins of Billie the Brownie, an historical mainstay of Milawaukee’s Schuster’s Department Store Christmas spectacles.
(I’ve tried not to overload these riffs with too many of Pynchon’s Milwaukee/Milwaukee-proximal references–like, I couldn’t leave Les Paul out when I riffed on Ch. 8, but I didn’t include his reference in the same chapter to Árpád Élő, the Hungarian-American physicist who taught at Marquette in Milwaukee for four decades, during which time he developed the Elo chess rating. Anyway, the point is — for a breezy novel, Shadow Ticket is still pretty dense. Pynchon enjoys fat in the right proportion.)
Anyway, addressing Hicks as “Schultz,” the elves deliver an Xmas package and evaporate into thin air. Then who appears? “Damn if it ain’t the same sawed-off Bolshevik striker Hicks didn’t manage to kill that fateful night not so long ago,” who we learned of back in Ch. 4 (recall Hicks felt some kind of metaphysical interjection prevented his striking down the protester). He warns Hicks to dispose of the package posthaste, insinuating it’s a time bomb.
Hicks steps into Wisebroad’s Shoes in order to use their, yes, X-ray machine. The narrator informs us that, “One of many interesting facts about Milwaukee is that along with the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout, it’s also the birthplace of the shoe-store X-ray machine.” I have to admit I thought at first that the ridiculousness of such an apparatus struck me as a goofy Pynchonian invention. But shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were like a totally real twentieth-century thing. (One of the shoe clerks attests that he prefers Brannock devices as X-rays “don’t pick up fat, and fat’s the key, see.”)
The X-ray riff here ties into Shadow Ticket’s themes of mad science, glow-in-the-dark wonders, and strange rays, like those Dr. Swampscott Vobe was said to experiment on his psychiatric patients (Ch. 14) or the irradiated “Radio-Cheez” that helped establish the Airmont cheese fortune (Ch. 13).
Instead of a bomb in the package, Hicks and the shoe clerks see something closer to a face when they peer into the fluoroscope’s lens. The scene is another moment of anxious dread, horror even, woven into the comic zaniness:
“Despite a certain blurriness, Hicks realizes it is inescapably a face, not unchanging and lifeless, like you’d get from a severed head for example, but instead gazingback with its eyes wide open and holding a gleam of recognition, a face he’s supposed to know but doesn’t, or at least can’t name. Mouth about to open and tell him something he should’ve known before this. The window he never wanted to have to look through, the bar he used to know enough not to set foot inside of.”
Hicks disposes of the package in Lake Michigan, where it explodes.
Later, Hicks, haunted and depressed, finds some solace in April. But they both know he won’t keep the girl, even as he dreams of them as partners on the move, “teamed up against each day and its troubles.”
The chapter ends with Hicks trying to pick up the thread of why those elves delivered the bomb to him, and why they called him Schulz. Uncle Lefty isn’t really much help. Hick checks in with the anarchist bombsmith Michele “Kelly” Stecchino, a character who could fit in neatly in Against the Day. Kelly suggests that “an explosion, not always but sometimes, is actually somebody with something to say. Like, a voice, with a message we aren’t receiving so much as overhearing.” He then advises Hicks to get out of town, suggesting a trip to Italy. Hicks protests that Italy’s, “Fascist dictatorship, Professore,” and anarchist Kelly needles him back, asking “What makes you private dicks any different?…Study your history, gabadost, you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys.” Again, one of the major conflicts in Shadow Ticket is Hicks realizing which side of history he wishes to be on. Hicks then checks in at the Nazi bolwing alley, New Nuremberg Lanes with his old associate Ooly, who thinks that the bomb “don’t feel local. Somethin’s on the way around here, bigger than a gang war.” That would be a World War. Finally, Hicks checks in with Lew Basnight (who was in Against the Day); Lew tells him that what he’s “after is an Overlooked Negative.” Is that something an X-ray could catch? Hicks tells Lew that he was “always what I was hoping to be someday” — and I don’t think he meant it as mere flattery.
Chapter 16 sees the action move out from Milwaukee (much to Hicks’s chagrin). His employer seems to agree with everyone else that he should get out of town for his own health and safety, and the agency sends him to New York (Hicks picks up on the fact that his travel stipend is decidedly a one way sum).
April’s gangster beau Don Peppino sends one of his enforcers along too to suggest he hits the bricks. (The goon tries to hip Hicks to how one might take a “grape so harsh and bitter you’d never make wine from it alone—but when you blend it with other grapes, sometimes only a couple percent, suddenly a miracle” — but Hicks protests that he’s “Only a beer drinker.” The scene is a sweet repetition of sorts of Mason and Dixon’s discussion of grape people and grain people in Mason & Dixon.)
Hicks then goes through some goodbyes with April. I realized that one of my favorite bits in Shadow Ticket is that April always addresses Hicks with a different, sweet-but-pejorative nickname — “Chuckles,” “damned ox,” “Fathead,” “Einsteins” (plural), and my favorite, “ten-minute egg.” They depart in a sweet noir phantasia at Union Station.
