Category: Book Reviews

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.

Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.

Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.

Notes on Chapters 35-36 | Ghost city.

Illustration of Vampyroteuthis infernalis from *Deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition*, 1898-1899 by Carl Chun

Chapter 37: Shadow Ticket continues its wrap-up. Hicks punches another old ticket, not-exactly-solving the mystery of missing Stuffy Keegan (who disappeared way back in Ch. 8 on a U-13 submarine — a submarine that not everyone can see — into the icy depths of Lake Michigan.)

Hicks meets Stuffy at “the old Whitehead factory, where the torpedo as we have come to know it was invented.” The Whitehead Torpedo Works, based in Fiume/Rijeka invented and developed the self-propelled torpedo in the 1860s. After WWI the company (under different subsidiary names) manufactured motorcycles and then hand grenades — bikes and pineapples, in the parlance of Shadow Ticket. There are a lot of bombs and biwheels in this novel.

The Whitehead Torpedo Works is another of Shadow Ticket’s Gothic spots, “fallen into ruin [and] said to be haunted by the ghosts of submarines long dismantled.” The phantom submarine that Stuffy crews is supernatural, natch, and a totem of the bigger thesis that Pynchon underlines throughout his latest novel: It’s never too late to redeem yourself. A war machine might repurpose itself, friendly ghost, into a rescue ship (or at minimum, a do-no-harm ship).

Whitehead torpedo’s illustrated profile, 1898

Stuffy introduces Hicks to the submarine’s skipper, Ernst Hauffnitz a veteran of the Great War responsible for “no casualty count that I know of, idiot’s luck no doubt.” The idiot, the fool, is blessed in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and in Shadow Ticket especially. And the idiot-who-does-no-harm is especially blessed. Let’s consider Hicks’s past as a strikebreaker, which we learn about back in Ch. 4, in a pivotal encounter when the big gorilla goes to whack a “truculent little Bolshevik” with a “lead-filled beavertail sap” that would’ve surely killed the poor fella. Hicks’s blackjack disappears — “asported,” in the novel’s paranormal lingo. It sets him on a non-violent path (whether he sees or chooses this path or not).

For skipper Ernst Hauffnitz, doubts about the merits of war — by which I think we should say, doubts about using technology and innovation in the service of violence and undue death — began when “Max Valentiner torpedoed and sank SS Persia in the Mediterranean, killing 343 civilians in direct violation of Chancellery orders to spare passengers and rescue survivors.”

Those doubts increased when post-WWI orders to bring his submarine “to be broken up pursuant to Article 122 of the Trianon dictate“ led Captain Hauffnitz to suicidal feelings — but he converts that despair into hope, and sets out on a “new career of nonbelligerence.”

That new do-no-harm career includes helping out the Al Capone of Cheez, Bruno Airmont, “Who is about to be taken, as we speak, off on an undersea voyage of uncertain extent.” The International Cheese Syndicate — InChSyn — is after Bruno who’s taken off with their cash and their secrets. The submariners, now in “the search and rescue line” aim to see that “Mr. Airmont is safely relocated where he can neither commit nor incur further harm.”

Captain Hauffnitz continues: “You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was, immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea…” On the move is the move of Shadow Ticket, one of its grand themes 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.”

The episode concludes with reference to the “Valdivia Expedition of 1898–99, which brought up into the daylight a pitch-black critter known as the Vampire Squid, by whose name, these days, the U-13 has since come to be known.” More Gothic tinges!

We transition to the parting farewells of Bruno and Daphne; Daphne’s secured her father’s passage with a mariner named Drago. Papa Bruno gives his “li’l midnight pumpkin” a parting gift — “Better than money…It’s information” on the machinations of the InChSyn. Their last moments end with Bruno looking down at his watch, a “Rolex Oyster Perpetual he does not seem to recognize, as if thanks to the psychical ambience he’s been in all evening it has just apported onto his wrist.”

It’s an odd reference, Bruno’s phantom Rolex, but it also fits with the novel’s theme of time as well as the motif of timepieces. Way back in Ch. 1, Skeet Wheeler shows off his new watch to Hicks: “Hamilton, glows in the dark too.” We’ll get a reference to that timepiece in the last paragraphs of the novel.

Bruno doesn’t make it too far on Drago’s escape boat before Hauffnitz’s crew intervenes. He’s on their sub in no time, wondering if he’s imprisoned in his “not uncomfortable cabin” — “Is this the brig I’m in, he wonders. No, submarines don’t have brigs, they are brigs.”

