Category: Books

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

Edwin Turner4 Comments

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of (or excess of) guides and commentaries on the novel can perhaps have the adverse and unintentional consequence of making readers new to Infinite Jest believe that they can’t “get it” without help.  Many of the online analyses and resources for Infinite Jest are created by and targeted to readers who have finished the novel or are rereading the novel. While I’ve read many insightful and enlightening commentaries on the novel over the years, my intuition remains that the superabundance of analysis may have the paradoxical effect of actually impeding readers new to the text. With this in mind, I’d suggest that first-time readers need only a dictionary and some patience.

Infinite Jest is very long but it’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation suggests. There is a compelling plot behind the erudite essaying and sesquipedalian vocabulary. That plot develops around three major strands which the reader must tie together, with both the aid of—and the challenge of—the novel’s discursive style. Those three major plot strands are the tragic saga of the Incandenzas (familial); the redemptive narrative of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, with Don Gately as the primary hero (sociocultural); and the the schemes of the Québécois separatists (national/international/political). An addictive and thus deadly film called Infinite Jest links these three plots (through discursive and byzantine subplots).

Wallace often obscures the links between these plot strands, and many of the major plot connections have to be intuited or outright guessed. Furthermore, while there are clear, explicit connections between the plot strands made for the reader, Wallace seems to withhold explicating these connections until after the 200-page mark. Arguably, the real contours of the Big Plot come into (incomplete) focus in a discussion between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin in pages 242-58. Getting to this scene is perhaps a demand on the patience of many readers. And, while the scene by no means telegraphs what happens in IJ, it nonetheless offers some promise that the set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes shall add up to Something Bigger. 

Some of those earliest set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes function almost as rhetorical obstacles for a first-time reader. The  novel’s opening scene, Hal Incandenza’s interview with the deans at the University of Arizona, is chronologically the last event in the narrative, and it dumps a lot of expository info on the reader. It also poses a number of questions or riddles about the plot to come, questions and riddles that frankly run the risk of the first-time reader’s forgetting through no fault of his own.

The second chapter of IJ is relatively short—just 10 pages—but it seems interminable, and it’s my guess that Wallace wanted to make his reader endure it the same way that the chapter’s protagonist–Erdedy, an ultimately very minor character—must endure the agonizing wait for a marijuana delivery. The chapter delivers the novel’s themes of ambivalence, desire, addiction, shame, entertainment, “fun,” and secrecy, both in its content and form. My guess is that this where a lot of new readers abandon the novel.

The reader who continues must then work through 30 more pages until meeting the novel’s heart, Don Gately, but by the time we’ve met him we might not trust just how much attention we need to pay him, because Wallace has shifted through so many other characters already. And then Gately doesn’t really show up again until, like, 200 pages later.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to suspend or delay introducing the reading rules that we’ve been trained to look for in contemporary novels. While I imagine this technique could frustrate first-time readers, I want to reiterate that this suspension or delay or digression is indeed a technique, a rhetorical tool Wallace employs to perform the novel’s themes about addiction and relief, patience and plateaus, gratitude and forgiveness.

Where is a fair place to abandon Infinite Jest? 

I would urge first-time readers to stick with the novel at least until page 64, where they will be directed to end note 24, the filmography of J.O. Incandenza (I will not even discuss the idea of not reading the end notes. They are essential). Incandenza’s filmography helps to outline the plot’s themes and the themes’ plots—albeit obliquely. And readers who make it to the filmography and find nothing to compel them further into the text should feel okay about abandoning the book at that point.

What about a guide?

There are many, many guides and discussions to IJ online and elsewhere, as I noted above. Do you really need them? I don’t know—but my intuition is that you’d probably do fine without them. Maybe reread Hamlet’s monologue from the beginning of Act V, but don’t dwell too much on the relationship between entertainment and death. All you really need is a good dictionary. (And, by the way, IJ is an ideal read for an electronic device—the end notes are hyperlinked, and you can easily look up words as you read).

Still: Two online resources that might be useful are “Several More and Less Helpful Things for the Person Reading Infinite Jest,” which offers a glossary and a few other unobtrusive documents, and “Infinite Jest: A Scene-By-Scene Guide” which is not a guide at all, but rather a brief series of synopses of each scene in the novel, organized by page number and year; my sense is that this guide would be helpful to readers attempting to delineate the novel’s nonlinear chronology—however, I’d advise against peeking ahead. After you read you may wish to search for a plot diagram of the novel, of which there are several. But I’d wait until after.

An incomplete list of motifs readers new to Infinite Jest may wish to attend to

The big advantage (and pleasure) of rereading Infinite Jest is that the rereader may come to understand the plot anew; IJ is richer and denser the second go around, its themes showing brighter as its formal construction clarifies. The rereader is free to attend to the imagery and motifs of the novel more intensely than a first-time reader, who must suss out a byzantine plot propelled by a plethora of characters.

Therefore, readers new to IJ may find it helpful to attend from the outset to some of the novel’s repeated images, words, and phrases. Tracking motifs will help to clarify not only the novel’s themes and “messages,” but also its plot. I’ve listed just a few of these motifs below, leaving out the obvious ones like entertainment, drugs, tennis (and, more generally, sports and games), and death. The list is in no way definitive or analytic, nor do I present it as an expert; rather, it’s my hope that this short list might help a reader or two get more out of a first reading.

Heads

Cages

Faces

Masks

Teeth

Cycles

Maps

Waste

Infants

Pain

Deformities

Subjects

Objects

One final note

Infinite Jest is a rhetorical/aesthetic experience, not a plot.

[Ed. note: Biblioklept first posted a version of this note in the summer of 2015. Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Infinite Jest’s publication. Wallace’s novel remains underread by overtalkers].

Mass-market Monday | Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died

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And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ, 1970. Ace Books (n.d., c. 1978). No cover artist or designer credited. 189 pages.

From Samuel R. Delany’s review of And Chaos Died:

The first two pages of this hardcover reprint of And Chaos Died present the protagonist, Jai Vedh, as a quietly despairing modern man with a nearly psychotic desire to merge with the universe. Moreover, it is suggested that this essentially religious desire is a response to the meaninglessness and homogeneity of every day life. There is a vacuum inside him; and when, on a business trip in a spaceship that has taken him off the surface of Old Earth (“on which every place was like every other place, ” p. 9), he senses the great vacuum of space itself about the ship, the real vacuum and the psychological vacuum become confused. Propelled by his desire for mergence,

on the nineteenth day he threw himself against one of the portals, flattening himself as if in immediate collapse, the little cousin he had lived with all his life become so powerful in the vicinity of its big relative that he could not bear it. Everything was in imminent collapse. He was found, taken to sick bay, and shot full of sedatives. They told him, as he went under, that the space between the stars was full of light, full of matter — what was it someone had said, an atom in a cubic yard? — and so not such a bad place after all. He was filled with peace, stuffed with it, replete; the big cousin was trustworthy.

Then the ship exploded. (p. 10)

The place Jai Vedh comes to, along with the philistine captain of the exploded spaceship, is the first of Russ’s SF utopias. Noting the January 1970 publishing date on the original edition, and thus inferring 1968/1969 as the most probable time of composition, we may be tempted to read this particular utopia as a kind of arcadian fall-out of that decade’s ecological crusade. A more sensitive reader of SF will, however, notice its sources in SF works that substantially predate that crusade: the nameless planet of telepaths takes its form from Clarke’s Lys (the more ruralized companion city to mechanical Diaspar in The City and the Stars, 1953) and from the world in Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Touch of Your Hand” ( 1953). What characterizes this particular SF image is not rural technology, but advanced technology hidden behind a rural facade; not human communication in good faith, but ordinarily invisible communicational pathways (some form of ESP); and it is always left and then returned to.

