“Children of the Future?” a one-pager by Jim Osborne. From Slow Death Funnies #1, April, 1970, Last Gasp.
Author: Biblioklept
Glows in the dark | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 1-7
Let’s start with the epigraph:
“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.”
—Bela Lugosi,
in The Black Cat (1934)
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:
Pynchon is not the first to sample this line.
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.
(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.)
“Getting sentimental, kid, better watch ’at, once.”
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.
Self-Portrait Fixing Foot — Julie Heffernan
Self-Portrait Fixing Foot, 2024 by Julie Heffernan (b. 1956)
I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older | William T. Vollmann reviews Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket
I’ve avoided reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel Shadow Ticket, but I couldn’t help but read William T. Vollmann’s piece on the novel at UnHerd. From Vollmann’s review:
…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.
It still believes in night | A review of Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic novel Mevlido’s Dreams
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.
Sunday Comix
From “Nightmare World” by Basil Wolverton. Published in Weird Tales #3, Sept. 1952, Stanely Morse Publications.
Man Reading — Erwin Fabian
Man Reading, 1941 by Erwin Fabian (1915-2020)
Mattia Filice’s Driver (Book acquired, 26 Sept. 2025)
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.
Studies for Departure — Paula Rego
Two studies for Departure, 1988 by Paula Rego (1935–2022)
reserved for those who have been mutilated in the war
“October”
by
Tom Clark
The rain falls like dirty string
on the tomb
of the human race
The girl with the red scarf
and the sassy face throws
her flowers on the wet leaves
Her name is Marie
I met her last Tuesday
on the Métro
You know how it is in the springtime
A man just can’t say no
especially when he is sitting in the seat
reserved for those who have been mutilated in the war
Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket (Book acquired, 30 Sept. 2025)
Here are the first four paragraphs of Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel Shadow Ticket:
When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line. What with tough times down the Lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, Prohibition repeal just around the corner, Big Al in the federal pokey in Atlanta, Outfit affairs grown jumpy and unpredictable, anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breezing up here to Milwaukee, where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish.
Hicks McTaggart has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats up from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake, the Chicago Outfit handling whatever needs to be taken care of in Milwaukee since Vito Guardalabene cashed in his chips ten years ago, though Vito’s successor Pete Guardalabene is still considered head man in the Ward, gets his picture in the social pages smiling at weddings and so forth.
Loitering in the alleyway in back of Pasquale’s Bella Palermo, Hicks can hear sounds of noodle-flexing sociability, smell spaghetti sauce and garlic frying and sfinciuni bagherese baking over an olive-branch fire, and it’s making him hungry, though this close to payday his lunch menu is a thermos of coffee and a buttermilk cruller stashed in a pocket someplace.
The explosion when it comes seems to be from somewhere across the river and nearer the Lake. Forks and glassware pause between tabletop and mouth, as if everybody’s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised.
An explosion! There we go.
Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney
Dr. Bloodmoney, or, How We Got Along After the Bomb, Philip K. Dick, 1965. Dell Books (1980). Cover art by Richard Courtney (not credited; cover signed R. Courtney); no designer credited. 304 pages. Continue reading “Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney”
Sunday Comix
A page from Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Black Arms to Hold You Up, Pantheon, 2025. Assata Shakur passed away on 25 Sept. 2025. She was free.
Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up (Book acquired, 23 Sept. 2025)
I was psyched to get an early copy of Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up this week. I love the dramatic vibrancy of Passmore’s cartooning, and his economic use of black, white, gray, and red throughout the book. I should have a review out around its release on 7 Oct. 2025.
Here is publisher Pantheon’s blurb:
It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”
So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic.
What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.
You Are Very Tacky and Everyone Hates You — Sarah Theresa Lee
You Are Very Tacky and Everyone Hates You, 2025 by Sarah Theresa Lee (b. 1980)
A previously unpublished Dream Song by John Berryman
“The applause of the world comes to an empty heart”
by
John Berryman
The applause of the world comes to an empty heart,
sure the man is thinking now of something else,
something else, a fearless end
‘I have lost, of course, the fear of death’, BUT.
Messages enchant me, as from Ireland
I am an old middle-aged man about to do his best
I love old men
The bartender did just call me ‘my friend’
I say the wonder is these busy caves
explored by men, & then by men, & then
by cold & dismal
engineers, are so costless
Deep in the angels let the good coat come
& I will wheedle home, who misséd you,
I can’t fix him. He’ll go down there apart,
that would be the wicked part of him that falls.
Henry has in Ireland no friend.
Alone, in the half-dark
Read five more previously-unpublished Dream Songs at Conjunctions. The poems are collected in the forthcoming volume Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae.
Voyager — Kerry James Marshall
Voyager, 1992 by Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955)
Biblioklept 