Stuffy starts to explain the situation to Bruno; the Cheez Gangster at first believes that the crew of the Vampire Squid intend to turn him over to the InChSyn. But as we saw earlier in the chapter, their goal is to add to a world of do no harm.

Stuffy tries to hip Bruno to his new life: “See, there’s a difference between the Al Capone of Cheese and the AC of C in Exile. One sooner or later gets the paving-material overcoat. The other goes where he’ll do no harm. Our racket happens to be exile.”

“Milk belonging to John Albrecht is poured out on Sept. 16, 1933, by insurgent members of the Pure Milk Association seeking to force higher prices.” *Chicago Tribune*.

The chapter ends with Stuffy hipping Bruno to the 1933 Wisconsin milk strikes:

Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S., beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk, spreading across the region and soon the nation. Milk shipments hijacked and dumped at trackside, trees felled across roadways and set aflame to stop motor delivery, all-night sentinels, crossroads pickets, roundups, ambushes, bayonet charges, gunfire, casualties military and civilian.

It’s easy to dismiss Pynchon’s evocation of American zaniness as goofy, silly, unserious — but that would require (the very easy threshold of) not actually really reading Pynchon, a writer whose works stand clearly on the side of organized labor as well as on the peace-anarchy dimension of do no harm. The notion of “milk strikes” and a gangster cheese magnate might seem wacky, but Pynchon’s narrator points us towards the wallet, the stomach, the soul. There’s something comforting in the idea of Midwestern dairy workers going hard as a motherfucker and taking collective action to resist exploitation a century ago.

“Men lay out obstacles for milk delivery trucks along the Wisconsin-Illinois state line at Route 41 during the milk strike in January 1934. More than 18,000 farmers were demanding a fair price for their milk.” *Chicago Tribune.*

Chapter 38: Who should Hicks run into on the Korzo but one-time mob-enforcer Dippy Chazz Foditto, recently deported from the USA but nevertheless “just signed on to a scheme hatched and run by U.S. ruling-class elements who are betting that the island of Sicily will be a strategic factor in the next war.” Dippy will help to establish “a local anti-Fascist guerrilla force, trained, armed, and ready to roll.” Again, we’re ramping up to WW2. Dippy Chazz brings news from the West: Hicks’s old flame April is now married to the head crimeboss Milwaukee, and pregnant to boot. Hicks is exiled: “Take the tip, is all, it’s over for you in M’waukee, Hicks, Chicago too.”

The chapter ends on a sad note, with Hicks, “in the dawn hours of the first day of a post-American life…dials a number without thinking much about it till later, when he remembers it’s a TRIangle exchange number in Chicago, same as Al Capone’s mother has.” We can recall from Ch. 4 that Hicks’s mother Grace abandoned him to run away with an elephant trainer. He has a conversation with a person — his mother? Capone’s? just a person? — that ends with the sad image of trying to find “just a glimpse of something blowing away into the night, something it’s already too late to chase in this windbeaten emptiness taking possession of his heart…”

The dead ride fast | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 33-34

November 11, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

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.”)

1499 German woodcut depicting Vlad the Impaler dining among his victims: “Here begins a gruesome and terrible history of the wild tyrant, Dracole Wayde. How he had people impaled, roasted, and boiled in a kettle with their heads. How he had people flayed and their skin salted like cabbage. He also had mothers’ children roasted, and they had to eat them themselves.”

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.'”

Illustration for *Lenore*, 1896 by Frank Kirchbach (1859-1912); engraving by Theodore Knesing (1840-1925).

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.

Some occult switchwork | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 30-32

November 8, 2025November 8, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

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.

Graf Zeppelin over Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 25 May 1930

“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.

A diagram of the internal mechanisms of a Leica I camera

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.

We’re back to Hop Wingdale and his band in Chapter 32 begins with their tricked-out road-Pullman ominously “moving deeper into Vladboys terrain.” We learn that the “band find themselves growing less enthusiastic about the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed [as] Loose cocaine isn’t always practical on these beat-up roadbeds.” The musicians settle on enormous pills of “cocaine and morphine, known as a speedball.”

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.

Motorcyclist Clara Lee riding the ‘Wall of Death’, Sydney Easter Show, 1938

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.

We’re in for some dark ages, kid | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 27-29

November 2, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 24-26 | Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.