Richard Hell’s Godlike (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike is getting a new printing from NYRB. Godlike reimagines the volatile Verlaine–Rimbaud dyad as a 1970s No Wave New York collision of art, desire, and language language language. Symbolist rebellion transmutes into downtown punk nihilism, drugs, and poetry. This corrosive Künstlerroman was originally issued by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery (an imprint of Akashic books). Read the description/blurb at NYRB; here’s a taste from Chapter 15, around the middle of the novel:

They spent the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking in T’s apartment. These were probably their best times too despite being experienced largely as tedium. They preferred the times of thrills, but the thrills grew out of the tension; and the mild, mildly restless, half-frustrated times of the many nights and late afternoons of doing almost nothing in T’s apartment, or walking the streets without direction, were their true lives.

T’s room was like some kind of glum office in its lack of daylight and its featurelessness, but with the little pictures now tacked on the walls, and the typewriter and sheets of paper, and the drugs, it got some character. He’d picked up a few stray pieces of furniture on the streets, including a table and three chairs, crates for shelves, and a beat-up old oriental rug. There was a secondhand portable record player too and a few albums.

They drank coffee and beer and sometimes codeine cough syrup and sometimes smoked some grass or snorted a little THC or mescaline and every once in a while a tiny bit of heroin, but mostly they lay around and lazily, impatiently goofed and wrote and complained, goading each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night one of them would go out for a container of fresh ice cream from Gem’s Spa. They’d go to a movie sometimes, or wander the rows of used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or drink in a bar, but most of t he time was spent in the dim back apartment.

The days and nights were as endless as wallpaper patterns. Boredom and irritation were normal and lengthened out into sometimes-mean giggles and into pages of writing. Writing was their pay. Books were reality. The room was a cruder dimension-poor annex to the pages of writing. The writing, as casual as it was—smeared eraseable typing-pages with revisions scribbled on and crumpled pages of rejected tries—was the brightly lit and wildly littered universe erupting out from the dark, poor, inexpressive room.

How odd is it to have as a purpose in life the aim of treating life-in the medium created for the purpose of coldly corresponding to it, words—as raw material for amusing variations on itself? Sometimes T. and Paul fantasized about this, imagining themselves as godlike philosopher poets encouched in the advanced civilization, languorously sipping their fermented grain as they spun ideas and mental-sensual constructions of life-language in the air for the pleasure of their own delectation.

 

Ishmael Reed on John A. Williams’ !Click Song

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The following essay is from Rediscoveries II, a 1988 “gathering of essays by novelists…asked to rediscover their favorite neglected work of fiction.” Ishmael Reed’s overview of John Williams’ 1982 novel !Click Song motivated me to track down a copy of the book. And while elements of Reed’s typically prickly essay are dated in their contemporaneous references, the essay’s thrust — that the Invisible Empire persists — is as timely as ever. Read more on Rediscoveries II at Neglected Books.

Ishmael Reed

on

John A. Williams’ !Click Song

The Ku Klux Klan may appear to be clownish, and inept to some, but they have one thing right. They do represent an “Invisible Empire,” of which, the kind of monkeyshines that go on in places like Forsyth County belong to those of a small ignorant outpost. On the day that some joker held a sign warning of welfare disaster if blacks moved into the county, a New York Times columnist and a book reviewer spread the same lie about welfare being an exclusively black problem, yet, I doubt whether demonstrators will march on the editorial offices of the Times.

Klan thinking goes on in the editorial rooms of our major newspapers, in the film, and television studios; and in the public schools, and universities whose white male supremacist curricula are driving Hispanic, and black children out of education. One hears Ku Kluxer remarks in places that present themselves as the carriers of “Western civilization” like National Public Radio where,recently, a man congratulated a musician for using the saxophone as a “serious” symphonic instrument. “Up to now,” he said,
“the saxophone has merely been used to make ‘jazzy howls.’ ” In “the Invisible Empire,” George Shearing will always receive more recognition than Bud Powell, Paul Cummings more recognition than Cato Douglass, and racist mediocrities will always get more publicity and praise than John A. Williams. Continue reading “Ishmael Reed on John A. Williams’ !Click Song” →

Mantra

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A book cover bearing the words, "WORK AS IF YOU LIVE IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION"

Alasdair Gray, 1934-2019

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

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Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed, 1976. Avon Bard Books (1977). Cover art by Andrew Rhodes; no designer credited. 192 pages.

Reed’s Flight to Canada is one of my Best Books of 1976? round up of books published fifty years ago.

From my 2020 review of the novel:

Flight to Canada features a number of intersecting plots. One of these plots follows the ostensible protagonist of the novel, former slave Raven Quickskill, who escapes the Swille plantation in Virginia. Along with two other former slaves of the Swille plantation, Quickskill makes his way far north to “Emancipation City” where he composes a poem called “Flight to Canada,” which expresses his desire to escape America completely. The aristocratic (and Sadean) Arthur Swille simply cannot let “his property run off with himself,” and sends trackers to find Quickskill and the other escapees, Emancipation Proclamation be damned. On the run from trackers, Quickskill jumps from misadventure to misadventure, eventually reconnecting his old flame, an Indian dancer named Quaw Quaw (as well as her husband, the pirate Yankee Jack). Back at Swille’s plantation Swine’rd, several plots twist around, including a visit by Old Abe Lincoln, a sadistic episode between Lady Swille and her attendant Mammy Barracuda, and the day-to-day rituals of Uncle Robin, a seemingly-compliant “Uncle Tom” figure who turns out to be Reed’s real hero in the end.

ReMass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

Best Books of 1976?

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Previously:

Best Books of 1972?

Best Books of 1973?

Best Books of 1974?

Best Books of 1975?

Not-really-the-rules recap:

I will focus primarily on novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope.

I will include books published in English in 1976, including translations published in English for the first time.

The New York Times Best Seller list for fiction in 1976 was dominated by Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal, and Leon Uris. Christie’s 1975 novel Curtain ruled winter and early spring, with her posthumous 1976 novel Sleeping Murder topping the charts in November and December. Vidal’s historical novel 1876 and Uris’s Trinity split the rest of the year. While Alex Haley’s Roots topped the nonfiction Best Seller list for only a few weeks in 1976, it’s the bestseller title of the year with the most cultural staying power. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days, their follow up to 1974’s All the President’s Men was a bestseller in the spring and summer (and one of many, many Watergate books of this era). Gail Sheehy’s “road map to adult life” Passages was popular in the fall.

But sales charts ain’t literature.

Better to regard the New York Times Book Review’s end-of-year round up, “1976: A Selection of Noteworthy Titles.” It begins with a heavy dose of literary biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and collections of letters. These include Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, Lucille Clifton’s memoir Generations, Patrick McCarthy’s bio Celine, Charles Higham’s The Adventures of Conan Doyle, and Lillian Hellman’s third memoir Scoundrel Time. 

Also of note in the NYT list are Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Britt Britton’s collection of author Self-Portraits (the article is peppered with some of the portraits).

The Book Review piece also notes collections of letters by Sylvia Plath, E.B. White, and Virginia Woolf, as well as more diaries of Anaïs Nin. There are multiple memoirs of Hemingway (one by his son and one by his last wife) and David Heyman’s Ezra Pound biography. The list of literary bios and memoirs conveys the beginnings of a strange autopsy of the Modernist past giving way to something new.

Here are some of the fiction titles the New York Times Book Review includes in its “Selection of Noteworthy Titles” that I thought more noteworthy than other titles included:

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck

The Autumn of the Patriarch Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

The Easter Parade, Richard Yates

Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed

The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

Lucinella, Lore Segal

Meridian, Alice Walker

Ratner’s Star, Don DeLillo

Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. Le Guin

Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

Speedboat, Renata Adler

The Takeover, Muriel Spark

Travesty, John Hawkes

Frog and Toad All Year, Arnold Lobel

Children of Dune, Frank Herbert

The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe

Triton, Samuel R. Delany

I’ll do some more with that list in a second. But for now–

One of the best sections of the NYT Book Review’s year-end recap is “Author’s Authors,” in which they ask various writers to pick their three favorite reads of 1976. John Cheever picks John Updike’s Picked Up Pieces (1975). Bernard Malamud picks García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. Vladimir Nabokov, always humble selects his own manuscript for The Original of Laura (it remained unpublished until 2009).