Chapter 17 is a relatively short chapter (especially given the sprawl of Chapter 15, which, let me say, I’m sorry that I went on so long about it — part of what I’m trying to do is reread the book by writing about it and tie some themes, motifs, etc. together — I know it went on long. But it was a long chapter, chock full of Important Stuff) — sorry, Chapter 17 is a relatively short ditty, with Hicks’s train moving east through “Depression Pittsburgh, a ghost city” and then “entering deeper into the night run, having left behind and below what neon still shone, the Hoovervilles, the ghost-city light, hobo gatherings around trackside trash fires, stray auto headlights gliding briefly alongside the tracks, some fractional moonlight through the windows plus a few dim electric lamps in the observation car, deserted at this hour except for Hicks.” Reviewers and critics will rightly point out that Shadow Ticket is a detective noir; it’s possible to overlook the Gothic horror underpinnings of that genre though. Pynchon often foregrounds this Gothicism, as in the lovely description above.
Solitary in the observation car, Hicks is approached by “a Pullman porter, whose name, as he’s quick to point out, isn’t George but McKinley.” The reference here is to George Gibbs, a nineteenth century naturalist who, in the parlance of Twain, lit out for the Territory to study, among other things, indigenous languages in the Pacific Northwest.
Our Pullman porter “McKinley Gibbs turns out to be running a sideline in race records“; after riffing on politics with Hicks, he slips a few records out for our PI to peruse, including “Blind Blake, ‘Police Dog Blues.’”
We are then told that “McKinley brings it over to the club-car Victrola, puts it on. Before bar three Hicks is about to topple into a romantic nostalgia episode. ‘I’ve heard this. Not on a record, not in a club, but…'”
Presumably the referent for the “it” McKinley possesses is “Police Dog Blues” — but the “romantic nostalgia episode” reveals a different song. The vocalist? “It’s April. Natch.” We get another of Pynchon’s songs, including another of April’s nicknames for Hicks — “dimwit of my dreams” (rhymes with “strange as it seems”). But Hicks’s “romantic nostalgia episode” (American Gothic, I say) is pure reverie. He awakes — no record, no McKinley. Did either ever exist?
Chapter 18: Hicks makes it to New York and does a “courtesy drop-by at the New York branch of U-Ops, which he finds slightly west of Broadway beneath a neon sign featuring a pair of eyeballs electrically switching back and forth between bloodshot vein-crazed and lens-blank pop-bottle green.” The lurid eyeball image mixes nineteenth-century Gothicism with twentieth-century pop. Connie McSpool, on the U-Ops desk, ribs Hicks: “You just missed Judge Crater, he was in here looking for you.” Joseph Force Crater was a New York Supreme Court justice who infamously disappeared and, for a decade or two, was known as America’s “missingest” person. (Maybe surpassed, at the end of the twentieth century, by Jimmy Hoffa.) Shadow Ticket–and Pynchon’s oeuvre in general–features many characters “pulling a Crater.”
Chapter 18 concludes with Hicks overwhelmed, in true Pynchonian fashion, by a shadowy (tickety?) They. There’s “something weirdly off about Gould Fisk Fidelity and Trust,” the “bank” he finds himself at, getting an unexpected ticket to Europe and two-weeks pay. The reference here is to Black Friday, 1869, where big money boys Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to hijack the gold market in a Gilded Age financial thriller. Another fragment, maybe, from Against the Day.
The chapter ends with Hicks at “Club Afterbeat up in Harlem,” complaining to Connie McSpool that someone “wants me 86’d clear out of the U.S.A.”
I’m quite a bit further into the novel than where I’m going to have to leave off in these notes, but there will not be any so-called spoilers/discussion of material past Chapter 14
My general take on Shadow Ticket though: This is probably Pynchon’s most accessible novel. It’s fun, funny, and breezy, but it also kinda sorta bridges Against the Day to Gravity’s Rainbow — and not just in a timeline sense, but also thematically.
Chapter 8:
Hicks’s protege Skeet brings Hicks down to the “clubhouse” under the Holton Street Viaduct. Pynchon continues to develop the glow-in-the dark horror film motif, describing, “Cobwebs of purple light from radio tubes with imperfect vacuums inside…A dozen speakers going at once…Pieces of electrical gear blinking and chirping at each other, like a lab in a movie belonging to a scientist not entirely in his right mind.”
The mad scientist monitoring all these wild signals is pretty harmless though. It’s “a kid named Drover in a set of earphones.” Drover shows off the amplified ukulele he’s crafted: “Kid out in Waukesha showed me…You want the real Tom Swift, it’s this Lester kid, calls himself Red, playing hillbilly guitar up and down Bluemound Road for nickels and dimes, drive-ins, roadhouse parking lots, gets to where he needs to be heard over the traffic, so he figured this out.”
This Lester aka Rhubarb Red is, of course, Les Paul, whose artistic and technological contributions and innovations to 20th-century popular music cannot be overstated. I think his licks sound fresh today.