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?

*Amazing Stories Quarterly* , Spring 1928. Cover by Frank R. Paul.

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).

Phantom gearbox | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 21-23

October 27, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Chapter 21:

We move from trans-Atlantic passage to Central Europe pretty quickly. Hicks’s spy handlers Alf and Pip (and like at this point I don’t think he fully realizes Alf and Pip are his handlers on whatever shadow ticket he’s picked up) — Hicks’s spy handlers Alf and Pip leave Hicks on the train while they depart into Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

In the Quarrenders’ place emerges Egon Praediger, claiming to be of ICPC — the International Criminal Police Commission (not the Insane Clown Posse Crew), progenitor of Interpol (not the dour 2000s band, but the ICPO). Egon produces “a jarful of cocaine crystals” and grinds up some fat lines — “a routine known around Chicago as ‘hitching up the reindeer,'” the narrator informs us. While ingesting the coke, Egon eventually discloses the shadow ticket Hicks is working: “as you pursue the elusive Miss Airmont, we keep the shadow on you day and night, hoping that Bruno at a moment of diminished attention will make some fateful lunge.” (In another nod to Shadow Ticket’s Gothic motif, the narrator tells us that Egon pronounces the name Bruno Airmont “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”).

It turns out that the Al Capone of cheese is the ICPC’s “most sought-after public enemy,” wanted for “criminal activities including murder, tax evasion in a number of countries, [and] Cheese Fraud.” For the terrible crime of counterfeiting cheese, “the International Cheese Syndicate,” or “InChSyn,” want to lock up Bruno. In a cocaine thrall, Egon riffs a bit at the sinister implications behind the scenes: “Cheese Fraud being a metaphor of course, a screen, a front for something more geopolitical, some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.” Egon’s ranting here echoes the academic discussions of cheese back at the Airmont compound in Ch. 13, when discussion turns to breaking into the Asian markets: “How the heck do we create a market for dairy products in Japan short of invading and occupying the country outright? Taking away their tea or sake or whatever it is they drink and forcing them to drink milk like normal human beings?”

(Going back to Ch. 13 to find these lines, I realized that I’d neglected to include a Gothic reference in my riff on that chapter, where cheese is described as “a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein”).

Egon’s coked-up rant culminates in another of Shadow Ticket’s prophetic warnings of the Next Big War to Come. A glistening, entranced Egon declares:

“This is the ball bearing on which everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential, prairie drifted over the horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever…”

To repeat a claim I made in my last riff: Shadow Ticket is a bridge novel between two of Pynchon’s masterpieces, Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.

And, to repeat another claim I’ve been making throughout these notes, as Hicks moves eastward, Shadow Ticket’s supernatural elements come closer to the foreground. He’s en route to Budapest, where, according to Egon, there “carouses a psychical Mardi Gras in every shade of the supernatural no matter how lurid.” We learn that “Budapest just at the moment is the metropolis and beating heart of asport/apport activities, where objects precious and ordinary, exquisite and kitsch, big and small, have been mysteriously vanishing on the order of dozens per day.” The “asport/apport” motif was first announced back in Ch. 4, via ex-vaudeville psychic Thessalie Wayward. Whereas folks back in Wisconsin were far more skeptical about — or at least reticent to openly speak about — the spooky stuff, Central Europe doesn’t try to deny it.

The chapter ends with Egon giving Hicks a present: a brand new type of pistol called the “Walther PPK.”

Chapter 22 begins in the Oktogon, a major intersection in Pest. Here, Hicks (and the readers) meet two new characters: Zoltán von Kiss, “once an echt working apportist, lately more of a psychic celebrity detective,” and motorcycle courier Terike who downplays her role as Zoltán’s “Glamorous Assistant.” Hicks is intrigued by Terike, and when she departs with “Szia!” — Hungarian for hello/goodbye, he responds with a “Hope so.” The pun is low hanging fruit but our boy Pynchon loves to eat from that tree.

Zoltán, or “Zoli,” as he prefers to be called has a mission for Hicks. But before getting into that (and a demonstration of his psychic and telekinetic powers), he distinguishes metaphysical Central Europe from concrete America:

“You are a practical people, Americans, everyone is either some kind of inventor or at least a gifted repairman. I myself have grown to rely too much on the passionate mindlessness which creeps over me just as an apport is about to arrive or depart. I am painfully aware of how much more exposure I need to the secular, material world.”