William H. Gass selects buddies William Gaddis (J R, 1975) and Stanley Elkin (The Franchiser); I’ll pick up Craig Nova’s 1975 novel The Geek on his recommendation. I’ll also be on the look out for one of Ishmael Reed’s recommendations: Dangerous Music (1975) by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn. He also recommends one of the many, many Watergate books of the era, Blind Ambition by John Dean and Shouting! by Joyce Carol Thomas. As far as I can tell, Shouting! wasn’t published until 2007.

By far the best entry belongs to John Updike though:

John Updike THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF GLASS by J.D. Salinger THE EARL BUTZ JOKE BOOK edited by Gerald Ford VOLUME X (GARRISON TO HALIBUT) OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA. I thought the Salinger well worth waiting for, the Butz one of the best volumes to issue from the Government presses in recent years, and Volume Ten, though rather severely treated in the New York Review of Books, the most amusing and varied yet in its series.

Shitposting in the Times in the late seventies. Gotta love it.

In her “Author’s Authors” write up, the novelist Lois Gold makes the only mention of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in the NYTBR piece. Rice’s seminal postmodernist vampire romance currently sits at #1 on Goodreads list of most popular books published in 1976, a testament to its populist staying power. Other notable books on the Goodreads list that were absent from the lofty NTYBR’s contemporary coverage include Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, David Seltzer’s The Omen, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Marian Engel’s Bear, Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster, Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes, Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Demon, Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout, Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, and many, many more. I’ll do more with that list momentarily, but next —

–prizes!

Saul Bellow won both the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature (“for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work”) and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, specifically for his 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift.

David Saville’s novel Saville was awarded the 1976 Booker Prize. The shortlist consisted of An Instant in the Wind by André Brink, Rising by R. C. Hutchinson, The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore, King Fisher Lives by Julian Rathbone, and The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor. 

The 1977 National Book Award winner for fiction was Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird. Runners-up were Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver, Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris, and A Fine Romance by Cynthia Propper Seton. 

The 1976 National Book Critics Circle award for best fiction went to John Gardner’s October Light.  Finalists were Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Valdimir Nabokov’s Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Cynthia Ozick’s Bloodshed and Three Novellas, and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. Haley’s Roots was runner up to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. 

The Nebula Awards for fiction published in 1976 gave first place to Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Notable finalists included Marta Randall’s Islands, Delany’s Triton and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm.

I have read many but hardly all the books mentioned in this post. But this is my blog, so here are my picks for the best books of 1976:

The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Bear, Marian Engel 

A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews

Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed

The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin

Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. Le Guin

Lucinella, Lore Segal

Ratner’s Star, Don DeLillo

Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

Speedboat, Renata Adler

A few sentences on every book I read or reread in 2025

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☉ indicates a reread.

☆ indicates an outstanding read.

In some cases, I’ve self-plagiarized some descriptions and evaluations from my social media and blog posts.

I have not included books that I did not finish or abandoned.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog☆

I got a paperback copy of Herzog’s memoir for Christmas last year but ended up listening to him read the audiobook on my commute for a week or two. Every Man for Himself was one of four memoirs as-read-by-the-author I listened to this year. The other three: The Friedkin Connection by William Friedkin; The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case; Rumors of My Demise by Evan Dando. I enjoyed all four memoirs and maybe as I go through this post I’ll pull a few common threads. Herzog’s memoir is bonkers, better than fiction. It really is one of those deals where a paragraph starts one way and a few sentences later you’re in a totally different place.

Dispatches from the District Committee, Vladimir Sorokov (translation by Max Lawton; illustrations by Gregory Klassen)

An absolutely vile book. I loved it.

Raised by Ghosts, Briana Loewinsohn

Loewinsohn’s love letter to the latchkey nineties hit me hard. I reviewed it here.

Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño (translation by Chris Andrews)☉

I think I was trying to get through the beginning of a novel by an “alt” midlist author when I realized I’d rather read something I loved. Or maybe there was something else in the air in late January. The notes on the draft for this post are cryptic.

Feminine Wiles, Jane Bowles

A slim lil guy, a nice reprieve from current events in January, a reminder that sanity is precarious.

Interstate, Stephen Dixon☆

From my review: “It upset me deeply, reading Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. It fucked me up a little bit, and then a little bit more, addicted to reading it as I was over two weeks in a new year.”

Remedios Varo: El hilo invisible, Jose Antonio Gil and Magnolia Rivera

A lot of Varo’s pictures, but also a lot of Spanish. I was trying hard at the time (to read Spanish). I used my iPhone to translate a lot.

Borgia, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Milo Manara 

Indian Summer, Milo Manara and Hugo Platt

Caravaggio, Milo Manara

A nice little run there, I seem to recall. Borgia was the best.

Occupancy 250: The Stories of Einstein A Go-Go

The Einstein A Go-Go was an all-ages music club at Jacksonville Beach that was a massive part of my teenage years. I saw so many amazing bands there over four or five years (including Luna, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Man or Astroman, Sebadoh, Polvo, Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and so many more), met so many cool people, and even played there with my band a time or two or five. And if I was too late (that is, too young) to see acts like Nirvana, The Replacements, 10,000 Maniacs, The Cranberries, and Soundgarden there at the the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties, it feels pretty swell to see my band’s name on the back of Occupancy 250 right there in the mix, as well as flyers and photos. Occupancy 250 is like the yearbook we never got when the club had to shut its doors in ’97 in the name of beachfront development. What a gift it was. A few months ago we went to a reunion event, featuring bands like The Cadets and Emperor X. I’ve never been to a high school reunion, but I know that this was better.

Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez (translation by Gregory Rabassa)☆

Loved it. A discussion with a colleague after, a Spanish instructor, led to my reading Cela, Peri Rossi, and Rulfo.

The Hive, Camilo José Cela (translation by Anthony Kerrigan)

Pascual Duarte, Camilo José Cela (translation by Anthony Kerrigan)

I liked them both but liked Pascal Duarte more than La colmena. I would love to read Cela’s 1988 novel Cristo versus Arizona if I could get my pink little hands on an English-language copy.

The Friedkin Connection, William Friedkin☆

I think that Spotfiy suggested that I listen to Friedkin’s memoir after I finished the Herzog memory; in any case, there was a lot of overlap. Like Herzog, Friedkin had no idea how to make a film and never really developed a baseline beyond, Doing the thing for real and filming it, whatever the thing was. Going to make a film where a criminal is going to counterfeit US currency? Better teach Willem Dafoe how to, I don’t know, counterfeit money and just film that instead of, like, getting a props department involved. (Weird overlap: both Friedkin and Herzog laud Michael Shannon as the greatest actor of his generation.)

I loved this memoir. It starts, if I recall correctly, with Friedkin admitting that he threw away a sketch by Basquiat and an offer from Prince. It ends with Friedkin telling his wife, legendary producer Sherry Lansing, to pass on Forrest Gump. Amazing stuff.

The Ship of Fools, Cristina Peri Rossi (translation by Psiche Hughes)☆ 

I loved it.

Monsieur Teste, Paul Valéry (translation by Charlotte Mandell) 

I hated it.

Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (translation by Douglas J. Weatherford

I liked it!

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy☉ 

I guess I fall into rereading this all the time.

Tongues, Anders Nilsen☆ 

screenshot-2018-08-31-at-4-34-20-pm

Amazing stuff.

Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

I probably would’ve read Day of the Triffids a dozen times as a kid instead of, like, Joan D. Vinge’s novelization of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, if there had been a copy in the lending library in Tabubil. Anyway, I’m glad I got to it when I did.

Frog, Stephen Dixon☆ 

Above, I wrote I have not included books that I did not finish or abandoned; look, I didn’t finish Frog, but in some ways it’s the most important book — or rather, most important, reading experience — for me this year.

An old great friend mailed me his copy back in March. I read and loved a hefty chunk of Frog, a long book, but abandoned it when another great old friend died unexpectedly in early May. I was deep into it but there was no comfort in it, in Frog.

And so then well I just read or reread a bunch of John le Carré novels.

Call for the Dead, John le Carré

A Murder of Quality, John le Carré☆ 

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

The Looking Glass War, John le Carré

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré☉☆ 

Was a blur, thank you to Mr. Le Carré’s ghost. A Murder of Quality was my favorite (I think). (I was a fucking mess and these books really helped me.)

The Woman with Fifty Faces: Maria Lani and the Greatest Art Heist That Never Was, by Jon Lackman and Zack Pinson.☆ 

I read it all in one sitting. Loved it.

The Bus 3, Paul Kirchner

I reviewed it here.

Portalmania, Debbie Urbanski

In my review, I wrote that, “Debbie Urbanski’s new collection Portalmania is a metatextual tangle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror where portals don’t offer escape so much as expose the fractures beneath family, love, and identity.”

Dreamsnake, Voya McIntrye

I liked it!

The Stone Door, Leonore Carrington

Wrestled with this dude a lot and it beat me. I thought it would twist one way and it did another thing. Ended up reading it twice in the summer and I guess I’ll read it again.

The Great Mortality, John Kelly

Kelly’s Black Death chronicle was a comfort read this summer.

Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, Rebecca Grandsen

Skip my review of Grandsen’ poetic post-apocalyptic miniature epic and just buy it and read it.

Macunaíma, Mário de Andrade (translation by Katrina Dodson)☆ 

I am so glad my guy at the bookstore sold me on this one. A synthesis of Brazilian folklore with high and low modernism (eh, Modernism?).

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

A corny book a colleague recommended. I’m happy that someone I know IRL wants me to read a book and talk about it with them.

Unkempt Thoughts, translation by Jacek Galazka (translation by Jacek Galazka)

More Unkempt Thoughts Stanislaw J. Lec (translation by Jacek Galazka)

Aphorisms.

The Frog in the Throat, Markus Werner (translation by Michael Hofmann)☆ 

I gave the guy who gave me the Julian Barnes this novel; he didn’t like it!

I loved it. In my review of The Frog in the Throat. I noted that “you could throw a small dart in this short book and find a nice line” its protagonist. I included a lot of those pithy gems in the review if you want a sample.

Counternarratives, John Keene☆ 

Amazing stuff. I was halfway through when I realized that Keene wrote the intro to my edition of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma. My favorite piece in the collection reads like a riff on Melville’s Benito Cereno with strong Gothic undertones.

Mevlido’s Dreams, Antoine Volodine (translation by Gina M. Stamm)☆ 

A bleak, dystopian noir novel set several centuries in a ruined city-state wherein Mevlido’s fragmented consciousness becomes a vessel for Volodine’s haunting post-exotic vision of history, language, and apocalypse. Loved it! My review.

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon☆ 

The highlight of 2025 in reading was a new late Pynchon novel. It might not have been the best novel I read this year, but it was my favorite reading experience. I ended up reading it twice, running a series of posts I called Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket. At the end of those notes, I wrote:

“I should probably distill my thoughts on Shadow Ticket into a compact, “proper” review, but I’ve sat with the novel now for two months, reading it twice, and really, really enjoying it. I never expected to get another Pynchon novel; it’s a gift. I loved its goofy Gothicism; I loved its noir-as-red-herring-genre-swap conceit; I loved even its worst puns (even “sofa so good”). I loved that Pynchon loves these characters, even the ones he might not have had the time or energy to fully flesh out — this is a book that, breezy as it reads, feels like a denser, thicker affair. And even if he gives us doom on the horizon in the impending horrors of genocide and atomic death, Pynchon ends with the hopeful image of two kids chasing sunsets. Great stuff.”

Black Arms to Hold You Up, Ben Passmore

Sports Is Hell, Ben Passmore

Subtitled A History of Black Resistance, Passmore’s comic is more fun than you would think a book about fighting a racist state should be. I still owe it a proper review. It made me go back and read Passmore’s Sports Is Hell, which is kinda like the NFL x Walter Hill’s The Warriors x George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case

Of the four memoirs I listened to this year, musician Neko Case’s is the most artfully written, packing in bursts of sensory images that pivot cannily to evoke very specific memories that connect the reader to the storyteller. The memoir is heavy on Case’s childhood and adolescence and purposefully avoids a direct accounting of her musical career. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot about music in here — there is (life on the road, songwriting, a nice section on her tenor guitar) — but Case seems to avoid going into too much detail about interpersonal relationships with other musicians. She also seems to want to apologize for some past behaviors, but the apologetic language is indirect and even cagey (Evan Dando’s memoir is a massive contrast here — the dude dishes deep, but is also frank and clear and specific about all the bad mean shit he did to people when he was younger).

Neko Case’s magnificent singing voice translates well to reading her memoir. She’s really good at reading it — expressive without being hammy, subtle, artful. I would love to hear her read other audiobooks, but I’m also happy for her to keep her focus on making music and playing live.

The King in Yellow, Robert Chambers☉

I played this silly fun indie game called The Baby in Yellow which led me to reread The King in the Yellow for the first time since I went nuts over True Detective (the first season). The first two stories were much stronger than I remembered — much weirder.

Acid Temple Ball, Mary Sativa

A Satyr’s Romance, Barry N. Malzberg

Flesh and Blood, Anna Winter

I spent some of the year browsing through a copy of the Maurice Girodias edited volume The Olympia Reader. That edition offers excerpts from Olympia Press’s more “respectable” authors, like William Burroughs, Chester Himes, Henry Miller, Jean Genet etc. I downloaded a bunch of trashier Olympia titles and ended up reading these three. They were all pretty bad but also fun. Acid Temple Ball is like a sex-positive Go Ask Alice; both A Satyr’s Romance and Flesh and Blood are well-beyond “problematic” in their depictions of sexual relationships.

The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle☆ 

In my golden-hued review, I called The Pisstown Chaos “a foul, abject, hilarious, zany vaudeville act, a satire of post-apocalyptic literature, an extended riff on American hucksterism. It’s very funny and will make most readers queasy.”

The Changeling, Joy Williams

Joy Williams is one of my favorite writers, but I’ll admit I was disappointed in her second novel, 1978’s The Changeling. I loved how dark and weird and oppressive it was, but soon tired of spending time in the rattled consciousness of its alcoholic hero, Pearl. When Williams explores beyond Pearl, the novel hints at weird Gothic cult island shit that is super-intriguing — but we always have to retreat back to our depressed, insane hero.

The Folded Clock, Gerhard Rühm (translation by Alexander Booth)

A collection of “number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning,” as publisher Twisted Spoon puts it. A fascinating and frustrating read that hearkens back to the good ole days of the avant garde.

Rumors of My Demise, Evan Dando

In a review at the Guardian of Evan Dando’s memoir Rumors of My Demise, Alexis Petridis writes that the Lemonheads leader “sounds insufferable, but weirdly, he doesn’t come across that way.” Dando doesn’t try to deny, deflect, or otherwise shade his life. He’s upfront about his privileged background, his good looks, and his love of the rock star lifestyle. He’s also, as he always was, very upfront about the drugs. I was in eighth grade when It’s a Shame about Ray came out. I loved it. I loved the follow up album, Come on Feel the Lemonheads even more. I am, I suppose, the target audience for this book, and I found it very satisfying. I also think listening to Dando read it is really remarkable. He’s charming and affable, but he doesn’t seem comfortable reading out loud (you can hear it, for example, in an awkward pause when he has to change the page during the middle of a sentence). It’s also remarkably honest, and culminates in a series of apologies to many of the people he’d hurt when he was younger (“If I could go back in time and give a bit of advice to myself, I’d say ‘Evan, don’t be such a dick.’”)

My best friend Nick, who died this May, was a bigger Lemonheads fan than I was. I think he would have loved Rumors of My Demise and I thought about him all the time while I was listening to it, wanting to text him, Hey, you’re gonna love this story about Dando drinking Fanta Orange and Absolut with Keith Richards or, Man, Dando really has a score to settle with Courtney Love, or Dando’s some kind of disaster magnet — he lived right by the Twin Towers and was home on 9/11, he was in L.A. during the King riots, in Paris when Diana died, on Martha’s Vineyard when JFK Jr. crashed…or, Man, Dando seems to have finally quit heroin, good for him. I didn’t get to text those things so I’m writing them here.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

A partial glossary for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

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The October 1980 issue of Esquire ran a piece titled “What to Think about Gravity’s Rainbow” by the poet Terrill Shepard Soules. It’s not really a what to think piece, though (the title seems an editorial intervention), but rather a witty glossary.

“WHAT TO THINK ABOUT GRAVITY’S RAINBOW”

by Terrill Shepard Soules

VERY CLEVER.

THOMAS PYNCHON, AUTHOR, KEEPS A LOW PROFILE.

MAIN CHARACTER: TYRONE SLOTHROP.

FIRST LINE: “A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY.” NICE FIRST LINE.

LONG — 760 PAGES IN HARD-COVER.

BUZZWORDS: PIGS, PARANOIA, B MOVIES, SEX, NAZIS.

PUBLISHED 1973; EVERYONE WENT CRAZY.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, OF COURSE. PULITZER JUDGES LOVED IT, PULITZER TRUSTEES THOUGHT OBSCENE. ALSO INCOMPREHENSIBLE. NO PULITZER PRIZE. SOMETHING LIKE ULYSSES THAT WAY. A FREQUENT COMPARISON.

INSIDERS CALL IT RAINBOW. INSIDERS ARE INSIDERS BECAUSE THEY LOVE THE IDEA THAT
SOME RECLUSE (A CORNELL GRAD?) WROTE A 760-PAGE BOOK ABOUT PIGS AND PARANOIA. ALSO BECAUSE THEY KNOW SOME VERY EXTRAORDINARY WORDS FROM RAINBOW, LIKE THE ONES IN THE GLOSSARY BELOW (FROM THE HARD-COVER EDITION).

BOOK 1
Beyond the Zero

NARODNIK [p. 11]
From Russian narod, “people.” Intellectual trying to metamorphose peasant into revolutionaries. The Narodniki flourished in the late 1860s. In the late 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists were referred to as narodoniks. By show-offs.

PRETERITION, PRETERITE
[p. 15 and throughout]
A passing over. Preterition is the Fluke Cosmic, the doctrine that God in John Calvin’s breast (cf. the Jampere-phrenia in Alien) decreed that you and you and you are heavenbound no questions asked but We’re going to have to think about the rest of you — don’t get your hopes up.

MAFFICK [p. 17]
The founder of the Boy Scouts defended the garrison at Mafeking against the Boers for two hundred seventeen days. When the siege was raised, on May 17, 1900, London went crazy, and the jubilant celebratory maffick — it’s a verb! — was born. Here, part of Lieutenant Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick’s moniker.

TANTIVY [p. 17]
Mucker-Maffick’s nickname. Means to gallop along, or a blast on a horn, or that headlong gallop itself.

LOVE-IN-IDLENESS [p. 22]
The perfect word for violet. Pynchon’s choice is dazzling. First, on a map of London there’s a star for each of Slothrop’s women, Slothrop “having evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing.” Second, the many stars are of many colors. Third, Slothrop gets the idea that the stars look like flowers. Now Viola tricolor, the flower in question, turns out to be a violet with yellow, white, and purple petals and several country names. The name our author finally selects enables him to pull off a genuine rampage-prose triple play: “and all over the place, purple and yellow as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness.” Continue reading “A partial glossary for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow” →

The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s post-convenience novel of abject gags and grotesque japes

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Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: The Pisstown Chaos is an improbably perfect and beautiful name for a novel. If you don’t like the title, The Pisstown Chaos isn’t for you. It is a foul, abject, hilarious, zany vaudeville act, a satire of post-apocalyptic literature, an extended riff on American hucksterism. It’s very funny and will make most readers queasy.

The author of The Pisstown Chaos is David Ohle. The novel was published in 2008; it is the second of three “sequels” to Ohle’s 1972 cult classic Motorman. You do not have to have read Motorman or The Age of Sinatra (2004) to “understand” The Pisstown Chaos. (But you’ll probably want to dig into those if you dig The Pisstown Chaos’s uh pungent urinous ammonia bouquet)

Moldenke, hero of Motorman, is a bit player in The Pisstown Chaos, a walk on, a song-and-dance man with no songs or dances. A storyteller. He’s a zombie, too — a “stinker” in the novel’s parlance — adorned in “black rags and a wide-brimmed white hat,” sporting “an inch-long tube of flesh protruding from just below his ear [which] had the general appearance and shape of an infant’s finger, but lacked a nail. In the end of the tube, a small hole leaked a clear, gelatinous fluid.”

Moldenke, we are to infer, is one of the “Victims of the Pisstown parasite…thought of as dead, but not enough to bury. Gray haggard, poorly dressed, they lay in gutters, sat rigidly on public benches, floated along canals and drank from rain-filled gutters.” He may or may not be centuries old.

It’s not clear how far into the future we are in the Ohleverse (it doesn’t really matter). After “the Great Forgetting,” and multiple and ongoing Chaoses, the world has regressed, or progressed, or really mutated, into a dusty, wet, gross, nasty post-infrastructure reality. You might read The Pisstown Chaos as a slapstick zombie Western.

The Reverend Hooker presides over this wonderfully abject world. Hooker’s loose theocratic federation revolves elliptically around a “shifting” scheme. Nothing is permanent, everything is moving, plates spinning on poles. Folks receive their shifting papers and must relocate from, say, a cozy cottage to a prison camp. Or they might end up paired with a new concubine or some such.

That’s the fate of Mildred Balls, née Mildred Vink, who meets Jacob Balls on the road to Witchy Toe. The pair meet cute and get on famously. (And who wouldn’t; after all, suave Jacob Balls was the inventor of  the “finely-grained, yellow-tinged powder” known as “Jake” — a kind of post-apocalyptic Bud Light.) Optimistic Jacob is optimistically optimistic of all the shifting, attesting his belief that “in any culture, when boredom and apathy take hold, the currency is debased and the decline is irreversible…What could be more of a tonic than a random redistribution of the populace?” Mildred is less convinced: “The whole scheme is idiotic.”

The Pisstown Chaos focuses on the Balls clan — primarily an older Mildred and her young adult grandkids, Roe and Ophelia. There are stinkers and imps, shifting folk consuming urpflanz, willy, and Jake on their way via Q-ped to Indian Apple or Bum Bay. Reverend Hooker is always lurking in the margins, too, before taking over the narrative’s final pages in a mock apotheosis that brought a stupid smile to my face.

Ohle’s narrative isn’t exactly a picaresque, but it runs on the same energy. Each chapter opens with a series of frank excerpts from the Pisstown rag, the City Moon. Here’s one update of news you need:

A fondness for pickled lips has led to the arrest of a Kootie Fiyo, a stinker known to be a trader in tooth gold and a vicious biter. Fiyo was just leaving the impeteria in South Pisstown when two Guards entered. The proprietor said, “That stink can eat more imp lips than I can heap in front of him. “

The City Moon is not just a source for the goods on a stinker’s glimpse of pickled imps’ lips, but also a gloss on the undead (or un-undead’s) physiology:

What then is a final-stage stinker’s life like? It has been described by scientists as showing a poverty of sensation and a low body temperature. In their nostrils is the persistent odor of urpmilk. The membrane which lines their mouth is extremely tough and is covered with thick scales. They like to touch fur and drink their own urine. Because they have been known to go without food for as long as eighteen years, we can assume that their sense of time passing is also very different from our own.

The Stinker Problem is likely the signature event of whatever century we are in. There’s probably an icky metaphor or allegory somewhere in there, but I find myself disinterested in that end of the novel. But still: Consider Mildred–who wants to find a “cure” for stinkerism–in charge of a crew of stinkers who, after their daily labors, commit “to walking in circles and searching the ground.” But these are not geologists peering into the navel of the world: “‘No, Miss,’ Spanish Johnny said, ‘We like to get dizzy and faint. It’s the way we have fun.'” We’ve all been there.

Mildred’s granddaughter Ophelia commands much of the narrative, shifting about her stations in life. Her domestic comedy with servants Red and Peters is a class-conscious comic delight. Our Miss Madame goes through a series of abject slapstick routines with the Help (including an enema gag that uh, gag me yeah). Here’s a foul episode in the life of Ophelia Balls:

She walked carefully from slippery stone to slippery stone until she got to the potting shed, then blew out the candle. She tried the door and found it locked. Wiping the dirty door-glass, she looked in at Peters, lying on the peat pile with his pants pulled down, fanning his rear with a handful of straw. Red, sitting beside him in Mildred Balls’s underwear, combed Peters’s coarse hair with a tortoise-shell comb. Peters’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes half-closed. When Ophelia entered, the scene seemed all the more lurid for the dim lantern and its flicker.

“I hope you don’t take any offense,” Red said, “but I’ve just mated with Peters here.”

Peters sat up. “I was quietly potting geraniums when that idiot stepped out of a dark corner and made advances, clumsy, lewd advances, with his big willy sticking out. I tried, but I couldn’t resist him.”

“Is that true, Red, that he put up resistance?”

“He lies like a rug. He clearly indicated he wanted me to sex him good and sex him hard.”

Ophelia saw the pointlessness of going any further with the inquiry. “All is forgiven. Let’s move past this.”

“I’ll serve the swan,” Red said.

If I’ll serve the swan isn’t your kinda punchline, The Pisstown Chaos ain’t your cup of Jake. It’s a rich, smelly, gross novel, fun, funny, fueled with 19th-century inventions viewed through piss-colored glasses, aimed at the apocalyptic future. It’s smoked imp-meat served with urpsmoke, a vaudeville buzz against the zombies in the gutter. When I was a kid we held our breath when we passed cemeteries. There are other ceremonies, other totems, but warding off the dead remains a concern.

I have neglected the Balls scion, young Roe, who eventually finds himself attending the Reverend Hooker. Late in the novel, Roe Balls prepares an enema for the theocrat; Hooker then delivers a sermon:

“I’ll warm up the bathroom right away, sir, and get the enema bag ready.”

Once Roe had firmly inserted the hose, the Reverend sat on the pot and closed his eyes. “There, that’s it, Roe. It’s in well enough.”

“Shall I leave you alone now, sir?”

“No. Don’t leave. Let me sermonize a little. I’ll tell you a story, a story with a lesson. In the days when all men were good, they had miraculous power. Lions, mountains, whales, jellyfish, hagfish, birds, rocks, clouds, seas, moved quietly from place to place, just as men ordered them at their whim and fancy. But the human race at last lost its miraculous powers through the laziness of a single man. He was a woodman in the Fertile Crescent. One morning he went into the forest to cut firewood for his master’s hearth. He sawed and split all day, until he had a considerable stack of hickory and oak. Then he stood before the pile and said, ‘Now, march off home!’ The great bundle of wood at once got up and began to walk, and the woodman tramped on behind it. But he was a very lazy man. Now, why shouldn’t I ride instead of galloping along this dusty road, he said to himself, and jumped up on the bundle of wood as it was walking in front of him and sat down on top of it. As soon as he did, the wood refused to go. The woodman got angry and began to strike it fiercely with his axe, all in vain. Still the wood refused to go. And from that time the human race had lost its power.”

“That certainly explains everything I’ve ever wondered about, sir.”

“You may clean me now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The punchlines accumulate after the Rev. Hooker’s fable — young Roe’s deadpan line “That certainly explains everything I’ve ever wondered about, sir” made me laugh aloud when I read it, and the following asswipe line is too much — but I think we have here in the fable a key to the novel. Not the key, but a key.

In the Rev’s woodman’s fable, humans once wielded Promethean power over the world. But that power’s contingent; it exists only when humans move with the world, attentive to its rhythms and limits. When the woodman attempts to ride the wood and make it a convenience instead of walking alongside it, cooperation collapses. S’all she wrote.

Ohle’s chaotic, grotesque world echoes his some-time collaborator William Burroughs’ alien abjection. It will also be comfortingly/nauseatingly familiar (familiar?!) with anyone who digs David Cronenberg’s corporeal horrors. The Pisstown Chronicles will also appeal to weirdos who dig the abject fictions of Vladmir Sorokin, José Donoso, and Antoine Volodine.

The Pisstown Chaos is not a novel for everyone, but there’s a certain type of reader who will love wading through its abject humor, grotesque imagery, and absurdist chaos. Ohle’s post-convenience world grunts and howls; it’s dark, vivid, gross, and hilarious. That scent will linger. Highly recommended.

Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock (Book acquired, drifted through, last week or the week before, end of 2025)

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I dug/was perplexed by Gerhard Rühm’s Cake and Prostheses a few years ago, so when I got my soft pink hands on The Folded Clock, (translated like C & P by Alexander Booth), I was intrigued. Publisher Twisted Spoon describes The Folded Clock as a collection of “number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning.”

Rühm seems to identify Kurt Schwitters as his artistic precursor, or an artistic precursor. Like Cake and Prostheses, the pieces in The Folded Clock defy easy categorization — Is it a script or a poem or art? is probably the wrong question.

Passing eyes over the text is probably not the way to go; Rühm’s asking you to engage. As Joseph Schreiber puts it in his review at Rough Ghosts, you might follow Rühm’s directions and “allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.”

I don’t really like numbers that much, at least not in a mob, a gang, a swarm. I tried and didn’t work out. Not just with this book but in general. I can’t count sheep, I guess.

I had a better time with Rühm’s forays into music and letters and collages; I enjoyed whatever psychotic version of minesweeper or Sudoku this piece is:

“Turkey Remains and How to Inter Them with Numerous Scarce Recipes” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks—

TURKEY REMAINS AND HOW TO INTER THEM WITH NUMEROUS SCARCE RECIPES
At this post holiday season the refrigerators of the nation are overstuffed with large masses of turkey, the sight of which is calculated to give an adult an attack of dizziness. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to give the owners the benefit of my experience as an old gourmet, in using this surplus material. Some of the recipes have been in my family for generations. (This usually occurs when rigor mortis sets in.) They were collected over years, from old cook books, yellowed diaries of the Pilgrim Fathers, mail order catalogues, golfbags and trash cans. Not one but has been tried and proven—there are headstones all over America to testify to the fact.
Very well then: Here goes:

1. Turkey Cocktail
To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.

2. Turkey at la Francais.
Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage-pudding.

3. Turkey and Water
Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator When it has jelled drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.

4. Turkey Mongole
Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.

5. Turkey Mousee
Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.

6. Stolen Turkey
Walk quickly from the market and if accosted remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn’t noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg-well, anyhow, beat it.

7. Turkey a la Creme.
Prepare the creme a day in advance, or even a year in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.

8. Turkey Hash
This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how really to prepare it. Like a lobster it must be plunged alive into boiling water, until it becomes bright red or purple or something, and then before the color fades, placed quickly in a washing machine and allowed to stew in its own gore as it is whirled around.
Only then is it ready for hash. To hash, take a large sharp tool like a nail-file or if none is handy, a bayonet will serve the purpose—and then get at it! Hash it well! Bind the remains with dental floss and serve.
And now we come to the true aristocrat of turkey dishes:

9. Feathered Turkey.
To prepare this a turkey is necessary and a one pounder cannon to compell anyone to eat it. Broil the feathers and stuff with sage brush, old clothes, almost anything you can dig up. Then sit down and simmer. The feathers are to be eaten like artichokes (and this is not to be confused with the old Roman custom of tickling the throat).

10. Turkey at la Maryland
Take a plump turkey to a barber’s and have him shaved, or if a female bird, given a facial and a water wave. Then before killing him stuff with with old newspapers and put him to roost. He can then be served hot or raw, usually with a thick gravy of mineral oil and rubbing alcohol. (Note: This recipe was given me by an old black mammy.)

11. Turkey Remnant
This is one of the most useful recipes for, though not, “chic”, it tells what to do with the turkey after the holiday, and extract the most value from it.
Take the remants, or if they have been consumed, take the various plates on which the turkey or its parts have rested and stew them for two hours in milk of magnesia. Stuff with moth-balls.

12. Turkey with Whiskey Sauce.
This recipe is for a party of four. Obtain a gallon of whiskey, and allow it to age for several hours. Then serve, allowing one quart for each guest.
The next day the turkey should be added, little by little, constantly stirring and basting.

13. For Weddings or Funerals. Obtain a gross of small white boxes such as are used for bride’s cake. Cut the turkey into small squares, roast, stuff, kill, boil, bake and allow to skewer. Now we are ready to begin. Fill each box with a quantity of soup stock and pile in a handy place. As the liquid elapses, the prepared turkey is added until the guests arrive. The boxes delicately tied with white ribbons are then placed in the handbags of the ladies, or in the men’s side pockets.

There I guess that’s enough turkey to talk. I hope I’ll never see or hear of another until—well, until next year.

Sunsets to chase | Notes on Ch. 39, the last chapter of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket

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

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

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.

Notes on Chapters 37-38 | Our racket happens to be exile.

The last chapter of Shadow Ticket has three movements: one for Bruno, the novel’s erstwhile villain; one for Hicks, its anti-hero finding his way to becoming a hero; and one for Hicks’s young protege Skeet, who’s been sidelined Stateside and not present in the novel’s second, European half.

We begin the finale on the phantom submarine the Vampire Squid, “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World.” Shadow Ticket will end with the promise of a new edge of the New World.

Bruno Airmont, one-time dairy gangster, believes he’s headed home. The sub encounters a bizarre behemoth, “a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field [wearing] an openwork visor of some darkly corroded metal protecting, some say hiding, her identity.” The full description of this statue is beautiful and strange, and culminates with the melancholic note that her visage recalls “somebody we knew once a long time ago.” 

“Statue of Liberty,” guesses Bruno, which, okay. I mean, that’s a reasonable guess I guess.

The image Pynchon conjures of a surreal, armed Lady Liberty recalls the opening of Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel Amerika, which begins with its hero entering the New York Harbor and encountering “the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds” (trans. Mark Harman).

In the Pynchonverse, “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile” for Bruno: “There is no Statue of Liberty, Bruno, no such thing, not where you’re going.”

Bruno’s episode–and the Vampire Squid’s—ends with a Dickinson dash: “Whatever counter-domain of exile this is they have wandered into, they will be headed not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected, as the days sweep over them—”

The Vampire Squid is another bilocated ghost ship, like the Stupendica on which Hicks voyaged to Europe. In Against the Day, the Stupendica splits into two ships — its shadow double the Emperor Maximilian is off to war. Recall that the Vampire Squid is a reformed U-boat, set out on a “new career of nonbelligerence.” Shadow Ticket might be cynical about redemption, but it also posits second chances — even if those chances take the quester into unknown counter-domains of exile.

Ch. 39’s second movement is a scant few lines. Hicks, exiled to Europe, panics a bit and realizes “that what he thought mattered to him is now foreclosed.” Terike pulls up on her bike, teaches him the Hungarian phrase csókolj meg, and our boy is on another adventure, another romance. It’s a nice conclusion for Hicks — who, it’s worth noting, has not committed a single act of violence in the novel.

The real conclusion of Shadow Ticket is epistolary, a letter to “Hicksie” from his old pal Skeet Wheeler. Skeet’s “On the hop,” staying clear of “Paddy wagons, dogcatcher nets, arrest warrants, the works,” lamenting that there are “Not so many places to hide as there were.” Here again is a theme of Shadow Ticket: there’s only freedom on foot, on the run, on the hop. To escape the net, Skeet plans to head West with Zinnia, the gal who gave him a glow-in-the-dark watch back in Chapter 1: “There’s supposed to be plenty of work out on the Coast.” That would be the West Coast of course.

Skeet offers a wrap-up of the Wisconsin cast of Shadow Ticket, including Against the Day’s hero Lew Basnight, who agrees to give Skeet and “Zin the fare out to California.” Basnight advises the young couple in a mode that’s not so much benediction as it is ominous prophecy, warning of “forks in the road, close shaves, mistakes he wished he didn’t make.”

Basnight warns Skeet of California’s American promises: “Eternal youth, big Hollywood playpen, whatsoever—but someday they’ll lose that innocence. They’ll find out.”

“Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent,” rejoins Skeet, to which Basnight replies: “Better if somebody tells you now—innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.”

Skeet concedes he’s not sure what that riddle means, but figures he’ll solve it in time; for now, he writes to Hicks, it’s “Time to put them street kiddie days behind me.” Time to grow up, or at least to make a motion towards it.

The novel ends with Skeet en route to California via the Santa Fe Chief: “Right now, we’ve got a couple of sunsets to chase.” Like the crew of the Vampire Squid, Skeet and Zin are headed “not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected.” 

And while Pynchon’s conclusion follows a signal trope of US American literature — namely the promise of a new start Out West — I think there’s more here than the urge that Huck expresses at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when he promises to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” to avoid the “sivilizin'” domesticity represented by Aunt Sally. Skeet’s Westward movement isn’t pure escapism or the fantasy of Manifest Destiny. It isn’t a rejection of domestic responsibility in lieu of a new frontier but rather a utopian dream of “finding new ways to be innocent,” even as he puts those “kiddie days behind.”

Lew Basnight, veteran of Against the Day‘s fantasia/nightmare of nineteenth-century history, provides a tempering wisdom to cool Skeet’s American Dream: “innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.” Perhaps, like the narrator back in Ch. 35 documenting Hicks and Daphne’s last encounter, Basnight understands that the characters in Shadow Ticket are floating “in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree” before the horrors of WWII. Again, Shadow Ticket is a dance number, a chronological breeze floating between Pynchon’s titans Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.

For me, the ending is sweet and then bittersweet and then bitter and then sweet again. We know Hicks will likely never see Skeet again — but he might. We know that this is probably Pynchon’s last novel — but maybe it isn’t.

And we know that Zoyd Wheeler is the hero of Pynchon’s California novel Vineland, and we know that Skeet’s last name is Wheeler. My presumption is that Skeet and Zinnia are Zoyd’s parents, and I presume it because I like to think that the Pynchonverse, although large and containing multitudes (and bilocations of every stripe) is somehow cozily discrete.

I should probably distill my thoughts on Shadow Ticket into a compact, “proper” review, but I’ve sat with the novel now for two months, reading it twice, and really, really enjoying it. I never expected to get another Pynchon novel; it’s a gift. I loved its goofy Gothicism; I loved its noir-as-red-herring-genre-swap conceit; I loved even its worst puns (even “sofa so good”). I loved that Pynchon loves these characters, even the ones he might not have had the time or energy to fully flesh out — this is a book that, breezy as it reads, feels like a denser, thicker affair. And even if he gives us doom on the horizon in the impending horrors of genocide and atomic death, Pynchon ends with the hopeful image of two kids chasing sunsets. Great stuff.

Ghost city | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 35-36

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

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

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.

Chapter 35 commences in “Fiume…a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself, unlikely to be redeemed.” 

There’s a lot there, as in most of Shadow Ticket’s sentences. The Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio marched on Fiume in 1919, claiming it post-WWI in defiance of its “Free City” status. Like the Esperanto that runs through Shadow Ticket, utopian ideals won’t last long.

The spectral language invoking an unredeemed ghost city is a theme Pynchon explored throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, the first section of which, in particular, details a preterite, apocalyptic London. I think what’s notable here is again the sense of a pretender’s “utopian intellectualism” — the fascist force’s Anno X — which tries to stabilize a dehumanizing pursuit of power within the context of the humanities. It’s a ghost town, bound for collapse, bad for the soul.

The narrator notes that Fiume was once “a major port of embarkation for the New World, bright and bustling.” What’s more utopian than a capital-en-capital double-you New World? Shadow Ticket is all about movement, particularly west-east movement, with the bilocated east-west corollary (coreality?) built in. Indeed, Pynchon will end the novel a la Huckleberry Finn with Hicks’ protege Skeet Wheeler following Huck’s move to “light out for the Territory.” But I’m jumping ahead. The bigger Thing to note here, I think is that the New World is not so new anymore. Frontiers are going to be stranger, more combustible, going forward.

I’ve focused too much on setting: Our man in Fiume is Daphne Airmont, hunting Papa Cheez. She picks up a pair of Morčić, “earrings representing a black Moor’s head in a fancy white turban,” as well as a new tune, “Daleko m’ê moj Split,” (“My Split Is Far Away from Me” — here, a reference to the singer’s hometown).

A few nights later Daphne is singing this tune “at a sympathetic room in a roadhouse on the Yugoslavian side of the line, where neighborhood musicians like to get together, tonight a C-melody sax, banjo-uke, trombone, piano, an underlying beat from snare brushes and woodblock” — I let the sentence ride out because just because (lots of ukes in Shadow Ticket, yet not a single snood). In the middle of the song, Daphne’s “joined out of somewhere by a clarinet, all too immediately recognizable as who else but Hop Wingdale.” Before the erstwhile couple retreats to more private environs to catch up, Hop “reaches for a highball glass, where he’s been keeping a couple of reeds soaking in slivovitz, drinks what’s there, pours in more.” I agree with Daphne (“That’s disgusting!”), but maybe the Drunk Pynchon blog will disagree if they ever get around to “clarinet reeds soaked in slivovitz.”

I can’t help myself: Here’s Pynchon’s mise en scène one-sentence-paragraph for the Daphne-Hop intimate reunion, in which she will find out that he’s actually a spy:

“A busy echoing interior comfortably dim with all-night cigarette and kitchen smoke, young runners who never fall asleep in and out bringing seafood fresh from the Adriatic, a continuous wind outside, down from the high limestone, a theremin of uneasiness, sliding around a narrow band of notes, in which it’s said you may come to hear repeated melodies, themes and variations, which is when you know you’re going bughouse, with only a very short period of grace to try and escape before it no longer matters.”

Pynchon is an underrated prose stylist. The rhythm here might not work for all folks, but it sings to me. There’s obviously a bustling noir quality to the cramped kitchen scene, which Pynchon drapes in mystical paranoia: the Adriatic wind (and “wind” by the by, is a byword in Against the Day, a physical yet invisible force) — the Adriatic wind becomes “a theremin of uneasiness,” a phrase that recalls “the Sombrero of Uneasiness” that makes “a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp” back in Ch. 10, back in Wisconsin, back at the Nazi bowling alley. (There was also a nod to the theremin back in Ch. 24, at the Club Hypotenuse.) The last little bit of the paragraph is a parable for paranoids perhaps — when we “hear repeated melodies, themes and variations,” we know we’re “going bughouse.”

There’s a bit of business at the end of the Daphne-Hop episode that again points to Shadow Ticket’s underinflated bagginess — I’ve pointed out in these riffs that this is a much bigger novel in my imagination, a fat wedge between between Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow. The narrator mentions that Daphne’s supposed-one-time-not-really-fiance “G. Rodney Flaunch has recently published How to Lose a Million and a Half and Bounce Back Smiling,” opening a potential skewering of the kind of self-helpery bullshit that grifters continue to grift on as we breathe, this very minute. It’s a blip of a bit, reminding us that Daphne is far from home (as “Daleko m’ê moj Split” has already underscored), and if it’s underdeveloped, well, William Gaddis took Carnegie to task in The Recognitions (and elsewhere).

The wrapping-things-up-too-quickly motif continues as Hicks and Daphne reunite. Daphne’s headed back home; Hicks is not. She lets him off “that Chippewa hook”; no more life debt for Hicks. Our hero asks her to convey a message to April Randazzo, who is not mentioned by name, but rather alluded to as a “grown woman, married, family to raise” — the kiddie stuff is done. It’s time to grow up. The narrator infuses their stilted, terse parting with a flood of emotion:

“What one of them should have been saying was ‘We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark…'”

The break is of course the moments between the two big wars, situated as the break between Modernity and what comes after — the atom bomb and all that.

Pynchon’s narrator then domesticates the issue in his hypothetical dialogue: “Stay, or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time.” Here again is the novel’s theme of bilocation, of imagining two lives; shadow/form.

It gets darker of course, as the Second World War deserves: “Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.” Hicks won’t go back east, back home to the New World. Can he rise to this challenge? Can he divert some souls to a safer stretch of track and earn a crumb of redemption?

Chapter 36 is a mess.

It is a mess because it attempts to tie up loose ends; that is the wrong metaphor, tie up loose ends — in any case a cavalcade of featured players, guest stars, and even extras show up here (in Fiume, natch), to reconfigure in new teams for the coming war. We get Hicks and Terike and Ace Lomax and Porfirio del Vasto and Zoltán von Kiss and Egon Praediger (“nose merrily aglow,” the fucking cokehead).

Anyway, they’re all in Fiume, convening at Bruno Airmont’s villa, which “dates from just after the War, when d’Annunzio’s republic was young and Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie…” Pynchon twins this list with new revelers at the villa, now a scene for “night owls, freeloaders, accidental walk-ins, practitioners of esoteric arts, fearers of the dark, compulsive socializers, secret police, jewel thieves, firefly girls, drug dealers, cigarette-factory workers, tobacco smugglers…” Old boy loves lists! (What is a “firefly girl”?)

The noisy, buzzing chapter ends with Hop Wingdale offering Ace Lomax (along with “that Czechoslovakian robot” Zdeněk) a job “Escorting Jews to safety, one at a time or in truckloads.” Ace was once hired muscle — like Hicks, who started his “career” as a strikebreaker. But in Shadow Ticket we see the possibility for his changing sides. Redemption is possible. As the psychic Zoltán von Kiss suggests in  Ch. 22: “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.” 

This novel believes in the promise of redemption.

 

Mass-market Monday | Murilo Rubião’s The Ex-Magician and Other Stories

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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?”

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

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

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

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.”

Mangalica piggy looking cute

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.

 

Mass-market Monday | William S. Burroughs’ Nova Express

Biblioklept1 Comment

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.”