Pynchon has long been concerned with the intersection of art and technology; of how a signal can cut through noise.
Skeet has brought Hicks to the “clubhouse” under the viaduct to connect with Stuffy Keegan, whose REO Speed Wagon was exploded by unknown entities in Shadow Ticket’s opening chapter. Things get very, very Pynchonian here—a U-13 submarine is prowling the depths of Lake Michigan, apparently there to pick up Stuffy. Hicks is in disbelief. Drover has a hard time picking up a human voice from the sub, and declares that, “everybody must be down below at the bowling alley.” Hicks is even more incredulous: “Bowling alley on a submarine, Drover?” — setting up an execrable/wonderful Pynchonian joke that pivots on a Jules Verne novel’s title.
The episode ends with Stuffy disappearing somewhere, although Hicks is loath to believe he left on a submarine. Chapter 8 concludes with a less-skeptical Skeet pointing out that Stuffy “Kept saying things like ‘Maybe I’m a ghost now and I’m haunting you,’” again underscoring the novel’s horror-film motif.
Chapter 9 might be summarized by its opening line: “Skeet shows up at the office next day with an out-of-town tomato who causes a certain commotion.”
This fair lady is one “Fancy Vivid” (geez Thomas); no one in the detective agency can quite believe that she wants to hire them to find disappeared Stuffy, whom she loves dearly. She’s hip to the submarine thing too: “He ever say anything to you about a submarine? …Kept wanting to know if I’d ever been on one, if I’d like to go for a ride on one. At first I thought it was some kind of sex talk.”
Like the previous chapter, this one ends with a Gothic note. Hicks goes into a reverie while looking through old files, dreams he’s “in Chicago, or something calling itself that, up North Clark, across the suicides’ bridge, deep in that part of the North Side known as The Shadows.” In this space that is “haunted to saturation by the unquiet spirits of hanged men and women, white, Negro, and American Indian,” he encounters too the spirit of Stuffy who pleads for his help. “Only a dream,” Hicks tells himself.
Chapter 10:
When we first met Hicks’s Uncle Lefty back in Ch. 4, he espoused his sympathies for Adolf Hitler; in Ch. 10, after a casserole dinner, he takes his nephew to a Nazi bar, the New Nuremberg Lanes. Hicks, as yet unaware of the bar’s fascist sympathies, nevertheless picks up on the weird vibes:
“All normal as club soda, yet somehow…toonormal, yes something is making a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp, the Sombrero of Uneasiness, as it’s known in the racket. Something here is off. A bowling alley is supposed to be an oasis of beer and sociability, busy with cheerful keglers, popcorn by the bucketful, crosscurrents of flirtation, now and then somebody actually doing some bowling. But this crowd here, no, these customers are only pretendingtobowl…”
These people are all American Nazis.
Hicks runs into Ooly Schaufl (“Going by Ulrich these days”), an old associate from his strike-breaking day. The scene underlines a theme developing in the novel: Hicks slowly starting to realize which side of the line he belongs on. The reunion is broken up by the Feds though — prohis, dry agents, in the novel’s parlance.
Hicks makes his escape. At the next casserole night, Uncle Lefty gives Hicks the plot-moving-forward tip that Pynchon has frequently deployed thus far in Shadow Ticket, telling him to check out the under-radar as-yet-unopened FBI office in Milwaukee.
Chapter 11 begins with more Gothic intentions; Hicks approaches local the local FBI headquarters, which appears something closer to a haunted house:
“On days of low winter light the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long.”
In Shadow Ticket, the goofy Gothicism of glaring gargoyles butts up against the realer, deeper horror of encroaching fascism abroad and a burgeoning police state at home — and worse, the twisting, bundling of these forces. Hicks gets twisted into it; the feds want him to be their agent too.
Chapter 12 begins with Hicks’s boss Boynt going full tilt paranoid, Pynchonian style:
“The federals who had you in are likely just a front, OK? It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover. Worried about the next election, worried this latest Roosevelt if he gets in might decide to step out on his own, and even if he does revert to type after all, it might not be in time to stop the Red apocalypse that’s got them spooked out of what they think of as their wits.”
The outfit, the syndicate–Boynt ties the forces of right-wing capitalism to outright fascist gangsterism. He redirects his detective’s attention to the cheese heiress case, and the pair take off to the Airmont’s lawyers’ office. There, Hicks is asked if he’s “aware of the American Indian belief, referenced in depositions filed on Miss Airmont’s behalf, that once you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for them in perpetuity?” (This routine gets brought up again and again.)
Chapter 13:
Hicks heads out to the Airmont mansion to do some recon on missing heiress Daphne. There, he picks up on chatter about “the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, ‘Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?'”
The philosophical riffing gives way to a brief overview of the Airmont cheese fortune, which was built in no small part upon the brief success of a product called “Radio-Cheez…designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally proprietary, radioactiveingredient.”
1921 magazine advertisement for Undark, a product of the Radium Luminous Material Corporation
The narrator reminds us that this was “radium’s grand hour of popularity, when it’s still medical wisdom to seek as many ways as possible to introduce radiation into the human body—radioactive mineral water, patent radium elixirs and aphrodisiacs, radium suppositories,” before bringing up the “Radium Girls” of “nearby Ottawa, Illinois [who] were employed in painting numbers on glow-in-the-dark clock dials, licking their brushes every so often to keep them finely pointed.”
The sad story of the Radium Girls has been well documented. It is another case of real-life horror in Shadow Ticket butting up against Pynchon’s zanier play-acting theatrical horrors. The Radium Girls’ case eventually led to expanded labor protections in the United States, making them ideal Pynchonian heroes.
Cheese conspiracies develop in this chapter; we learn that “The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business.” Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese” befriends the Al Capone (“And what is it you’re the Al Capone of again?”).
At the Airmont compound we also meet G. Rodney Flaunch, “a onetime male flapper” and fiancé to departed Daphne and mom, Mrs. Vivacia Airmont.
And in Chapter 14 we finally get the backstory of Hicks and Daphne’s meet-cute. Daphne’s in disguise and on the run from “Winnetka Shores Psychopathic, a ritzy banana plantation in the neighborhood, overseen by a Dr. Swampscott Vobe, M.D. Known for a susceptibility to anything newfangled, Dr. Vobe has somehow gotten it into his head that the patients at WSP are all available to him as lab material to try out his therapy ideas on, free of charge. Drugs, electricity, rays. Dr. Vobe is specially interested in rays.”
More mad scientist Halloween-all-the-time shit. They escape via rumrunner–the boat, not the drink–and Hicks drops the heiress at an Ojibwe reservation (she claims it was her finishing school). There are more horror notes — references to werewolves and windigos — and again the note that if you save a person’s life you are forever responsible for it:
“And if I say thanks but no thanks, what happens, I get an arrow through my head?”
“You don’t have to be all that way about it either, white man.”
It’s more a family of drinks, revolving around a central theme. There are four main ways to order it: sweet, with 7 Up; sour (which is not), with sour mix or Squirt; “press” with half 7 Up and half seltzer; or seltzer only. There are regional garnish customizations using pickled vegetables — including mushrooms, asparagus, cucumbers, tomatoes, brussels sprouts and olives — that seem counterintuitive until you taste the salty, vinegar tang playing off of the spice of the bitters and the sweet thrum of the brandy. By God, our great-grandparents were on to something.
Jan Kerouac’s first autofiction novel Baby Driver is getting a reprint from NYRB. Their blurb:
“Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue.” Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. Her sojourn there–both thrilling and heartbreaking–marks the beginning of a life of restless wandering. Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac, first published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Fearless and frank, Baby Driver is the story of a difficult childhood, marked by maternal warmth and paternal disregard, and of the heady freedom and precariousness of self-reliance.
Outside, as usual, the sun shone, the trade winds blew; on her way to put some starched clothes on the line, my mother shooed some hens out of her garden; Miss Dewberry baked the buns, some of which my mother would buy for my father and me to eat with our afternoon tea; Miss Henry brought the milk, a glass of which I would drink with my lunch, and another glass of which I would drink with the bun from Miss Dewberry; my mother prepared our lunch; my father noted some perfectly idiotic thing his partner in housebuilding, Mr. Oatie, had done, so that over lunch he and my mother could have a good laugh.
The Anglican church bell struck eleven o’clock—one hour to go before lunch. I was then sitting at my desk in my classroom. We were having a history lesson—the last lesson of the morning. For taking first place over all the other girls, I had been given a prize, a copy of a book called Roman Britain, and I was made prefect of my class. What a mistake the prefect part had been, for I was among the worst-behaved in my class and did not at all believe in setting myself up as a good example, the way a prefect was supposed to do. Now I had to sit in the prefect’s seat—the first seat in the front row, the seat from which I could stand up and survey quite easily my classmates. From where I sat I could see out the window. Sometimes when I looked out, I could see the sexton going over to the minister’s house. The sexton’s daughter, Hilarene, a disgusting model of good behavior and keen attention to scholarship, sat next to me, since she took second place. The minister’s daughter, Ruth, sat in the last row, the row reserved for all the dunce girls. Hilarene, of course, I could not stand. A girl that good would never do for me. I would probably not have cared so much for first place if I could be sure it would not go to her. Ruth I liked, because she was such a dunce and came from England and had yellow hair. When I first met her, I used to walk her home and sing bad songs to her just to see her turn pink, as if I had spilled hot water all over her.
Our books, A History of the West Indies, were open in front of us. Our day had begun with morning prayers, then a geometry lesson, then it was over to the science building for a lesson in “Introductory Physics” (not a subject we cared much for), taught by the most dingy-toothed Mr. Slacks, a teacher from Canada, then precious recess, and now this, our history lesson. Recess had the usual drama: this time, I coaxed Gwen out of her disappointment at not being allowed to join the junior choir. Her father—how many times had I wished he would become a leper and so be banished to a leper colony for the rest of my long and happy life with Gwen—had forbidden it, giving as his reason that she lived too far away from church, where choir rehearsals were conducted, and that it would be dangerous for her, a young girl, to walk home alone at night in the dark. Of course, all the streets had lamplight, but it was useless to point that out to him. Oh, how it would have pleased us to press and rub our knees together as we sat in our pew while pretending to pay close attention to Mr. Simmons, our choirmaster, as he waved his baton up and down and across, and how it would have pleased us even more to walk home together, alone in the “early dusk” (the way Gwen had phrased it, a ready phrase always on her tongue), stopping, if there was a full moon, to lie down in a pasture and expose our bosoms in the moonlight. We had heard that full moonlight would make our breasts grow to a size we would like. Poor Gwen! When I first heard from her that she was one of ten children, right on the spot I told her that I would love only her, since her mother already had so many other people to love.
Our teacher, Miss Edward, paced up and down in front of the class in her usual way. In front of her desk stood a small table, and on it stood the dunce cap. The dunce cap was in the shape of a coronet, with an adjustable opening in the back, so that it could fit any head. It was made of cardboard with a shiny gold paper covering and the word “DUNCE” in shiny red paper on the front. When the sun shone on it, the dunce cap was all aglitter, almost as if you were being tricked into thinking it a desirable thing to wear. As Miss Edward paced up and down, she would pass between us and the dunce cap like an eclipse. Each Friday morning, we were given a small test to see how well we had learned the things taught to us all week. The girl who scored lowest was made to wear the dunce cap all day the following Monday. On many Mondays, Ruth wore it—only, with her short yellow hair, when the dunce cap was sitting on her head she looked like a girl attending a birthday party in The Schoolgirl’s Own Annual.
It was Miss Edward’s way to ask one of us a question the answer to which she was sure the girl would not know and then put the same question to another girl who she was sure would know the answer. The girl who did not answer correctly would then have to repeat the correct answer in the exact words of the other girl. Many times, I had heard my exact words repeated over and over again, and I liked it especially when the girl doing the repeating was one I didn’t care about very much. Pointing a finger at Ruth, Miss Edward asked a question the answer to which was “On the third of November 1493, a Sunday morning, Christopher Columbus discovered Dominica.” Ruth, of course, did not know the answer, as she did not know the answer to many questions about the West Indies. I could hardly blame her. Ruth had come all the way from England. Perhaps she did not want to be in the West Indies at all. Perhaps she wanted to be in England, where no one would remind her constantly of the terrible things her ancestors had done; perhaps she had felt even worse when her father was a missionary in Africa. I could see how Ruth felt from looking at her face. Her ancestors had been the masters, while ours had been the slaves. She had such a lot to be ashamed of, and by being with us every day she was always being reminded. We could look everybody in the eye, for our ancestors had done nothing wrong except just sit somewhere, defenseless. Of course, sometimes, what with our teachers and our books, it was hard for us to tell on which side we really now belonged—with the masters or the slaves—for it was all history, it was all in the past, and everybody behaved differently now; all of us celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday, even though she had been dead a long time. But we, the descendants of the slaves, knew quite well what had really happened, and I was sure that if the tables had been turned we would have acted differently; I was sure that if our ancestors had gone from Africa to Europe and come upon the people living there, they would have taken a proper interest in the Europeans on first seeing them, and said, “How nice,” and then gone home to tell their friends about it. Continue reading ““Columbus in Chains” — Jamaica Kincaid”→
Dr. Vitus Werdegast, Bela Lugosi’s character in The Black Cat, gives this line to mystery novelist Peter Alison (portrayed by David Manners). Here is the scene:
The epigraph for Shadow Ticket highlights a concern with the metaphysical that Pynchon has shown throughout his novels. The epigraph encapsulates this concern, ties it to the talkies, the American Gothic tradition, and wedges in a slice of absurd (and drily-delivered) humor early on.
Chapter 1; the novel’s first line:
“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.”
Shadow Ticket is set, thus far and for the most part, in Milwaukee Wisconsin in early 1931. For about half a century, The Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad ran from Chicago to Milwaukee, roughly a long the coast of Lake Michigan. It ceased operations in early 1963.
(Even went through Kenosha, kid.)
The opening paragraphs introduce us to Shadow Ticket’s hero Hicks McTaggart and establish a snappy, hardboiled style reminiscent of films of the thirties and forties (or films of the Coen Brothers that pay homage to those films).
“Everybody is looking at everybody else like they’re all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.”
These lines append the postprandial scene of a noontime explosion. We get paranoia and a whiff of the supernatural — that “deep mischief…at work.”
“Pineapples come and pineapples go,” declares Hicks’s boss Boynt Crosstown, dismissing the explosion. (Perhaps the name Boynt Crosstown evokes “Burnt Cross Town”?)
Pineapples, slang for grenades specifically or explosives more generally, pops up repeatedly early on in Shadow Ticket.
“…local multimillionaire Bruno Airmont, known throughout the dairy industry as the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile…this one’s more about his daughter Daphne…Seems your old romance has just run off with a clarinet player in a swing band.”
Daphne Airmont, Runaway Cheese Heiress: an early MacGuffin or possible red herring to look out for. One of many, many of Pynchon’s female characters on the run.
Detail from Apollo and Daphne by Pollaiuolo, c. 1470–1480
(Parenthetically, I suppose, because it’s of such minor note, but there’s a mention of one “Zbig Dubinsky” — surely, Shirley, a minor character? — but the name seems to echo the Coens’ film The Big Lebowski.)
A warning from Hicks to his protege Skeet Wheeler, a “flyweight juvenile in a porkpie hat.” We’ll see more of Skeet’s apparent sentimentality when he pockets a ball bearing from an exploded REO Speed Wagon. The line would be a throwaway for me, except that it is the first instance of the word kid in the novel. We see it pop up frequently in several forms, including kidding and kiddies. In Ch. 1, Skeet refers to his “snub nose service .32″ pistol as a “Kids’ Special.” We learn that Skeet is tapped into the “kid underworld—drifters, truants, and guttersnipes, newsboys at every corner and streetcar stop—who in turn have antennas of their own out.” The system of littler kids reporting to bigger kids, etc., reports Skeet to bigger kid Hicks, is “like Mussolini.” (Hitler will show up soon.)
“‘…New watch, I see.’
‘Hamilton, glows in the dark too.'”
The first of (by my count) four specific references to things that glow in the dark. I’ll remark on them in turn, but the other three are Hicks’s hair gel (Ch. 3), a jello salad served at the Velocity Lunch diner (Ch. 5), and a pair of novelty vampire fangs (Ch. 7).
In Pynchon’s books, and in particular in Against the Day and Mason & Dixon, there is a concern with the invisible world, which might be taken as the metaphysical world, or, the supernatural-but-not-baloney world. Perhaps these novelties that glow in the dark point in that direction?
Chapter 2 begins at the crime scene, the scene of an exploded bootlegger’s hoochwagon (the aforementioned REO Speed Wagon).
The “kid” motif develops with references to “Federal kiddies that nobody’s ever heard of,”“Chicago Latin kids,“ and “German storm kiddies.“ A page or two later soda jerk Hoagie Hivnak (of a certain “adenoidal brashness”) laments that his Ideal Pharmacy “was no place for kids, the words ‘soda fountain’ would send mothers all over town into fits, worse than ‘opium den.'” No more coke in the sodas for the “Leapers and sleigh riders” to enjoy.
Hoagie moves the plot forward, telling Hicks to “Track down Bruno Airmont wherever he’s got to.”
Chapter 3: We meet Hicks’s special lady, April Randazzo. She’s a femme fatale, folks, a singer-dancer making the late night speakeasy scene. Hicks and April seem like a suave match, but we learn that she has a fetish for married men: “A gold-accented ring finger has the same effect on April as a jigging spoon on a Lake trout, especially when kept on while kidding around, good as a framed copy of a marriage license hanging up on a love-nest wall.”
Note the kidding around there; perhaps Pynchon teases kidness as the illusion of a romanticized time of faux-innocence, an idealized (and ironized) notion of primeval purity. “Any town but this one / Couldn’t we be kids again” croons April in “what’s gotten to be her trademark ballad, backed by a minor-key semi-Cuban arrangement for accordion, saxes, banjo-uke, melancholically muted trumpet.”
Oh and before I forget, our glow-in-the dark fetish for this episode is delivered from Hicks’s “hip flask from which he pours not hooch but some slow green liquid, rubs it between his hands, runs both hands through his hair as an intensely herbal aroma fills the room…” (21). Hicks attests that his hair jelly “Lasts for days, glows in the dark” (21).
(Parenthetically–we get our first two Pynchon songs in this chapter, one from Hicks and one from April (as cited above.) The chapter ends with Hicks getting nudged again, this time to visit his Uncle Lefty, a retired cop.)
Chapter 4 starts at Uncle Lefty and Aunt Peony’s house. They, sorta, raised Hicks; like his protege Skeet (and every other hero), Hicks is an orphan.
Uncle Lefty has prepared a special “Surprise Casserole [in which] Hicks can detect sport peppers, canned pineapple,almost-familiar pork parts marinated in Uncle Lefty’s private cure, based on wildcat beer from a glazed-crock studio just across the Viaduct.” Here, a pineapple is a pineapple. But it can still be part of a surprise.
Uncle Lefty’s name is a bit ironic. He opines: “Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’ ”
Aunt Peony is more sympathetic. We learn that her words have taken on an edge as her marriage advanced, “as if some maidenly spirit, searching and pious, has set out on a trip Peony has no plans herself to make, toward a destiny quietly lifted away from her when she wasn’t looking.” Unlike Daphne (and April?), Peony failed to make her escape in good time.
We learn of Hicks’s fresh-out-of-school job as a strikebreaker. This job would generally make him on the wrong side in Pynchonian terms, but the novel extends some heartstrings his way, pulling him over to the light. Hicks, it seems, would not turn a Pinkerton villain the likes of which Pynchon castigated in Against the Day. His road to Damascus moment happens when his “lead-filled beavertail sap” disappears before he can decimate a striking “truculent little Bolshevik.” The metaphysics of this disappearing object has a profound effect on our hero.
A bit later in the chapter, Boynt offers a through-a-glass-darkly description of Milwaukee, Cream City USA, evoking, “Hitler kiddies, Sicilian mob, secret hallways and exit tunnels, smoke too thick to see through, half a dozen different languages, any lowlife thinks they can turn a nickel always after you for somethin, there’s your wholesome Cream City, kid, mental hygiene paradise but underneath running off of a heartbeat crazy as hell, that’s if it had a heart which it don’t.”
There’s the invisible world, but it might sometimes glow in the dark.
Chapter 4 segues into Chapter 5; Uncle Lefty tells Hicks to talk to ex-vaudeville mentalist Thessalie Wayward. They meet at Velocity Lunch, a cafe where “Today’s Special [is] a vivid green salad centerpiece the size and shape of a human brain, molded in lime Jell-O, versions of which have actually been observed to glow.” Hicks is hoping to learn more about the metaphysical disappearance of his beavertail sap–what divine hand intervened to prevent his killing another person?
Thessalie teaches him about ass and app: “Asported. When something disappears suddenly off to someplace else, in the business that’s called an asport. Coming in at you the other way, appearing out of nowhere, that’s an ‘apport.’ Happens in séances a lot, kind of side effect. Ass and app, as we say.”
After some speculation on this “unnamed force,” Thessalie sends Hicks out again, this time to “Talk to Lew.”
That Lew, as we see in Chapter 6, is none other than Lew Basnight, one of the many heroes of Pynchon’s opus Against the Day (which, so far, Shadow Ticket feels very much akin to). Lew’s chapter is beautiful, short and sweet, a kind of elegy for Western phantasia. He was already late to the Manifest Destiny goldrush: “Didn’t even get out there till late in life, after years of dancin the Pinkertonian around what only a couple of old-timers were still callin the Wild West anymore. Hell, I’m ready to go back…”
Pynchon then extends Lew’s fantasy of returning to a mythical Old West via “lucid dreaming… flown in from strange suburban distances, past radio antennas and skyscrapers, down the gloomy city canyons, skimming echo to echo, banking into the Dearborn station, flown invisible, ticketless, right onto the Santa Fe Chief. And away. Away, so easy…” An escape from the Modern world. Invisible, ticketless–that’s the fantasy.
Lew’s episode ends with a warning to Hicks not to become “another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation.”
In Chapter 7, Hicks takes his (his?) gal April to Chicago to see Dracula. April’s smitten by Bela Lugosi, and “Soon she is sending away to Johnson Smith down in Racine for a set of Glow-in-the-Dark Vampire Choppers, 35¢ postpaid.”
A paragraph later our hero is getting some bad news about his (his..?) gal April and one Don Peppino Infernacci. “April Randazzo is in fact the promised bride of evil,” we learn; Infernacci (good golly that name, Pynchon, chill) is “lord of the underworld.”
Infernacci could be Hades, but April doesn’t strike me as a Persephone. But we’ll see.
…this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal.
There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples.
Antoine Volodine’s 2007 novel Mevlido’s Dreams is a bleak, dystopian noir novel set several centuries in the future in the ruined city-state of Oulang-Oulane. Here, weary revolutionary Mevlido lives in a decaying ghetto called Henhouse Four, an eerie quarter inhabited by indigents, junkies, and other remnants of failed uprisings who must contend with the giant mutated birds who terrorize the borough.
Once a soldier of the revolution, Mevlido now serves as a policeman, yet he may also be a double or even triple agent, a sleeper sent through time from a kind of liminal afterlife, a bardo between death and rebirth. The novel drifts between waking and dream states, war memories and spectral futures, as Mevlido’s fragmented consciousness becomes a vessel for Volodine’s haunting post-exotic vision of history, language, and apocalypse.
About halfway through the novel, Mevlido’s bardo boss offers a handy summary of the apocalypse:
They’ve become an inexplicable species. They are just getting out of multiple wars of extermination, but a new conflict is already in sight. The population has decreased by a hundredfold, even more. Entire continents are currently uninhabitable. Those who have survived remain socially organized, but they no longer believe in themselves, or in society. They’ve inherited political systems to which they’ve lost the keys; for them ideology is a prayer devoid of meaning. The ruling classes have become criminalized, the poor obey them. Both classes act as if they were already dead. And as if, on top of that, they don’t even care. … Something in them has changed. You’d think that they no longer have the ability to differentiate between life, dreams, and death.
Our hero will be reborn into this turmoil, his consciousness a roiling mess of anxious irreality. “Even if I’m dreaming, I’m in reality,” he concludes at one point, as if to anchor himself in his mission. What that mission is, exactly, is never fully clear to Mevlido or the reader. Or perhaps the mission is very clear; as translator Gina M. Stamm puts it in her introduction, the plot of Mevlido’s Dreams “has the elements of a fairly classic tragic romance: man and woman are in love, the world prevents their being together, man descends into tragic circumstances.” This motif repeats in dreamlike iterations in the novel; Mevlido drifts through a post-exotic wasteland following orders no one remembers giving, haunted by his dead wife Verena Becker, whose presence threads through his days like a recurring dream or a flickering film reel.
We come to learn that Verena Becker died cruelly, murdered by the “child soldiers” who were pressed in to service by agents of the exploitative upper class. In Mevlido’s present time (or, more specifically one of Mevlido’s present times), the child soldiers are now “ex-child soldiers,” reviled refugees who hide under new identities, hoping to avoid the vengeance of people like Mevlido. The vengeance is not aimed just at these foot soldiers though; one of the novel’s heroes, Sonia Wolguelane, plots the assassination of the upper-echelon genociders who, now absolved of their war crimes, continue to rule the city-state with their one-time political foes. Here is Volodine’s description of one of the men Wolguelane assassinates:
Toni Müller, forty-nine years old, delegate to the Office of Fuel, policy officer during the final project of pacification of the remaining zones, initiator of the so-called controlled genocide practice, threatened with legal action after the disappearance of the Wongres, the Spanish, and the Myrzes, sued for not having been able to provide an explanation for the mysterious annihilation of the inhabitants of the Philippines. Amnestied. Director of the petroleum trusts in the remaining zones, billionaire, numerous books of economics published in his name, numerous honorific titles. During his last self-criticism, he admitted having constantly hidden from the masses the fact that he didn’t share the household chores with his wife.
While the apocalyptic stakes here are swollen to hyperbolic levels, Volodine’s critique of how the ruling class wields power nevertheless applies neatly to our own 21st-century blues. Henry Kissinger, for example, died fat and happy. I’m reminded too here of Thomas Pynchon’s critique of power, particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow, where the narrator laments that the Nazi war criminal Weissmann will not be punished but rather elevated, set to sit “among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” Look low for the preterite heroes of Mevlido’s Dreams though. They are the “faded zombies, probably candidates for another hallucinatory expedition, left-behinds who imagine they will be able to leave again.”
I am making the novel sound too grim. It is rich, and much of that richness comes from a bureaucratic, deadpan humor, the laughter of exhausted ideologues trapped in their own paperwork. But what happens to faith in any ideology when it is sundered from observable reality? Consider this exchange, in which a lost Mevlido tries to communicate with a band of men who fail to recognize him as a human being:
“Incredible,” says one of the normal ones, “it’s still talking.”
“And what is it talking about?” asks the red cap.
“About the night,” says the fat one.
“It’s talking about the night?” the bare-chested one asks, surprised.
“Yes, it must still believe in night,” says one of the normal ones.
“Incredible,” says the other normal one, “it still believes in night.”
And beneath the satire, there’s love. Volodine writes love as a metaphysical condition, a persistence that outlasts ideology, memory, and even death. The tenderness between Mevlido and Verena gives the novel its pulse. It’s the one human rhythm left in a mechanical world. Stamm’s translation conveys this rhythm in clipped, moody sentences, wounded and precise.
Like Volodine’s 2014 novel Radiant Terminus, Mevlido’s Dreams operates in the twilight between horror and tenderness. But Mevlido’s Dreams is quieter, more interior—a story of a single man’s dissolution told in flickering vignettes. It reads like the afterimage of a life projected on a cracked wall.
That light, dim and trembling, is what Volodine and Stamm preserve. Mevlido’s Dreams reads not like a film script but like a film itself: shadowy scenes unfolding in silence, broken by bursts of deadpan dialogue and ghostly humor. You can see the ash swirling, hear the echo of curses in an alley haunted by mutant birds.
Oulang-Oulane feels shot through a grim lens, intense, ugly, beautiful, like something from Tarkovsky’s Stalker or a Béla Tarr film, with scenes of desolation punctuated by tenderness. Volodine isn’t cinematic because he borrows film tropes, but because he composes through atmosphere and rhythm. His sentences drift like a camera through fog and memory.
That line above—“it still believes in night”—could be the novel’s credo. Dreaming isn’t retreat; it’s resistance. Writing, too. Mevlido’s Dreams works as both a political fable and a séance for the lost, a way of keeping consciousness flickering in the dark. Highly recommended.
Mattia Filice’s Driver is new in English translation by Jacques Houis. Here’s NYRB’s blurb:
Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails—packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond—Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.
Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.
Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.
Surprisingly, NYRB’s blurb doesn’t mention the novel’s striking style; on the page, the episodes of Driver look like poems that sometimes coalesce into prose. The chapter titles and section titles also seem to cast the novel as a take on knight’s quest. Compelling stuff.
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Biblioklept 