The Pond, 2023 by Aron Wiesenfeld (b. 1972)
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork
Chapter 33 is the big-budget action sequence of Shadow Ticket, in which the “pocket-size golem Zdeněk” and musician/secret agent Hop Wingdale rescue Ace Lomax from the clutches of the fascist Vladboys in their “Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline.” (Notably–significantly–Hicks is missing from the rescue team.)
The narrator informs us that the camp is “flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…briefly innocent as Fascism in its ‘springtime of beauty,’ as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…” We tend to think, rightly, that fascism is a rejection of progressive values, but it’s worth remembering that much of what we now think of as Modernism was wrapped up in proto-fascist idealizations of energy and action — consider Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism f’r’instance…
The camp where Ace is being held prisoner is a hotbed of action:
“Fascist adventurers have journeyed here from all over, Austrians sporting blue cornflowers and black grouse feathers, secret police, anti-Red goon squads, revolutionary cells, convicts escaped from internal exile and not sure where they are right now or what language they’re supposed to be speaking, colonial stooges in civvies in from as far afield as Indo-China and South America, irredentist aristos from the old Hungarian kingdom adrift in nostalgia, Polish freelancers working on spec for all of the above.”
I love the force of the sentence. For such a breezy novel, Shadow Ticket is dense. We might take it as a sketch of a much larger, thicker, denser novel.
Well so and anyway–
The deal is that Hop’s band shows up to play this fascist gig; he’s informed that they, the fascist paramilitary Vladboys, “are pretending to invade Fiume, which any number of potential clients want back.” The garrulous entertainment liaison who meets with the band opines that such an invasion would be “all over in a day or two. Anasa supo.”
That last phrase, anasa supo, is Esperanto for duck soup, an American idiom referring to a task easily accomplished. Duck Soup is also of course the title of the 1933 Marx Brothers that centers (oh-so-anarchically) around the tiny nation of Freedonia–a bilocation of Fiume? Here’s a bit of bilocation from Duck Soup:
Hop and his band will play their swing tunes in “ruined limestone amphitheater, once dedicated to bloodletting presented as amusement, back when the Fifth Macedonian Legion were busy here invading and occupying.“
The entertainment menu is “A Gay Evening with Vlad Ţepeş,” with riffs including “Vlad’s Vegetarian Chef”…(“Turnip loaf again, remind me to have the chef impaled”) and “Vlad at the Office” (the Count laments that they never call him “Vlad the Spending Reducer.”)
Is this “Vlad Ţepeş” just a performer playing a character in the evening’s festivities, vamping on a riff–or is it, like, the Vlad Ţepeş, son of Vlad Dracul, Voivode of Wallachia, born half a century before the events of Shadow Ticket — like, Dracula man Vlad? A few paragraphs later, we are briefly introduced to the thug guarding Ace, “Csongor…a sort common in these parts, an apprentice vampire doomed never to develop past journeyman.” On one hand, the language here, and the general supernatural bent of Shadow Ticket suggests that these are like real (as in mythological) vampires — but the novel’s themes of bilocation also hedge the bet: vampire here could be a metaphor; the Vlad Ţepeş could be merely an actor playing a part.
Pynchon renders the scene in the kind of sexualized language we’d expect from vampire stories: “Vladboys have been building up, sending them out after prey each time in a more dangerous state of arousal. Trivial disputes are apt at any moment to erupt into violence. Local women go more and more in fear of their safety, cover their hair, stay in groups. The weirdly erotic charge accumulates, until vrrrooom! here’s the Vladboys out on another massive prowl…”
The prowl, as we’ve already learned, scores “Ace…an understandably welcome catch, with the Flathead an unexpected bonus, which the boys keep insisting is a Jewish motorcycle.” (The idiot vladboys reasoning? “Harley. David…Son, this is son of David, no?”)
Standing guard over their “welcome catch,” journeyman vampire Csongor takes interest in Ace’s tattoo: “’Die Todten reiten schnell,’ the Vladboy reads from the Gothic lettering there. ‘Something about the dead ride fast.'”
The phrase “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” appears in the opening chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a phrase recorded in Harker’s journal, which he identifies as the “line from [Gottfried August] Bürger’s ‘Lenore.'”
Csongor wants to know if the dead actually do ride fast. Ace’s answer is philosophical: “Over there, among the dead, time has no meaning anymore, so to get distance per hour you’d have to divide by zero, which even if it was legal would still give you infinite speed.”
But before he can really explain his riff on death-speed paradox though, Ace’s rescuers arrive: “the pocket-size golem Zdeněk [and] Hop Wingdale.” Our mini-golem is a cyborg: “Zdeněk’s left arm turns out to be a modified ZB-26 Czech light machine gun, with the magazine built into his shoulder.” He likens it to “one of many earthly variants of Azrael, the Angel of Death” — yet still spares Csongor.
The chapter ends with our heroic trio escaping the fascist camp, fleeing their captors with the aid of a “pocket-size model” of a “a Bangalore torpedo” that Zdeněk has improvised from “a few sticks of dynamite thoughtfully borrowed last week in Transylvania off of a freelance firefighting crew passing through en route to a Romanian oil-well fire everybody could see from fifty miles away.”
The massive fire Pynchon’s narrator refers to here is, with most everything in Shadow Ticket, an historical event. The “torch of Moreni” burned for almost two and a half years, from September 1929 to November 1932.
Chapter 34 opens with a sentence that lays out the situation for us: “Daphne looking for Hop has blundered out into a territory she thought she knew, which in fact the political situation has changed to something unrecognizable and poisonous.”
The Weimar days are over; “Hamburg, once the Swing Kid metropol” is now a Nazi hotbed, where “Blues licks have largely given way to major triads.” Conformity reigns; difference is punished. Daphne finds this out the hard way when she “wanders into a beer garden [Hop’s band] the Klezmopolitans once played at, formerly named the Midnight Mouse after a poem by Christian Morgenstern, now converted to a Sturmlokal” — she’s stumbled into a Nazi bar, and immediately finds herself imperiled by the not-so-subtle sexual predations of fascist goons (“Looking for me, Schätzchen?”)
But before our “Cheez Princess…become[s] fondue” she’s by Glow Tripforth del Vasto in her autogyro-cum-deus-ex-machina. They alight to a tavern; on the way Glow complains that because gyros “are forgiving ships…there’s the danger [of] The idiot appeal…romance on the cheap.” Modern convenience will puncture Gothic adventures of flight. Any idiot can fly.
Glow, headed to “some kind of anarchist sainthood” in Spain, drops Daphne in Fiume, but first delivers another one of several hey-we’re-about-to-be-in-some-bigger-mess-than-we-thought-we-were-going-to-be-in proclamations: “Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life.”
Glow adds, “I don’t care to know more than I need to about the mysteries of time…You’re expecting spiritual wisdom from little G. T. del V.? you’ll be waiting a long time, sucker.”
The dead might ride fast–but they’re still dead.
The Ex-Magician and Other Stories, Murilo Rubião, 1979. Translation by Thomas Colchie. Avon-Bard (1984). No cover artist or designer credited. 119 pages.
“Elisa”
by
Murilo Rubião
Translation by Thomas Colchie
I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me.
Proverbs, VIII:17
One afternoon—it was in the early days of April—she arrived at our home. She pushed open the gate quite naturally, which guarded our little front yard, as if she were simply obeying a time-worn habit. From up on the porch, where I was sitting, a needless observation slipped out:
“And what if we had a dog?”
“Dogs don’t frighten me,” she replied wearily.
With a certain difficulty (the suitcase she was carrying must have been quite heavy) she managed to climb the stairs. Before going in, at the front door she turned to me:
“Or men either.”
Surprised by her capacity to divine my thoughts, I made haste to extricate myself from what seemed to be an increasingly embarrassing situation:
“Terrible weather out today. If it goes on like this …”
I cut short the series of absurdities that now occurred to me and tried, rather awkwardly, to avoid her look of reproach.
Then she smiled a little, while I nervously squeezed my hands.
Our strange visitor quickly adjusted to the ways of the house. She seldom went out, and never appeared at the window.
Perhaps at first I hadn’t even noticed her beauty: so lovely, even when the spell was broken, with her half-smile. Tall, her skin so white, but such a pale white, almost transparent, and a gauntness that betrayed a profound degradation. Her eyes were brown, but I don’t wish to talk of them. They never left me.
She soon began to fill out more, to gain some coloring and, in her expression, to display a joyful tranquillity.
She didn’t tell us her name, where she came from, or what terrible events had so shaken her life. In the meantime, we respected her silence on such matters. To us, she was simply herself: someone who needed our care, our affection.
I was able to accept the long silences, the sudden questions. One night, without my expecting it, she asked me:
“Have you ever loved?”
When the answer was in the negative, she made obvious her disappointment. After a while she left the sitting room, without adding a word to what she had spoken. The next morning we discovered her room was empty.
Every afternoon, as dusk was about to fall, I would step out onto the porch, with the feeling that she might show up, any moment, at the corner. My sister Cordelia berated me:
“It’s useless, she won’t be back. If you were only less infatuated, you wouldn’t be having such hopes.”
A year after her flight—again it was April—she appeared at the front gate. Her face was sadder, with deep shadows under the eyes. In my own eyes, so overjoyed to see her, the tears welled up, and in an effort to provide her with a cordial reception I said:
“Careful, now we do have a little dog.”
“But her master is still gentle, isn’t he? Or has he turned fierce during my absence?”
I extended my hands, which she held for a long time. And then, no longer able to suppress my concern, I asked her:
“Where did you go? What have you done all this time?”
“I wandered around and did nothing. Except maybe love a little,” she concluded, shaking her head sadly.
Her life among us returned to its former pace. But I felt uneasy. Cordélia observed me pityingly, implying I should no longer conceal my passion.
I lacked, however, the courage, and so put off my first declaration of love.
Several months later Elisa—yes, she finally told us her name—departed again.
And since I was left knowing her name, I suggested to my sister we should move to a different place. Cordélia, although extremely attached to our house, raised no objection and limited herself to asking:
“And Elisa? How will she be able to find us when she returns?”
I managed, with an effort, to conceal my anxiety, and repeated like an idiot:
“Yes, how will she?”
“Ada” by Willie Mendes. The piece is the back cover of Insect Fear #2, March 1970, The Print Mint.
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Chapter 30 opens in “The Vienna branch of MI3b, daytime, a modest-size office decorated with a movie poster of Lilian Harvey waltzing with Willy Fritsch in Der Kongreß tanzt and an ancient map of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy.”
Der Kongreß tanzt (The Congress Dances) is a 1931 UFA production set in Vienna, 1815 — if you want to go down the rabbit hole, maybe start with this contemporary New York Times review of the film. The Congress Dances was Weimar UFA’s tentpole shot at competing with Hollywood; later the production company would be subsumed by the Nazis. A current throughout Pynchon’s works has been something like, resist the military-industrial-entertainment complex. It’s worth noting the emphasis on dancing here, a motif in Shadow Ticket. Is dancing a form of transcendent resistance? Or is it a narcotizing agent?
The Habsburg Dual Monarchy, formed in 1867 after the Austro-Prussian War, joined two distinct nations under one emperor — a kind of bilocation — leaving ethnic and nationalist tensions unresolved. These divisions weakened the empire, contributing to the instability that helped spark World War I and, after its collapse, left a fragmented Central Europe whose resentments helped set the stage for World War II.
We are in that stage-setting right now, in that fragmented, fragmenting Central Europe, in the office of British Military Intelligence Section 3 where secret agent couple Alf and Pip Quarrender have been called before “Station chief Arvo Thorp.” Thorp informs the Quarrenders that their asset Vassily Midoff is “seeking to join a motorcycle rally in progress at the moment” — the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed that everyone’s set out on — and “that someone must be sent round” to cut off that loose end posthaste. The Quarrenders are upset — “But he was ours, Thorp…Our bloke” — but orders are orders. They do question the rationale of the orders though, wondering if it was simply “too much effort to keep all [Vassily’s] allegiances straight.” Here we have a neat little summary of how some readers may feel sussing motives and plot points from Shadow Ticket.
Codebreaker Alf gets something proximal to an “answer” when he intercepts an encrypted message floating around various intelligence agencies: Vassily “has apparently been promoted to deputy operations officer of an unacknowledged narkomat, a Blavatskian brotherhood of psychical masters and adepts located someplace out in the wild Far East.” Pynchon further underlines Shadow Ticket’s haunted themes, bringing up Stalin’s “chief crypto genius Gleb Bokii [who] is also running a secret lab specializing in the paranormal.”
But Alf can’t fully crack the code (natch), receiving “only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it.” In a chilly series of sentences, Alf, pushed by “some invisible power,” continues chipping at the encryption against his better judgment. But the encryption is, well, cryptic, even as it portends a future yet to come (including the ominous not that Stalin, “threatened by supernatural forces [would] probably go after Jews first.”
Alf concludes that Vassily “may have gone mad, he may in fact have crossed a line forbidden or invisible to the likes of us, thrown by some occult switchwork over onto an alternate branch line of history.” The “alternative branch line” again evokes the novel’s themes of bilocation (which I’ve tried to enumerate in previous riffs).
(The bigger Pynchonian bilocation is frequently visible/invisible, in the spiritualist-materialist sense — which perhaps finds a moral corollary in convenient/inconvenient.)
So well and anyway–the Quarrenders track down the Russian Trans-Trianon caravan and locate Vassily, but he manages to escape on a Rio-bound zeppelin painted like a watermelon, to their relief.
“Hicks, Slide, and Zdeněk come rolling into a parts depot deep in the Transylvanian forest,” at the beginning of Chapter 31. (Slide is an American journalist; Zdeněk is a non-gigantic golem, if you need help keeping track.) They are on the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle route, presumably tracking Hop Wingdale. Or Daphne Airmont. Or Bruno Airmont. Or…?
Here in “actual Transylvania, the vampire motherland itself,” the trio drives through “hairpin turns frequented by vengeful spirits, passages cursed by some local shaman, marsh life you wouldn’t want swarming around you after dark…And the bats of course.” According to Zdeněk these vampire bats “are the Unbreathing, who go about their business in a silence not even broken by pulsebeats.”
Slide’s brought along his Leica camera to “cover the supernatural angle,” but the pictures all end up blank: “a vampire’s allergy to silver, an ambivalence as to light itself…” I’ve foregrounded Shadow Ticket’s Gothic motifs and impulses throughout my notes. I don’t really know what I could add to, like, golems and vampires in Transylvania.
Noting that the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle route allows for “impulses disallowed in normal society” to be acted upon, the narration then gives over to one of my favorite little bits in Shadow Ticket, a self-contained episode of “spontaneous pig rescue.” The pig in question is “a Mangalica, a popular breed in Hungary at the moment, curly-coated as a sheep, black upper half, blonde lower. And that face! One of the more lovable pig faces, surrounded by ringlets and curls.”
Pynchon’s porcophilia is well-documented, with pigs showing favorably throughout his work–particularly in Mason & Dixon and in Gravity’s Rainbow, where Tyrone Slothrop takes on the role (and costume) of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero, and then later wanders through the Zone with a sweet pig as his companion-guide, while the narrator sings:
“A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt–
A pig is a pal, who’ll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.”
Back to Hicks: “wandering the compound one day hears a piano in the distance, recognizes the tune as ‘Star of the County Down,’ a longtime favorite of Irish drinkers he’s known.” It turns out that none other than Pip Quarrender is singing and playing the song — which she identifies as “Dives and Lazarus,” a traditional English folk song that that adapts a riff from the Gospel of Luke. Pips notes that it’s “technically it’s a Christmas carol, though uncomfortable for the average churchgoer given its rather keen element of class hostility.” We have here another bilocation, a song with two separate but real co-existing lives. (Throw in a little class warfare, too.)
Hicks then runs into Terike, who’s concerned that Ace Lomax is missing, on the run from she-knows-not-what (it’s Bruno). The chapter ends with “Zdeněk the golem [locating] Hop Wingdale en route to a Croatian guerrilla training camp near the Hungarian border.” He decides to go check it out.
The band pulls in to a “towering wooden cylinder set in a clearing, filled with the snarling of low-displacement bike engines.” Their gig is at a Wall of Death motor cycle stunt show.
Pynchon invokes the image of a wall of death late in Gravity’s Rainbow: “somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone.” The metaphor here of course is the wall between the living and the dead.
It turns out that Ace Lomax has been stunt riding on the Wall of Death for tips. Prompted by the band, he sings a Western tune: “Things were so jake, at the O.K. Corral— / Till those Earps and Clantons came along—.” The fantasy here is of an unspoiled West which eventually succumbs to the violence of competing agencies.
Ace recognizes Hop and congratulates his being “still vertical.” He proceeds to tell the musician that Bruno Airmont had tried to get Ace to assassinate Hop, but he decided that wasn’t his gig and hit the road: “By nightfall he’s in Bratislava and slipping unnoticed in among a convoy of Trans-Trianon machinery.” In their discussion about the Wall of Death, Hop brings up motordrome physics: “Somebody said it’s safe long as you keep moving fast enough, something about centrifugal force.” We get here a repetition of one of Shadow Ticket’s major themes, neatly summed up by Stuffy Keegan back in Ch. 20: “as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free.”
Ace then hits the road. He fails to check in back at the Trans-Trianon base camp, causing Terike’s cryptic road-adventuress face…to drift into disarray. She decides to light out looking for him.
The chapter ends with the narrator telling us that it turns “out that in some walled-in maze of a mountain town Ace has missed a turn…and ends up running on fumes.” He’s pursued by not only wolves but also the fascist Vladboys, “who also run this terrain in packs.” The fascist gang are on what I take to be dirt bikes, faster than Ace’s Harley. The last line, “Ace finds himself in the hands of the Vladboys,” sets up a nice opportunity for a big dramatic climactic rescue scene.
What seems to’ve begun happening out here on the route with some regularity is that impulses disallowed in normal society are surfacing unexpectedly and being acted upon. Some more benevolent than others, spontaneous pig rescue, for example.
Unaccustomed bustle one day in the repair shop, where the ill-tempered Sándor Zsupka, across whose path few who have ever ventured care to do so again, currently on the run from a number of felony charges, including actual bodily harm, is putting together a pig-customized helmet and goggles combination revealing along with his criminal activities a gift for millinery.
“This is your…”
“Spirit guide, and even a spirit guide can do with some extra windproofing now and then. Further questions?”
“Never seen a pig quite like this…”
She’s a Mangalica, a popular breed in Hungary at the moment, curly-coated as a sheep, black upper half, blonde lower. And that face! One of the more lovable pig faces, surrounded by ringlets and curls. Squeezita Thickly should only look half this adorable.
No more than idly cruising the countryside, Sándor happened to get off on one of those fateful back roads, and there in a steep farmyard were a family and their livestock, a cute meet, you’d say, though not half as cute as the pig herself. “Oh and this is Erzsébet, we’re eating her for Christmas.”
Hell they are. Sándor and some barroom accomplices perform a snatch-and-grab in the middle of the night, the pig pretending to be asleep, as she is picked up, installed in the sidecar of Sándor’s rig, and spirited away, just like that. Next thing anybody knows she’s riding in the sidecar, done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine. Anybody feels like commenting, they don’t.
A self-contained episode from Thomas Pynchon’s 2025 novel Shadow Ticket.
Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy is new in English translation from publisher NYRB and translator and Peter Behrman de Sinéty. NYRB’s blurb–
Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.
Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.
The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”
Non Compus Mentis, 1976 by Benjamin Cañas (1933-1987)
Nova Express, William S. Burroughs, 1964. Evergreen Black Cat Books (1965). 155 pages. The cover by artist Grove Press mainstay Roy Kuhlman is not credited.
I picked up this mass-market Burroughs at A Capella Books in Atlanta this weekend. We drove up on Thursday to see the American indie rock band Big Thief play at the Fox Theatre. The theater is gorgeous, its interior a lavish orientalist fantasy draped in rich reds and golds, royal blues, and warm ambers, all illuminated under a ceiling painted to resemble a twinkling night sky. The sound was pretty bad and the crowd was worse. Several groups around me talked throughout the concert, and the general vibe was soured by the crowd’s inability to pick a lane when it came to standing-or-not-standing. Big Thief started in a moody jammy mood jamming on an extended version of “No Fear” from their new album Double Infinity. They followed it up with three more songs from the new album, and while the playing was polished and strong, with plentiful harmonic textures coming from the guitars, the audience didn’t really respond in a strong way until they played two “hits” back to back — “Vampire Empire” and “Simulation Swarm.” The audience then fell into this weird rhythm of people rising to their feet like reverse dominoes when people closer to the stage decided to stand and sway to more familiar “hits,” only to sit down when Big Thief played a newer song. The jerky rhythm led to hissed arguments and then not-so-hissed arguments throughout the theater — again, the mood was really odd, and the band didn’t seem to really connect with the audience. At one point, guitarist Buck Meek said something like, “You can dance to this new one, too” — but the few people who tried eventually quit. After “Not” and “Masterpiece,” Big Thief decided to workshop a new song, stopping at one point to adjust the rhythm. Again, the reaction to this tinkering was mixed. The highlight of the show for me was a dreamy, hazy, heavy reworking of “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You” in which the band seemed to tune totally in to their sound. (I had also managed to get the guys behind me to shut the fuck up after a very tense exchange, so I could actually appreciate the sounds without their banal chomping.) The band managed to get the crowd on their feet two more times — once with “Spud Infinity” near the end of their set, and then again when the crowd called for the obligatory encore. (It’s worth noting that much of the crowd headed to the exits right away, determined to beat awful Atlanta traffic.) Big Thief then played exactly one song (“Change”) and left, signalling for the house lights to come on. I have never seen a band play only one song at an encore. Some of the people I was with had a better time than I did. The show mostly reminded me of seeing Wilco in an old theater — this was close to twenty years ago, I guess — and their failure to connect with the audience. There’s not a lot of room to boogie in those old seats. That’s not what a theater is designed for. I saw Yo La Tengo around the same time in the same theater and they absolutely understood the space they were playing in and mapped their show around it. I still have a sour taste in my mouth from the concert, but the rest of the weekend was fun–good food, good times, etc. I even dressed up for Halloween — as Bob Ferguson from One Battle After Another. It’s such an easy costume (jeans, flannel robe, black beanie, oversized sunglasses) that I thought the Beltline would be littered with other lazy dickheads with the same dickhead idea, but it wasn’t. Everyone I interacted with thought I was going for the Dude. In my review of One Battle After Another I made the bathrobe connection writing that PTA’s film plays “as a sinister inversion to The Big Lebowski. I will file the pair away for a future double feature.” Later that night, after perhaps too many okay not perhaps definitely too many libations I rewatched The Beach Bum on my laptop. That’s the triple feature — Battle, Lebowski, Bum.
So here’s a snippet from Nova Express, just so I won’t be accused of bait n’ switch:
“Mr. Martin, and you board members, vulgar stupid Americans, you will regret calling in the Mayan Aztec Gods with your synthetic mushrooms. Remember we keep exact junk measure of the pain inflicted and that pain must be paid in full. Is that clear enough Mr. Intolerable Martin, or shall I make it even clearer? Allow me to introduce myself: The Mayan God Of Pain And Fear from the white hot plains of Venus which does not mean a God of vulgarity, cowardice, ugliness and stupidity. There is a cool spot on the surface of Venus three hundred degrees cooler than the surrounding area. I have held that spot against all contestants for five hundred thousand years. Now you expect to use me as your ‘errand boy’ and ‘strikebreaker’ summoned up by an IBM machine and a handful of virus crystals? How long could you hold that spot, you ‘board members’? About thirty seconds I think with all your guard dogs. And you thought to channel my energies for ‘operation total disposal’? Your ‘operations’ there or here this or that come and go and are no more. Give my name back. That name must be paid for. You have not paid. My name is not yours to use. Henceforth I think about thirty seconds is written.”
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Chapter 27 focuses on Hop Wingdale. Out on tour with his band (and maybe on the run, sorta, from Daphne) he meets up with his agent Nigel Trevelyan in Geneva. Hop refuses to play “any of these Nazi joints popping up all over,” but sympathetic Nigel has something kosher for the clarinetist: the “Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed,” an anarchic, carnvialesque motorcycle race that will culminate in Fiume (aka Rijeka — a bilocated multilingual, multiethnic city-state). Everyone in Shadow Ticket is headed to Fiume — you too, reader.
Halfway through this short chapter, things take a spooky twist: Nigel dispenses with the tour stuff to move to “the real business at hand…Hop’s ‘booking agent’ turns out to be a” secret agent. He’s so secret that he literally physically morphs “through a smooth frame-by-frame personal transition, gaining a couple inches in height, mustache narrowing to little more than a lip gesture, discreetly tinted indoor specs.” It turns out that “the real business at hand” is the worsening “antisemitism situation.” Hop’s on a mission; the tour is a cover for him to scout “possible escape routes from Central Europe should a sudden exodus become necessary.” Nigel suggests that the “key connection will be to Fiume, also known as Rijeka.” He warns Hop that: “We’re in for some dark ages, kid.”
Nigel has arranged luxury transport for his asset: a “road-Pullman all lit up, size of a railway sleeping car, futuristic as something just rolled off the cover of Amazing Stories.” The notation of a “road-Pullman” threw me at first — Pynchon has evoked something like a sci-fi bus, sure, but I had always identified the term “Pullman” with railroad cars — like the one Hicks journeyed eastward out of Illinois (while chatting with a phantom Pullman porter) back in Ch. 17. Perhaps it’s just slang here?
Chapter 28 begins with homesickness blooming into idealized nostalgia: “Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe…” I feel that Hicks!
The chapter then moves through a series of short vignettes that move the plot forward (however obscurely). Terike will be taking off on the Trans-Trianon bike tour; Hicks is worried that Harley-riding Ace Lomax will be there too. Hicks checks in with Egon Praediger, who implicitly offers to pay Hicks to kill Bruno Airhart. Hicks declines, claiming that assassination “draws too much kiddie outlaw attention” — but we get the sense that he’d like to find more meaningful work than just one “high-risk orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s greed or fear.” Hicks also visits journalist Slide Gearheart, who questions whether or not the former strikebreaker might find forgiveness or “redemption via Cheez Princess.” Cynical Slide is dubious, but their exchange recalls psychic Zoltán von Kiss’s riff in Ch. 22 on the redemption of lamps: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.”
Chapter 28 then gives over to Daphne, who will finally, “in a turbulence and drift of multiple unlikelihoods” meet up with her estranged father Bruno. She meets him in Night of the World, a multi-floor cabaret whose “circles of depravity…go corkscrewing down…toward ancient depths few have been willing to dare, each with its own bar and dance band and clientele.” The image of the bar and its name recall German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s notion of “die Nacht der Welt” a reference to human subjectivity as a chaotic, unconscious darkness that lies beneath rational thought. Pynchon has previously referenced Carl Jung in Shadow Ticket, and while I don’t really think of Jung as a follower of Hegel, his concept of “the shadow” seems to resonate with Hegel’s “Nacht der Welt.”
Pynchon’s description of the Night of the World is worth sharing at length: “Each table here has a small circular cathode-ray tube or television screen set flush in the tabletop, throbbing more than flickering with shaggy images of about 100 lines’ resolution…Numbered push-button switches allow you to connect to any other table in the place and watch each other as you chat.” As if to underline the parody here of our twenties’ contemporary screen culture obsession, a strange man — it’s Bruno, spoiler — tells Daphne the screens are, “The future of flirtation…here they call it Gesichtsröhre, or ‘Face-Tube.’ ”
But the theme here goes beyond the parodic surface. Looking in the screen, “Viewers sometimes do not agree on the nature of the image. Pareidolia is common. You look down into it, like a crystal gazer, and faces loom unbidden.” The language here recalls Hicks gazing into the shoe-fitting fluoroscope back in Ch. 15 and seeing “a face he’s supposed to know but doesn’t, or at least can’t name.” Is this image the shadow — like, the Jungian shadow? The night of the world? Or just Hicks’s paranoid pareidolia cooking up an answer to a corkscrew of images that amount to chaos.
Anyway–the weird stranger is Papa Bruno. Soon there’s another of Pynchon’s original songs and a daddy-daughter dance. Bruno looks much, much younger, and creepily, more virile. How? “These days the Central European backwoods, Bruno explains, are full of ‘scientists,’ elsewhere known as witch doctors, working miracle effects in chemical defiance of time.” All in the service of horny plutocrats, natch.
Daddy and daughter agree on a movie date and go to see “Bigger Than Yer Stummick (1931), the latest hit starring child sensation Squeezita Thickly, which is about, well, eating, actually.” The description of Bigger Than Yer Stummick is, for me, a highlight of Shadow Ticket. It’s well-over whatever line of “good taste” some folks might set down (Squeezita Thickly!), over-indulgent, and I love it. Here’s Pynchon the auteur framing a special effects shot:
“A pot of soup, approached from overhead, now smoothly lap-dissolving into a giant swimming pool full of bathing beauties, bordered by palm trees and food pitches, offering an array of snacks from roast turkey drumsticks to deluxe hot dogs smothered in sport peppers and dripping green-blue pickle relish strangely aglow, even though the movie’s supposed to be in black-and-white, and gigantic Italian sandwiches quite a few feet long, and glutton-size ice-cream extravaganzas and oh well that sort of menu…”
I think I’ve pointed out in every single one of these riffs some instance of glow-in-the-dark material, like the “green-blue pickle relish” that manages supernatural radiation here.
The Bigger Than Yer Stummick routine isn’t just goofy fun though. It showcases the zany-sinister paradox that Pynchon is so good at evoking. The film is about eating, and thus, highlights hunger via hunger’s absence. And the film’s audience is hungry: “Back in the States, every showing of this movie, no matter where, has collapsed well before the second reel into civic disorder—screens across the nation presently inscribed with knife scars, fork tracks, spoon indentations as audiences, many of whom haven’t seen a square meal since the start of the Depression.” As the film progresses, it gets darker; first “the music has shifted grimly minor,” and soon folks are “shooting at each other, both semi- and fully-automatically, not always in play, plus setting off spherical anarchist-style bombs.” There’s a war on the horizon — “We’re in for some dark ages, kid” — a war that will cannibalize the world. Consider Egon Praediger’s cocaine-inspired reverie back in Ch. 21. He predicts the coming war; although it will entail “a violent collapse of civil order” it will also point to a “horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever…”
One last note on Bigger Than Yer Stummick — the title is a take on the idiom “your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” meaning that you’ve overestimated your hunger or taken on more than you can handle. The missing word is “eyes” and two of the words are in alternate spellings. Perhaps Pynchon is inviting us to see not just a missing “eye” but a missing “I.” Maybe there’s something here with the shadow self, the missing or submerged self, the moral self that would love to transcend the material plain, the stomach of reality — if you weren’t so fucking hungry all the time.
Post-film credits, things get weird between Daphne and pops. The narrator tells us that, “If Daphne has been hoping for something incestuous yet romantic, she’s once again reminded how very little anybody can put past Bruno.” Uh, okay. Bruno wants to euchre her of her cattle/cheese rights; he needs cash as “Some very bad people are after your old Pop, itchin to take down the Al Capone of Cheese. Forces I once had no idea even existed.” We then switch back to Hicks and Slide, with Slide apparently hep to an apparent incest grift on Daphne’s point: “Word around is she’s been working her own counter-scheme, luring Bruno deeper into a sordid and forbidden sex affair while hired photo crews secretly record every last shameful detail—” Hicks is shocked. But, like — incest, power, plutocracy. Daphne skips town, possibly hunting Hop.
Ch. 28 snowballs, adding characters, like “Heino Zäpfchen, a much sought-after Judenjäger, or Jew-tracker”; the Vladboys, an anti-semitic gang of hooligans “desperate for Nazi approval” who are engaged in streetfighting; and “Zdeněk, who claims to be an authentic Czechoslovakian golem.” Thomas Pynchon is 88 years old. I have no idea how long he’s had this novel percolating, and I’m so thankful to get to read at least one more, and I think it’s a really good novel, but, yeah, there’s a sketchiness to it — a sense that the old master might not have the energy or time to flesh out all of the big ideas. Or, alternately–Shadow Ticket is leaner and meaner than the epics it points towards (Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow).
Okay, so I just mentioned Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow — parenthetically, sure. But “Zdeněk, who claims to be an authentic Czechoslovakian golem,” provides a clear link to Mason & Dixon. Golems show up in Mason & Dixon, first appearing in Chapter 49, where the narrator refers to “Kitchen-size” ones, not the giants we expect. Cf. Zdeněk being described as a “sort of snub-nose golem.” Then, in chapter 50, there’s an extended riff on the Rabbi of Prague (I wrote about it here). Back in Shadow Ticket, Zdeněk “explains, ever since Judah Loew was Rabbi of Prague, a body of powerful golem lore has been passed down, rabbi to rabbi.”
The (long) chapter ends with a flurry of references: to Imi Lichtenfeld (Hungarian-born inventor of the Israeli martial art krav maga (“’You could think of it as Jew-jitsu,’ sez Zdeněk”); to “a glamorous, indeed sultry, robotka or female robot named Dushka“; and to “some business in Transylvania we needed to take care of.”
Chapter 29 is an ultracompressed precis of Central European history in the 1920s, the point of which is the origin of the Trans-Trianon motorcycle ride (that’s not really the point):
“Sometime in the period 1920–25 the first tentative motorcyclists set out on low-horsepower machinery, army dispatch bikes, city-street models. While the ’20s roared in Chicago and American expats whooped it up in Paree, while Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman went gliding through the city traffic of Petersburg filming a newly tsarless and not yet Stalinized people” —
— “while Berlin still offered unparalleled freedom and refuge to heretics and asylum seekers of all persuasions, this is what was going on in the strange ring of historical debris that had once belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary—bikers in motion, some riding clockwise, some counter-, not a rally, not a race, not a pilgrimage, no timekeepers, no grand prizes, no order of finish, no finish line for that matter, though some, speaking metaphysically, say if there were one it’d be at Fiume. Rijeka, whichever.”
Bilocation, anarchy, telekinesis.
Watch Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Vertov; dir. of photog. Kaufman).
A panel from Sergio Aragonés’ one-shot Dia de Los Muertos, 1998, Dark Horse Comics.
November First, 1950 by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
“The Girl I Left Behind Me”
by
Muriel Spark
It was just gone quarter past six when I left the office.
‘Teedle-um-tum-tum’ — there was the tune again, going round my head. Mr Letter had been whistling it all throughout the day between his noisy telephone calls and his dreamy sessions. Sometimes he whistled ‘Softly, Softly, Turn the Key’, but usually it was ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ rendered at a brisk hornpipe tempo.
I stood in the bus queue, tired out, and wondering how long I would endure Mark Letter (Screws & Nails) Ltd. Of course, after my long illness, it was experience. But Mr Letter and his tune, and his sudden moods of bounce, and his sudden lapses into lassitude, his sandy hair and little bad teeth, roused my resentment, especially when his tune barrelled round my head long after I had left the office; it was like taking Mr Letter home.
No one at the bus stop took any notice of me. Well, of course, why should they? I was not acquainted with anyone there, but that evening I felt particularly anonymous among the homegoers. Everyone looked right through me and even, it seemed, walked through me. Late autumn always sets my fancy towards sad ideas. The starlings were crowding in to roost on all the high cornices of the great office buildings. And I located, among the misty unease of my feelings, a very strong conviction that I had left something important behind me or some job incompleted at the office. Perhaps I had left the safe unlocked, or perhaps it was something quite trivial which nagged at me. I had half a mind to turn back, tired as I was, and reassure myself. But my bus came along and I piled in with the rest. Continue reading “Read “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a ghost story by Muriel Spark”
Séance, 2025 by Taylor Schultek (b. 1990)
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Chapter 24: Another fairly long chapter for Shadow Ticket. I’ve been over-summarizing in these notes, and maybe I’ll keep over-summarizing — at this point doing these notes has been my second reading of Shadow Ticket. I would say though, that we’ve reached a point well beyond the novel’s quick change glamour, its bilocative split — or its bait n’ switch, if you feel that way. The novel initially presents as a hardboiled noir send-up in the dark American Heartland only to pivot (or bilocate, to misapporpriate a term from Against the Day) to Central Europe where there’s preparation for a war on (moron). Hero Hicks fades, just a little, in the background; a larger cast steps up.
But Hicks is still the heart of Ch. 24, which begins at Egon Praediger’s office in Budapest, where the ICPC detective is snorting soup spoonfuls of cocaine while ranting about his inability to catch Bruno Airmont. Egon fears he’s wasting his talent “not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child.” Oh man–wonder if that sounds like any evil moron of recent vintage? Egon would rather face off against a worthy villain, a “Dr. Mabuse or Fu Manchu,” references again underlining Shadow Ticket’s lurid pop Goth bona fides.
Hicks then runs into Terike, “just emerging from her latest run-in with the authorities over her motorcycle, a 500 cc Guzzi Sport 15″ — which more on this transport later. On the way to the bike, Hicks finds that he has somehow “percolated through“ Terike, who has performed some kind of metaphysical quick change. He apports, I guess.
For Terike, the Guzzista “is a metaphysical critter. We know, the way you’d say a cowboy knows, that there’s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with.” As we should expect now in Ole Central Europe, this bike is spooky, and Terike is a superhero on it: “she can go straight up the sides of walls, pass through walls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.”
Hicks rides along in the sidecar. (A bit later we’ll see a charming pig, a spirit animal, really, riding sidecar–perhaps there’s a link between Hicks and Pynchon’s other pigmen, like Seaman Bodine or Tyrone Slothrop (or the unfortunate Major Marvy.) Their mission: deliver a batch of experimental vacuum tubes “specially designed for the theremin” to “Club Hypotenuse,” a “cheerfully neon-lit” venue featuring a rotating dance floor and “not just one soloist on theremin but a half dozen, each expensively gowned tomato with more or less identical platinum bobs, waving their hands at these units and pulling music out of some deep invisibility, swooping one note to the next, hitting each one with pitch as perfect, Terike assures him, as the instrument’s reigning queen, Clara Rockmore. The joint effect of these six virtuoso cuties all going at once in close harmony is strangely symphonic.”
(Forgive me if I let the quote linger too long, the image is just too lovely.)
At Club Hypotenuse we get a bit of background on Terike, her rejection of her bourgeoisie upbringing, and recent Hungarian political struggles, before meeting yet another character, freelance foreign correspondent Slide Gearheart (he uses the alias “Judge Crater” at the bar. We last heard the name back in Ch. 18, but Crater, icon of the disappearing act, will pop up again). Slide lets Hicks in on a lead he has to cheese heiress Daphne Airmont’s whereabouts; he also gives our P.I. some advice about (not) fitting in to Hungary: “…best stick to English and there’s a chance they’ll take you for an idiot and leave you alone. It might help if you could also pretend now and then to hear voices they don’t. Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.”
But Slide’s bigger note for Hicks is a soft warning to prepare him for the reality that you can never really go home.
Chapter 25: “Things pick up a day or two later when Slide reports that Daphne has been sighted at the Tropikus nightclub, in Nagymező utca, the Broadway of Budapest.” (This is I suppose the inspiration for the use of the photograph of Nagymező Street used on the cover of the first edition of Shadow Ticket.)
Daphne sings a song and then she and Hicks dance together.
So–I have really neglected Shadow Ticket as a song and dance routine. I think if you’ve read Pynchon you’d expect it; it’s a bit more prevalent here, the singing and dancing, in Shadow Ticket I mean, then in some of the other novels, but it’s certainly what you’d expect. The songs probably deserve their own whole blog or something to deal with (which I will never do); the dancing — well the dancing — I think something I should’ve highlighted much earlier is that Hicks is a really good dancer. Like fucking excellent. He’s a magician who goes into “one of those hoofer’s trances” in the previous chapter while dancing with Terike to the theremin orchestra. That notation — of the trance state — is given for various characters in Shadow Ticket who achieve a kind of short-term perfection outside the physical realm. (It’s the drummer Pancho Caramba (and like, Pynchon, c’mon man, that’s too much, name wise) — it’s the drummer Pancho Caramba in Ch. 25 who goes “into this kind of trance” at his drum kit, enchanting his audience.)
Most of the chapter is the dance and the dance-within-the-dance between Hicks and Daphne. There are Gothic-tinged allusions to their past in Wisconsin–his saving her from the “North Shore Zombie Two-Step” of forced psychiatric hospitalization, incurring a “Chippewa hoodoo” debt as her caretaker in perpetual.
We also start to get Daphne’s backstory with Hop Wingdale, the jazz clarinetist she left home for. She’s followed Hop and his band the Klezmopolitans around Europe, but is worried that the ill-fated lovers “need to relocate before it’s all Storm Trooper chorales and three-note harmony.” Daphne again underlines Shadow Ticket’s departure point — a big ugly change is gonna come. Hop is (rightfully) worried about Papa “Bruno’s invisible hand…” though. “Awkwardly enough,” he tells Daphne, “it turns out more of your life than you think is being run on the Q.T. by none other” but her pops.
The phrase “on the Q.T.” — meaning quiet (or “on the quiet tip,” as I thought way back as a teen encountering it) — shows up a few times in Shadow Ticket. It’s phonetically doubled in the word cutie, which shows up more than a few times in Shadow Ticket.
Chapter 26: Another longish section by Shadow Ticket standards, and less breezy than the novel as a whole.
There’s a lot of Daphne-Hicks and Daphne-Hop stuff here — more bilocations, maybe? — in any case, our boy Hicks gets himself more wrapped up than he intended to. After Daphne urges him to help hunt down Hop, who’s kinda sorta left her, he reminds himself of his mantra “No More Matrimonials! Ever!”
By the end of the chapter our American idiot is wondering if “wouldn’t it be a nice turnaround to bring some couple back together again, put the matrimony back in ‘matrimonial’ for a change, instead of divorce lawyers into speedsters and limousines.” Here, I couldn’t help but think of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film revision to Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice; PTA ties a neater bow on the narrative by letting its lead P.I. Doc Sportello restore the marriage of musician Coy Harlingen.
Anyway, we get Daphne and Hop’s origin story: “Talk about meeting cute. You’d think she’d have known better by then. It was in Chicago a few years back, still deep in her teen playgirl phase.” General gunplay shatters Daphne’s double aviation cocktail. She’s smitten with his woodwind serenades.
This chapter is chocked full of motifs and mottoes we’d expect from Shadow Ticket in particular at this point and Pynchon in general: invisibility, inconvenience, Judge Crater, “Who killed vaudeville?,” etc. It’s also pretty horny, with Hicks and Daphne finally consummating their meet cute from years gone by. Sorry if I’m breezing through.
I’m more interested in a specific exchange.
Daphne hips Hicks to something she saw “once, in one of these mental fix-it shops I kept getting sent to, up on the office wall was a motto of Carl Jung—Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. I said what’s this my Latin’s a little rusty, he sez that’s called or not called, the god will come.”
The end of Ch. 23, at least in my guess, seemed to obliquely reference Jung’s Answer to Job, with the narrator suggesting that a trinity can only truly operate as a whole in the form of a stealth quatro — it’s phantom fourth piece balancing out the visible trio in the foreground. The reference to Jung here is not oblique but direct and maybe I will do something more direct with it down the line.
Of course the thing that comes to save Daphne isn’t “the god” but that Big Gorilla Hicks. He notes that, “Your old pals from the rez think it’s spoze to be a critter” who shows up to save the day. In a moment of vulnerability that I take to be sincere, Daphne asks Hicks if he didn’t think that she might actually be insane and should be returned to the hospital and not set free. His reply is a repetition of one of the novel’s several theses: “You were on the run, that was enough.”
Bat illustrations from Dierkundig mengelwerk (Zoological Miscellany), 1793 by I.B.S. Hopfer and J.J. Bylaert.
“Identification Tags”
by
Tom Clark
Ghosts do wear sheets but not for sleeping.
Sometimes people die while still alive
and then come back to life
but only partially. You can read the signs
around the eyes, which get
a dusty look like burned out hundred watt bulbs.
When they pass one another on the streets
there is a soft noise, as of muslin touching.
Biblioklept 