The phrase “passionate mindlessness” recalls Mindless Pleasures — a working title Pynchon used for what would become Gravity’s Rainbow.

mindless-pleasures

But onto that mission: Hicks will assist in the recovery and return of “the crown jewel of tasteless lamps… known in underworld Esperanto as La Lampo Plej Malbongusto.” (Zoli’s ever-inflating description of the lamp’s tastelessness is pure Pynchon.) Again, we get an echo of the Airmont compound back in Ch. 13, where Hicks stumbled into “an excessive number of electric lamps… Some are unusual-looking, to say the least, and few if any in what you’d consider good taste.”

While the tasteless-lamp bit is, on the surface very goofy, it nevertheless highlights the novel’s concern with what can be seen and what remains unseen; with what casts a shadow, and with what is immaterial. Zolti posits the lamp’s recovery in language that approaches a holy restoration: “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.” I think the notion here is beautiful answer to a rhetorical question posed in the opening nightmare of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, ‘You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you…‘ Pynchon is for the preterite; even the ugliest light-bearer is poised for redemption.

Hicks and Zoli eventually make their way to “a neighborhood of warehouses, corner taverns, cafés and hashish bars, metallic shadows, sounds of mostly invisible train traffic” and into speakeasyish spot “turbulent with kleptos conferring in Esperanto, featuring a lot of words ending in u (‘Volitive mood,’ comments Zoltán, ‘used for yearnings, regrets, if-onlys…’)” (When I was young my mother had a friend who was a member of an Esperanto society. The notion of an invented language fascinated me; I also recognized, even as a child, that it was a doomed project. I love that Pynchon includes a few nods to L. L. Zamenhof’s utopian linguistic project, and highlights the “yearning” behind the invented grammar.) After some funny business by a vaudevillian magic act trio called Drei Im Weggla (secret agents themselves, we’re assured parenthetically) and a nonviolent showdown with “Bruno Airmont’s deputy Ace Lomax,” Hicks fulfills his mission with Zoli.

Chapter 23 sees Hicks reunite with the Quarrenders. Pips has performed a quick change glamour, to Hicks’s admiration. She tells him it’s, All part of the craft, give whoever’s watching something blonde and shiny to fix their attention, then should one need to disappear, simply get rid of it and fade into the mobility.” Like Terike and the other sleight-of-hand artists of Shadow Ticket, Pips understands the value of posing as the “Glamorous Assistant.” Later in this chapter we’ll meet another spy, Vassily Midoff, of whom we’re told “Impressions of what he looks like also vary widely. Not that he’s invisible, exactly, people see him all the time, but they don’t remember that they saw him.”

Alf soon (literally) materializes and complains of an exhausting morning at the “Crossword Suicide Café.” Alf then goes on to detail how “an unemployed waiter named Antal Gyula steps in to what was then known as the Emke Café,” committed suicide, and left a “farewell note in the form of a crossword puzzle he designed himself, whose solution will reveal the reasons he did the deed, along with the names of other people involved.” The puzzle remained unsolved, a “crypto bonanza potentially and yet just as easily somebody’s idea of a practical joke.” The note is zany and sinister, silly and sad, utterly Pynchonian but also, like, totally real.

The chapter ends with the “nightclub apport trio Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz, seated one behind another on a Böhmerland Long Touring motorcycle, ten and a half foot wheelbase, red and yellow paint job, riding patrol…” The spectacle upsets Vassily Midoff, who senses a fourth “invisible rider” at the motorcycle’s stern. He hits the high road, “spooked…back into invisibility,” the narrator noting that “for a trinity to be effective, and not just a set which happens to contain three members, there must be a fourth element, silent, withheld. A fourth rider, say, working a phantom gearbox…”

Perhaps the invisible fourth rider alludes to Carl Jung’s Answer to Job, which argues for a unified, reconciled quaternity, and not a trinity; a symbolic totality that acknowledges the shadow (ticket?) suppressed by the idealized triad. In Jung’s schema, the fourth element completes the cycle by restoring what has been excluded, granting wholeness rather than perfection. The phantom rider becomes an embodiment of that hidden completion, an invisible force that trails behind the spectacle of the three visible figures, suggesting that beneath their exuberant surface rides the unacknowledged presence that makes the whole thing work. (Or perhaps threatens to undo it.)

Ghostly crawl | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 15-18

October 17, 2025October 17, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment