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Chapter 27 focuses on Hop Wingdale. Out on tour with his band (and maybe on the run, sorta, from Daphne) he meets up with his agent Nigel Trevelyan in Geneva. Hop refuses to play “any of these Nazi joints popping up all over,” but sympathetic Nigel has something kosher for the clarinetist: the “Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed,” an anarchic, carnvialesque motorcycle race that will culminate in Fiume (aka Rijeka — a bilocated multilingual, multiethnic city-state). Everyone in Shadow Ticket is headed to Fiume — you too, reader.

Halfway through this short chapter, things take a spooky twist: Nigel dispenses with the tour stuff to move to “the real business at hand…Hop’s ‘booking agent’ turns out to be a” secret agent. He’s so secret that he literally physically morphs “through a smooth frame-by-frame personal transition, gaining a couple inches in height, mustache narrowing to little more than a lip gesture, discreetly tinted indoor specs.” It turns out that “the real business at hand” is the worsening “antisemitism situation.” Hop’s on a mission; the tour is a cover for him to scout “possible escape routes from Central Europe should a sudden exodus become necessary.” Nigel suggests that the “key connection will be to Fiume, also known as Rijeka.” He warns Hop that: “We’re in for some dark ages, kid.”

Nigel has arranged luxury transport for his asset: a “road-Pullman all lit up, size of a railway sleeping car, futuristic as something just rolled off the cover of Amazing Stories.” The notation of a “road-Pullman” threw me at first — Pynchon has evoked something like a sci-fi bus, sure, but I had always identified the term “Pullman” with railroad cars — like the one Hicks journeyed eastward out of Illinois (while chatting with a phantom Pullman porter) back in Ch. 17. Perhaps it’s just slang here?

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

Chapter 28 begins with homesickness blooming into idealized nostalgia: “Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe…” I feel that Hicks!

The chapter then moves through a series of short vignettes that move the plot forward (however obscurely). Terike will be taking off on the Trans-Trianon bike tour; Hicks is worried that Harley-riding Ace Lomax will be there too. Hicks checks in with Egon Praediger, who implicitly offers to pay Hicks to kill Bruno Airhart. Hicks declines, claiming that assassination “draws too much kiddie outlaw attention” — but we get the sense that he’d like to find more meaningful work than just one “high-risk orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s greed or fear.” Hicks also visits journalist Slide Gearheart, who questions whether or not the former strikebreaker might find forgiveness or “redemption via Cheez Princess.” Cynical Slide is dubious, but their exchange recalls psychic Zoltán von Kiss’s riff in Ch. 22 on the redemption of lamps: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.”

Chapter 28 then gives over to Daphne, who will finally, “in a turbulence and drift of multiple unlikelihoods” meet up with her estranged father Bruno. She meets him in Night of the World, a multi-floor cabaret whose “circles of depravity…go corkscrewing down…toward ancient depths few have been willing to dare, each with its own bar and dance band and clientele.” The image of the bar and its name recall German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s notion of “die Nacht der Welt” a reference to human subjectivity as a chaotic, unconscious darkness that lies beneath rational thought. Pynchon has previously referenced Carl Jung in Shadow Ticket, and while I don’t really think of Jung as a follower of Hegel, his concept of “the shadow” seems to resonate with Hegel’s “Nacht der Welt.”

Pynchon’s description of the Night of the World is worth sharing at length: “Each table here has a small circular cathode-ray tube or television screen set flush in the tabletop, throbbing more than flickering with shaggy images of about 100 lines’ resolution…Numbered push-button switches allow you to connect to any other table in the place and watch each other as you chat.” As if to underline the parody here of our twenties’ contemporary screen culture obsession, a strange man — it’s Bruno, spoiler — tells Daphne the screens are, “The future of flirtation…here they call it Gesichtsröhre, or ‘Face-Tube.’ ”

But the theme here goes beyond the parodic surface. Looking in the screen, “Viewers sometimes do not agree on the nature of the image. Pareidolia is common. You look down into it, like a crystal gazer, and faces loom unbidden.” The language here recalls Hicks gazing into the shoe-fitting fluoroscope back in Ch. 15 and seeing “a face he’s supposed to know but doesn’t, or at least can’t name.” Is this image the shadow — like, the Jungian shadow? The night of the world? Or just Hicks’s paranoid pareidolia cooking up an answer to a corkscrew of images that amount to chaos.

Anyway–the weird stranger is Papa Bruno. Soon there’s another of Pynchon’s original songs and a daddy-daughter dance. Bruno looks much, much younger, and creepily, more virile. How? “These days the Central European backwoods, Bruno explains, are full of ‘scientists,’ elsewhere known as witch doctors, working miracle effects in chemical defiance of time.” All in the service of horny plutocrats, natch.

Daddy and daughter agree on a movie date and go to see “Bigger Than Yer Stummick (1931), the latest hit starring child sensation Squeezita Thickly, which is about, well, eating, actually.” The description of Bigger Than Yer Stummick is, for me, a highlight of Shadow Ticket. It’s well-over whatever line of “good taste” some folks might set down (Squeezita Thickly!), over-indulgent, and I love it. Here’s Pynchon the auteur framing a special effects shot:

“A pot of soup, approached from overhead, now smoothly lap-dissolving into a giant swimming pool full of bathing beauties, bordered by palm trees and food pitches, offering an array of snacks from roast turkey drumsticks to deluxe hot dogs smothered in sport peppers and dripping green-blue pickle relish strangely aglow, even though the movie’s supposed to be in black-and-white, and gigantic Italian sandwiches quite a few feet long, and glutton-size ice-cream extravaganzas and oh well that sort of menu…”

I think I’ve pointed out in every single one of these riffs some instance of glow-in-the-dark material, like the “green-blue pickle relish” that manages supernatural radiation here.

The Bigger Than Yer Stummick routine isn’t just goofy fun though. It showcases the zany-sinister paradox that Pynchon is so good at evoking. The film is about eating, and thus, highlights hunger via hunger’s absence. And the film’s audience is hungry: “Back in the States, every showing of this movie, no matter where, has collapsed well before the second reel into civic disorder—screens across the nation presently inscribed with knife scars, fork tracks, spoon indentations as audiences, many of whom haven’t seen a square meal since the start of the Depression.” As the film progresses, it gets darker; first “the music has shifted grimly minor,” and soon folks are “shooting at each other, both semi- and fully-automatically, not always in play, plus setting off spherical anarchist-style bombs.” There’s a war on the horizon — “We’re in for some dark ages, kid” — a war that will cannibalize the world. Consider Egon Praediger’s cocaine-inspired reverie back in Ch. 21. He predicts the coming war; although it will entail “a violent collapse of civil order” it will also point to a “horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever…”

One last note on Bigger Than Yer Stummick — the title is a take on the idiom “your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” meaning that you’ve overestimated your hunger or taken on more than you can handle. The missing word is “eyes” and two of the words are in alternate spellings. Perhaps Pynchon is inviting us to see not just a missing “eye” but a missing “I.” Maybe there’s something here with the shadow self, the missing or submerged self, the moral self that would love to transcend the material plain, the stomach of reality — if you weren’t so fucking hungry all the time.

Post-film credits, things get weird between Daphne and pops. The narrator tells us that, “If Daphne has been hoping for something incestuous yet romantic, she’s once again reminded how very little anybody can put past Bruno.” Uh, okay. Bruno wants to euchre her of her cattle/cheese rights; he needs cash as “Some very bad people are after your old Pop, itchin to take down the Al Capone of Cheese. Forces I once had no idea even existed.” We then switch back to Hicks and Slide, with Slide apparently hep to an apparent incest grift on Daphne’s point: “Word around is she’s been working her own counter-scheme, luring Bruno deeper into a sordid and forbidden sex affair while hired photo crews secretly record every last shameful detail—” Hicks is shocked. But, like — incest, power, plutocracy. Daphne skips town, possibly hunting Hop.

Ch. 28 snowballs, adding characters, like “Heino Zäpfchen, a much sought-after Judenjäger, or Jew-tracker”; the Vladboys, an anti-semitic gang of hooligans “desperate for Nazi approval” who are engaged in streetfighting; and “Zdeněk, who claims to be an authentic Czechoslovakian golem.” Thomas Pynchon is 88 years old. I have no idea how long he’s had this novel percolating, and I’m so thankful to get to read at least one more, and I think it’s a really good novel, but, yeah, there’s a sketchiness to it — a sense that the old master might not have the energy or time to flesh out all of the big ideas. Or, alternately–Shadow Ticket is leaner and meaner than the epics it points towards (Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow).

Okay, so I just mentioned Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow — parenthetically, sure. But “Zdeněk, who claims to be an authentic Czechoslovakian golem,” provides a clear link to Mason & Dixon. Golems show up in Mason & Dixon, first appearing in Chapter 49, where the narrator refers to “Kitchen-size” ones, not the giants we expect. Cf. Zdeněk being described as a “sort of snub-nose golem.” Then, in chapter 50, there’s an extended riff on the Rabbi of Prague (I wrote about it here). Back in Shadow Ticket, Zdeněk “explains, ever since Judah Loew was Rabbi of Prague, a body of powerful golem lore has been passed down, rabbi to rabbi.”

The (long) chapter ends with a flurry of references: to Imi Lichtenfeld (Hungarian-born inventor of the Israeli martial art krav maga (“’You could think of it as Jew-jitsu,’ sez Zdeněk”); to “a glamorous, indeed sultry, robotka or female robot named Dushka“; and to “some business in Transylvania we needed to take care of.”

Chapter 29 is an ultracompressed precis of Central European history in the 1920s, the point of which is the origin of the Trans-Trianon motorcycle ride (that’s not really the point):

“Sometime in the period 1920–25 the first tentative motorcyclists set out on low-horsepower machinery, army dispatch bikes, city-street models. While the ’20s roared in Chicago and American expats whooped it up in Paree, while Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman went gliding through the city traffic of Petersburg filming a newly tsarless and not yet Stalinized people” —

— “while Berlin still offered unparalleled freedom and refuge to heretics and asylum seekers of all persuasions, this is what was going on in the strange ring of historical debris that had once belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary—bikers in motion, some riding clockwise, some counter-, not a rally, not a race, not a pilgrimage, no timekeepers, no grand prizes, no order of finish, no finish line for that matter, though some, speaking metaphysically, say if there were one it’d be at Fiume. Rijeka, whichever.”

Bilocation, anarchy, telekinesis.

Watch Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Vertov; dir. of photog. Kaufman).

The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 19-20

October 21, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

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.

Chapter 19:

Last time we checked on hero Hicks McTaggart, our P.I. was in NYC, unwillingly sent there by his intelligence agency, U-Ops. A “a needle full of something in the chloral hydrate family” sends Hicks out on the Atlantic, on the “ocean liner Stupendica.“ The Stupendica is presumably the same ship, or a version of the ship, from Pynchon’s opus Against the Day. In the “Bilocations” section, the Stupendica bifurcates (or doubles?), engendering a second ship, the Emperor Maximilian, which departs on its own timeline to other bellicose adventures.

Aboard this particularStupendica, Shanghaied Hicks revives to a “seagoing-type tomato” named “Glow Tripforth del Vasto…here on assignment for Hep Debutante magazine, sending in a series of articles on how to be a Jazz Age adventuress on a Depression budget.”

Glow’s name immediately recalls Shadow Ticket’s motif of “glow in the dark” images and monster movie irradiation. The name “Glow Tripforth” (she married into the del Vasto name) also echoes “Geli Tripping,” the beautiful young witch who takes up with Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Indeed, much in seafaring Chapter 19 seems to echo some of Gravity’s Rainbow’s nautical (and casino) episodes. The Stupendica isn’t the Anubis of GR, but, with its “grinning stewards, uniformed juveniles years corrupted, American sorority girls, [and] exiled royalty” it offers another version of Pynchon’s ship of foolish fun.

And just as Pynchon delighted in Gravity’s Rainbow giving his totem Slothrop costume changes, so too does Hicks get a new suit, a garish “‘Midnight aubergine and electric kumquat…not perhaps as understated a look as one might wish.’ Though in fact, as the Gumshoe’s Manual points out, quite useful if you want eyewitnesses to be focused more on the suit than the mug happens to be in it.” Glamour, as in magic, is a recurring theme in Shadow Ticket, and this theme only intensifies as Hicks heads east to Ole Europe, where we meet more characters who disguise themselves via peacocking distractions.

Pynchon renders the Stupendica as a drunken anarchic playground where “different classes of passenger all … shuffle together” fueled by “Champagne Cocktails, Sidecars, French 75s, Jack Roses, and Ward Eights [that] flow without interruption.” Lotta spirits on this ship!

In this carnivalesque atmosphere, Hicks is approached by Alf and Philippa Quarrender; he claims to be a retired Lt. Commander in the British Royal Navy, but Hicks, brighter than these spies (yeah, spoiler) realize, detects “an air of international monkey business, maybe even some kind of espionage racket, hard at work” in the story they’re selling. The Quarrenders test Hicks a bit on his susceptibility to fascist/Nazi tendencies, and in one of the novel’s least subtle gags, Alf feigns shock to learn from Hicks that U.S. political operatives have ties to the mob in America: “But Al Capone, I say— Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?” (Pynchon’s stand-in “Hicks blinks once, maybe twice” at this reaction.)

The chapter ends with some more monkey business with people who may not be what they seem, sweet Glow and her “ex- or possibly current husband, Porfirio del Vasto,” an autogyro dealer who may or may not have a murderous streak and who may or may not be a jewel thief. But he does share with Hicks that the word on the street is that folks believe Hicks is “an American gangster, being deported to somewhere in Eastern Europe. Traveling in the custody of Lieutenant-Commander and Mrs. Quarrender, of the British Intelligence, currently under contract to forces unnamed.”

Chapter 20:

So Hicks confronts the Quarrenders: “Seems Alf and Pips have been out on a worldwide scouting expedition to find recruits for the Secret Intelligence” and have likely picked up a “number of code breakers [who] have recently found themselves at loose ends after the Black Chamber was shut down, on Halloween of 1929, just after the stock market crashed.”

There’s a lot I could riff on here — the reference to cryptoanalytics; the will to mill meaning from chaos, finding the visible in the invisible; the rise of national intelligence agencies — but it’s really Pynchon’s reference to Halloween I most want to foreground here. Shadow Ticket is a stealth Gothic novel. Or not really a Gothic novel, per se, but maybe a novel about Gothicism in relation to technology, or, more specifically, communication technology — ways of knowing, ways of sending, ways of communicating. Pynchon chooses to highlight a Gothic aesthetic in the lines above, pinning them to the economic-political historicity of the U.S. at the end of the 1920s. This Gothicism intensifies over the next few chapters, as our hero P.I. heads East into Old Europe. Is Hicks a U.S. Modern? A hayseed hick? Something else?

Either way, the sophisticated, aristocratic Quarrenders do condescend to Hicks’s midwestern naivete. Our P.I. hopes aloud that things will get back to “normal” soon, to which Pips replies: “Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’” Alf is even more frank: “Take up shooting.” Later in the chapter, Alf delivers one of several theses dispersed in Shadow Ticket:

“It’s a strange time we’re in just now…one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved.'”

The next war is coming.

Again, I want to situate Shadow Ticket as a bridge novel between two of Pynchon’s masterpieces. Read it after Against the Day and before Gravity’s Rainbow. (Or read it however you like.)

Alf’s concern with “so many wrongs still unresolved” finds psychical manifestation on the decadent Stupendica, where “Passageways long after hours clamor with what sounds like an immense unsleeping crowd, not to be explained away by corridor acoustics or the unceasing friction of the sea.” It’s a ghost ship, baby: “‘Not too many of them exactly visible,’ Alf speculates, ‘yet still wandering the ship at will, in and out of spaces both authorized and forbidden.'” Alf suggests these spirits haunt from “a hope no longer quite sure and certain that injustices would be addressed and all come right in the end.”

The seagoing chapters of Shadow Ticket continue to echo Gravity’s Rainbow; prompted by Alf’s ghost talk, Hicks remembers “séances and so forth going on all the time” at a “spiritualist camp” he visited in summers at his “mother’s side of the family…Hicks and his friends used to hang around…hoping to see ghosts or other supernatural visitors.” The immediate recall here is to the séance scene early in Gravity’s Rainbow, but the bigger pull is to Pynchon’s overall concern with how we know what we know and how we don’t know what we don’t know — a concern that can fit neatly into a term like “paranoia,” but also manifests in attention to the paranormal or supernatural or the metaphysical.

Or, in terms Pynchon repeats in his novels, the visible and the invisible—what glows in the dark? Consider the epigraph to Shadow Ticket (from Bela Lugosi’s character in The Black Cat): “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.” Now compare it to the epigraph Pynchon gives for Against the Day (attributed to Thelonious Monk: “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.” And then, far messier in its layered levels of irony, Pynchon’s epigraph to Gravity’s Rainbow, from Nazi-to-NASA rocketmensch Wernher von Braun: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.” But how can you know?

Pip is skeptical of all of Alf’s intuitions — “a sighting of uncertain luminosity, or a wordless voice that might be more than wind strumming the guy wires of the radio masts,” for example. The skepticism is doubled in the crew and passengers of the Stupendica, some of whom give over to “paranoid suspicions the liner is being tracked by a mysterious submarine.” Like Alf’s ghosts, “Some see it, some don’t.”

Hicks doesn’t ever see the submarine — presumably the same U-13 he didn’t see back in Chapter 8, when it picked up Stuffy Keegan. Hicks does, however, communicate with Stuffy, or someone claiming to be Stuffy (“Don’t sound like you”) over the radio. Throughout the novel, different characters warn Hicks about a variety of wonderful dangers: bombs and guns and dames and gangsters and an impending world war — but Stuffy gives the gumshoe a warning that he feels in his flat feet:

“‘…back in Milwaukee, freedom, nobody thought much about it, we just figured hey, a free country ain’t it and left it at that. But—’ this being about the point Hicks begins to feel warning signs from his feet—’the real thing, what if that’s only when they’re comin after you for somethin? But they haven’t caught you yet. So for a while, as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free?'”

Is that freedom though?

“I don’t know why Against the Day hasn’t been banned” | Ishmael Reed on Thomas Pynchon

October 18, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

I don’t know why Against the Day hasn’t been banned. In one of the most remarkable scenes penned by an American writer, Pynchon cites events that the anti-woke crowd would want deleted. Referring to the Blacks and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies who are present in that scene, the character Lew Basnight “gradually understood that what everybody here had in common was having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about directly — a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S. government.” Those with prominent media megaphones today are denying that such cataclysms took place.

Ishmael Reed on one of his favorite Thomas Pynchon novels. The extract is from a piece in The New York Times on different writers and artists sharing their “favorite pinch of Pynchon.” William Gibson’s riff is especially nice too–he singles out Father Rapier’s sermon on They/we systems in Gravity’s Rainbow. Don DeLillo contributes a loose haiku. I didn’t read the remarks of Homer and Lisa Simpson.

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

October 17, 2025October 17, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Chapter 15 opens proximal to Xmas time, presumably 1931, still–although it’d take a reread for me to pin down the timeline better. Hicks is in the grip of mild paranoia, feeling like he’s the target of some unknown They. The feeling is a haunting: “light as delusional bugs, the ghostly crawl of professional finger-eye coordination, somewhere above and in the distance, tightening in on whatever is centered in its crosshairs, which at the moment happens to be Hicks’s head.”

Christmas bugs?!

Hicks’s paranoia is well-placed. He’s “handed a parcel wrapped in festive red-and-green paper whose design features Xmas trees, reindeer, candy canes, so forth. Ribbon tied in a big bow. Something to do with Christmas” by miscreants claiming to be “Santa’s elves.”

Skeptical Hicks denies the supernatural, natch, despite the “ghostly crawl” that’s come over his aspect this haunted season. The so-called elves protest that they are cousins of Billie the Brownie, an historical mainstay of Milawaukee’s Schuster’s Department Store Christmas spectacles.

(I’ve tried not to overload these riffs with too many of Pynchon’s Milwaukee/Milwaukee-proximal references–like, I couldn’t leave Les Paul out when I riffed on Ch. 8, but I didn’t include his reference in the same chapter to Árpád Élő, the Hungarian-American physicist who taught at Marquette in Milwaukee for four decades, during which time he developed the Elo chess rating. Anyway, the point is — for a breezy novel, Shadow Ticket is still pretty dense. Pynchon enjoys fat in the right proportion.)

Anyway, addressing Hicks as “Schultz,” the elves deliver an Xmas package and evaporate into thin air. Then who appears? “Damn if it ain’t the same sawed-off Bolshevik striker Hicks didn’t manage to kill that fateful night not so long ago,” who we learned of back in Ch. 4 (recall Hicks felt some kind of metaphysical interjection prevented his striking down the protester). He warns Hicks to dispose of the package posthaste, insinuating it’s a time bomb.

Hicks steps into Wisebroad’s Shoes in order to use their, yes, X-ray machine. The narrator informs us that, “One of many interesting facts about Milwaukee is that along with the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout, it’s also the birthplace of the shoe-store X-ray machine.” I have to admit I thought at first that the ridiculousness of such an apparatus struck me as a goofy Pynchonian invention. But shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were like a totally real twentieth-century thing. (One of the shoe clerks attests that he prefers Brannock devices as X-rays “don’t pick up fat, and fat’s the key, see.”)

The X-ray riff here ties into Shadow Ticket’s themes of mad science, glow-in-the-dark wonders, and strange rays, like those Dr. Swampscott Vobe was said to experiment on his psychiatric patients (Ch. 14) or the irradiated “Radio-Cheez” that helped establish the Airmont cheese fortune (Ch. 13).

Instead of a bomb in the package, Hicks and the shoe clerks see something closer to a face when they peer into the fluoroscope’s lens. The scene is another moment of anxious dread, horror even, woven into the comic zaniness:

“Despite a certain blurriness, Hicks realizes it is inescapably a face, not unchanging and lifeless, like you’d get from a severed head for example, but instead gazing back with its eyes wide open and holding a gleam of recognition, a face he’s supposed to know but doesn’t, or at least can’t name. Mouth about to open and tell him something he should’ve known before this. The window he never wanted to have to look through, the bar he used to know enough not to set foot inside of.”

Hicks disposes of the package in Lake Michigan, where it explodes.

Later, Hicks, haunted and depressed, finds some solace in April. But they both know he won’t keep the girl, even as he dreams of them as partners on the move, “teamed up against each day and its troubles.”

The chapter ends with Hicks trying to pick up the thread of why those elves delivered the bomb to him, and why they called him Schulz. Uncle Lefty isn’t really much help. Hick checks in with the anarchist bombsmith Michele “Kelly” Stecchino, a character who could fit in neatly in Against the Day. Kelly suggests that “an explosion, not always but sometimes, is actually somebody with something to say. Like, a voice, with a message we aren’t receiving so much as overhearing.” He then advises Hicks to get out of town, suggesting a trip to Italy. Hicks protests that Italy’s, “Fascist dictatorship, Professore,” and anarchist Kelly needles him back, asking “What makes you private dicks any different?…Study your history, gabadost, you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys.” Again, one of the major conflicts in Shadow Ticket is Hicks realizing which side of history he wishes to be on. Hicks then checks in at the Nazi bolwing alley, New Nuremberg Lanes with his old associate Ooly, who thinks that the bomb “don’t feel local. Somethin’s on the way around here, bigger than a gang war.” That would be a World War. Finally, Hicks checks in with Lew Basnight (who was in Against the Day); Lew tells him that what he’s “after is an Overlooked Negative.” Is that something an X-ray could catch? Hicks tells Lew that he was “always what I was hoping to be someday” — and I don’t think he meant it as mere flattery.

Chapter 16 sees the action move out from Milwaukee (much to Hicks’s chagrin). His employer seems to agree with everyone else that he should get out of town for his own health and safety, and the agency sends him to New York (Hicks picks up on the fact that his travel stipend is decidedly a one way sum).

April’s gangster beau Don Peppino sends one of his enforcers along too to suggest he hits the bricks. (The goon tries to hip Hicks to how one might take a “grape so harsh and bitter you’d never make wine from it alone—but when you blend it with other grapes, sometimes only a couple percent, suddenly a miracle” — but Hicks protests that he’s “Only a beer drinker.” The scene is a sweet repetition of sorts of Mason and Dixon’s discussion of grape people and grain people in Mason & Dixon.)

Hicks then goes through some goodbyes with April. I realized that one of my favorite bits in Shadow Ticket is that April always addresses Hicks with a different, sweet-but-pejorative nickname — “Chuckles,” “damned ox,” “Fathead,” “Einsteins” (plural), and my favorite, “ten-minute egg.” They depart in a sweet noir phantasia at Union Station.

Chapter 17 is a relatively short chapter (especially given the sprawl of Chapter 15, which, let me say, I’m sorry that I went on so long about it — part of what I’m trying to do is reread the book by writing about it and tie some themes, motifs, etc. together — I know it went on long. But it was a long chapter, chock full of Important Stuff) — sorry, Chapter 17 is a relatively short ditty, with Hicks’s train moving east through “Depression Pittsburgh, a ghost city” and then “entering deeper into the night run, having left behind and below what neon still shone, the Hoovervilles, the ghost-city light, hobo gatherings around trackside trash fires, stray auto headlights gliding briefly alongside the tracks, some fractional moonlight through the windows plus a few dim electric lamps in the observation car, deserted at this hour except for Hicks.” Reviewers and critics will rightly point out that Shadow Ticket is a detective noir; it’s possible to overlook the Gothic horror underpinnings of that genre though. Pynchon often foregrounds this Gothicism, as in the lovely description above.

Solitary in the observation car, Hicks is approached by “a Pullman porter, whose name, as he’s quick to point out, isn’t George but McKinley.” The reference here is to George Gibbs, a nineteenth century naturalist who, in the parlance of Twain, lit out for the Territory to study, among other things, indigenous languages in the Pacific Northwest.

Our Pullman porter “McKinley Gibbs turns out to be running a sideline in race records“; after riffing on politics with Hicks, he slips a few records out for our PI to peruse, including “Blind Blake, ‘Police Dog Blues.’”

We are then told that “McKinley brings it over to the club-car Victrola, puts it on. Before bar three Hicks is about to topple into a romantic nostalgia episode. ‘I’ve heard this. Not on a record, not in a club, but…'”

Presumably the referent for the “it” McKinley possesses is “Police Dog Blues” — but the “romantic nostalgia episode” reveals a different song. The vocalist? “It’s April. Natch.” We get another of Pynchon’s songs, including another of April’s nicknames for Hicks — “dimwit of my dreams” (rhymes with “strange as it seems”). But Hicks’s “romantic nostalgia episode” (American Gothic, I say) is pure reverie. He awakes — no record, no McKinley. Did either ever exist?

Chapter 18: Hicks makes it to New York and does a “courtesy drop-by at the New York branch of U-Ops, which he finds slightly west of Broadway beneath a neon sign featuring a pair of eyeballs electrically switching back and forth between bloodshot vein-crazed and lens-blank pop-bottle green.” The lurid eyeball image mixes nineteenth-century Gothicism with twentieth-century pop. Connie McSpool, on the U-Ops desk, ribs Hicks: “You just missed Judge Crater, he was in here looking for you.” Joseph Force Crater was a New York Supreme Court justice who infamously disappeared and, for a decade or two, was known as America’s “missingest” person. (Maybe surpassed, at the end of the twentieth century, by Jimmy Hoffa.) Shadow Ticket–and Pynchon’s oeuvre in general–features many characters “pulling a Crater.”

Chapter 18 concludes with Hicks overwhelmed, in true Pynchonian fashion, by a shadowy (tickety?) They. There’s “something weirdly off about Gould Fisk Fidelity and Trust,” the “bank” he finds himself at, getting an unexpected ticket to Europe and two-weeks pay. The reference here is to Black Friday, 1869, where big money boys Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to hijack the gold market in a Gilded Age financial thriller. Another fragment, maybe, from Against the Day.

The chapter ends with Hicks at “Club Afterbeat up in Harlem,” complaining to Connie McSpool that someone “wants me 86’d clear out of the U.S.A.”

We’ll get to that ejection soon.

Halloween all year long | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 8-14

October 14, 2025 Biblioklept3 Comments

Notes on Chapters 1-7 here.

I’m quite a bit further into the novel than where I’m going to have to leave off in these notes, but there will not be any so-called spoilers/discussion of material past Chapter 14

My general take on Shadow Ticket though: This is probably Pynchon’s most accessible novel. It’s fun, funny, and breezy, but it also kinda sorta bridges Against the Day to Gravity’s Rainbow — and not just in a timeline sense, but also thematically.

Chapter 8:

Hicks’s protege Skeet brings Hicks down to the “clubhouse” under the Holton Street Viaduct. Pynchon continues to develop the glow-in-the dark horror film motif, describing, “Cobwebs of purple light from radio tubes with imperfect vacuums inside…A dozen speakers going at once…Pieces of electrical gear blinking and chirping at each other, like a lab in a movie belonging to a scientist not entirely in his right mind.”

The mad scientist monitoring all these wild signals is pretty harmless though. It’s “a kid named Drover in a set of earphones.” Drover shows off the amplified ukulele he’s crafted: “Kid out in Waukesha showed me…You want the real Tom Swift, it’s this Lester kid, calls himself Red, playing hillbilly guitar up and down Bluemound Road for nickels and dimes, drive-ins, roadhouse parking lots, gets to where he needs to be heard over the traffic, so he figured this out.”

This Lester aka Rhubarb Red is, of course, Les Paul, whose artistic and technological contributions and innovations to 20th-century popular music cannot be overstated. I think his licks sound fresh today.

Pynchon has long been concerned with the intersection of art and technology; of how a signal can cut through noise.

Skeet has brought Hicks to the “clubhouse” under the viaduct to connect with Stuffy Keegan, whose REO Speed Wagon was exploded by unknown entities in Shadow Ticket’s opening chapter. Things get very, very Pynchonian here—a U-13 submarine is prowling the depths of Lake Michigan, apparently there to pick up Stuffy. Hicks is in disbelief. Drover has a hard time picking up a human voice from the sub, and declares that, “everybody must be down below at the bowling alley.” Hicks is even more incredulous: “Bowling alley on a submarine, Drover?” — setting up an execrable/wonderful Pynchonian joke that pivots on a Jules Verne novel’s title.

The episode ends with Stuffy disappearing somewhere, although Hicks is loath to believe he left on a submarine. Chapter 8 concludes with a less-skeptical Skeet pointing out that Stuffy “Kept saying things like ‘Maybe I’m a ghost now and I’m haunting you,’” again underscoring the novel’s horror-film motif.

Chapter 9 might be summarized by its opening line: “Skeet shows up at the office next day with an out-of-town tomato who causes a certain commotion.”

This fair lady is one “Fancy Vivid” (geez Thomas); no one in the detective agency can quite believe that she wants to hire them to find disappeared Stuffy, whom she loves dearly. She’s hip to the submarine thing too: “He ever say anything to you about a submarine? …Kept wanting to know if I’d ever been on one, if I’d like to go for a ride on one. At first I thought it was some kind of sex talk.”

Like the previous chapter, this one ends with a Gothic note. Hicks goes into a reverie while looking through old files, dreams he’s “in Chicago, or something calling itself that, up North Clark, across the suicides’ bridge, deep in that part of the North Side known as The Shadows.” In this space that is “haunted to saturation by the unquiet spirits of hanged men and women, white, Negro, and American Indian,” he encounters too the spirit of Stuffy who pleads for his help. “Only a dream,” Hicks tells himself.

Chapter 10:

When we first met Hicks’s Uncle Lefty back in Ch. 4, he espoused his sympathies for Adolf Hitler; in Ch. 10, after a casserole dinner, he takes his nephew to a Nazi bar, the New Nuremberg Lanes. Hicks, as yet unaware of the bar’s fascist sympathies, nevertheless picks up on the weird vibes:

“All normal as club soda, yet somehow…too normal, yes something is making a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp, the Sombrero of Uneasiness, as it’s known in the racket. Something here is off. A bowling alley is supposed to be an oasis of beer and sociability, busy with cheerful keglers, popcorn by the bucketful, crosscurrents of flirtation, now and then somebody actually doing some bowling. But this crowd here, no, these customers are only pretending to bowl…”

These people are all American Nazis.

Hicks runs into Ooly Schaufl (“Going by Ulrich these days”), an old associate from his strike-breaking day. The scene underlines a theme developing in the novel: Hicks slowly starting to realize which side of the line he belongs on. The reunion is broken up by the Feds though — prohis, dry agents, in the novel’s parlance.

Hicks makes his escape. At the next casserole night, Uncle Lefty gives Hicks the plot-moving-forward tip that Pynchon has frequently deployed thus far in Shadow Ticket, telling him to check out the under-radar as-yet-unopened FBI office in Milwaukee.

Chapter 11 begins with more Gothic intentions; Hicks approaches local the local FBI headquarters, which appears something closer to a haunted house:

“On days of low winter light the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long.”

In Shadow Ticket, the goofy Gothicism of glaring gargoyles butts up against the realer, deeper horror of encroaching fascism abroad and a burgeoning police state at home — and worse, the twisting, bundling of these forces. Hicks gets twisted into it; the feds want him to be their agent too.

Chapter 12 begins with Hicks’s boss Boynt going full tilt paranoid, Pynchonian style:

“The federals who had you in are likely just a front, OK? It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover. Worried about the next election, worried this latest Roosevelt if he gets in might decide to step out on his own, and even if he does revert to type after all, it might not be in time to stop the Red apocalypse that’s got them spooked out of what they think of as their wits.”

The outfit, the syndicate–Boynt ties the forces of right-wing capitalism to outright fascist gangsterism. He redirects his detective’s attention to the cheese heiress case, and the pair take off to the Airmont’s lawyers’ office. There, Hicks is asked if he’s “aware of the American Indian belief, referenced in depositions filed on Miss Airmont’s behalf, that once you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for them in perpetuity?” (This routine gets brought up again and again.)

Chapter 13:

Hicks heads out to the Airmont mansion to do some recon on missing heiress Daphne. There, he picks up on chatter about “the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, ‘Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?'”

The philosophical riffing gives way to a brief overview of the Airmont cheese fortune, which was built in no small part upon the brief success of a product called “Radio-Cheez…designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally proprietary, radioactive ingredient.”

1921 magazine advertisement for Undark, a product of the Radium Luminous Material Corporation

The narrator reminds us that this was “radium’s grand hour of popularity, when it’s still medical wisdom to seek as many ways as possible to introduce radiation into the human body—radioactive mineral water, patent radium elixirs and aphrodisiacs, radium suppositories,” before bringing up the “Radium Girls” of “nearby Ottawa, Illinois [who] were employed in painting numbers on glow-in-the-dark clock dials, licking their brushes every so often to keep them finely pointed.”

The sad story of the Radium Girls has been well documented. It is another case of real-life horror in Shadow Ticket butting up against Pynchon’s zanier play-acting theatrical horrors. The Radium Girls’ case eventually led to expanded labor protections in the United States, making them ideal Pynchonian heroes.

Cheese conspiracies develop in this chapter; we learn that “The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business.” Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese” befriends the Al Capone (“And what is it you’re the Al Capone of again?”).

At the Airmont compound we also meet G. Rodney Flaunch, “a onetime male flapper” and fiancé to departed Daphne and mom, Mrs. Vivacia Airmont.

And in Chapter 14 we finally get the backstory of Hicks and Daphne’s meet-cute. Daphne’s in disguise and on the run from “Winnetka Shores Psychopathic, a ritzy banana plantation in the neighborhood, overseen by a Dr. Swampscott Vobe, M.D. Known for a susceptibility to anything newfangled, Dr. Vobe has somehow gotten it into his head that the patients at WSP are all available to him as lab material to try out his therapy ideas on, free of charge. Drugs, electricity, rays. Dr. Vobe is specially interested in rays.”

More mad scientist Halloween-all-the-time shit. They escape via rumrunner–the boat, not the drink–and Hicks drops the heiress at an Ojibwe reservation (she claims it was her finishing school). There are more horror notes — references to werewolves and windigos — and again the note that if you save a person’s life you are forever responsible for it:

“And if I say thanks but no thanks, what happens, I get an arrow through my head?”

“You don’t have to be all that way about it either, white man.”

I’ve left out noting all the drinks in Shadow Ticket thus far — I leave that task for Drunk Pynchon! — but I have to bring up two from this chapter. The first is Hicks’s Old Log Cabin Presbyterian, which sounds fucking delicious. The second is Dippy Chazz’s Wisconsin Old Fashioned: “Korbel brandy, 7UP lithiated lemon soda, and, sharing the toothpick with a cherry, a pickled Brussels sprout.” Initially, I thought this had to be a Pynchonian invention — but it’s not. From Toby Cecchini’s case study of the cocktail in The New York Times:

It’s more a family of drinks, revolving around a central theme. There are four main ways to order it: sweet, with 7 Up; sour (which is not), with sour mix or Squirt; “press” with half 7 Up and half seltzer; or seltzer only. There are regional garnish customizations using pickled vegetables — including mushrooms, asparagus, cucumbers, tomatoes, brussels sprouts and olives — that seem counterintuitive until you taste the salty, vinegar tang playing off of the spice of the bitters and the sweet thrum of the brandy. By God, our great-grandparents were on to something.

Glows in the dark | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 1-7

October 9, 2025 Biblioklept2 Comments

Let’s start with the epigraph:

“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.”

—Bela Lugosi,
in The Black Cat (1934)

Dr. Vitus Werdegast, Bela Lugosi’s character in The Black Cat, gives this line to mystery novelist Peter Alison (portrayed by David Manners). Here is the scene:

Pynchon is not the first to sample this line.

The epigraph for Shadow Ticket highlights a concern with the metaphysical that Pynchon has shown throughout his novels. The epigraph encapsulates this concern, ties it to the talkies, the American Gothic tradition, and wedges in a slice of absurd (and drily-delivered) humor early on.

Chapter 1; the novel’s first line:

“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.”

Shadow Ticket is set, thus far and for the most part, in Milwaukee Wisconsin in early 1931. For about half a century, The Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad ran from Chicago to Milwaukee, roughly a long the coast of Lake Michigan. It ceased operations in early 1963.

(Even went through Kenosha, kid.)

The opening paragraphs introduce us to Shadow Ticket’s hero Hicks McTaggart and establish a snappy, hardboiled style reminiscent of films of the thirties and forties (or films of the Coen Brothers that pay homage to those films).

“Everybody is looking at everybody else like they’re all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.”

These lines append the postprandial scene of a noontime explosion. We get paranoia and a whiff of the supernatural — that “deep mischief…at work.”

“Pineapples come and pineapples go,” declares Hicks’s boss Boynt Crosstown, dismissing the explosion. (Perhaps the name Boynt Crosstown evokes “Burnt Cross Town”?)

Pineapples, slang for grenades specifically or explosives more generally, pops up repeatedly early on in Shadow Ticket.

“…local multimillionaire Bruno Airmont, known throughout the dairy industry as the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile…this one’s more about his daughter Daphne…Seems your old romance has just run off with a clarinet player in a swing band.”

Daphne Airmont, Runaway Cheese Heiress: an early MacGuffin or possible red herring to look out for. One of many, many of Pynchon’s female characters on the run.

Detail from *Apollo and Daphne* by Pollaiuolo, c. 1470–1480

(Parenthetically, I suppose, because it’s of such minor note, but there’s a mention of one “Zbig Dubinsky” — surely, Shirley, a minor character? — but the name seems to echo the Coens’ film The Big Lebowski.)

“Getting sentimental, kid, better watch ’at, once.”

A warning from Hicks to his protege Skeet Wheeler, a “flyweight juvenile in a porkpie hat.” We’ll see more of Skeet’s apparent sentimentality when he pockets a ball bearing from an exploded REO Speed Wagon. The line would be a throwaway for me, except that it is the first instance of the word kid in the novel. We see it pop up frequently in several forms, including kidding and kiddies. In Ch. 1, Skeet refers to his “snub nose service .32″ pistol as a “Kids’ Special.” We learn that Skeet is tapped into the “kid underworld—drifters, truants, and guttersnipes, newsboys at every corner and streetcar stop—who in turn have antennas of their own out.” The system of littler kids reporting to bigger kids, etc., reports Skeet to bigger kid Hicks, is “like Mussolini.” (Hitler will show up soon.)

“‘…New watch, I see.’

‘Hamilton, glows in the dark too.'”

The first of (by my count) four specific references to things that glow in the dark. I’ll remark on them in turn, but the other three are Hicks’s hair gel (Ch. 3), a jello salad served at the Velocity Lunch diner (Ch. 5), and a pair of novelty vampire fangs (Ch. 7).

In Pynchon’s books, and in particular in Against the Day and Mason & Dixon, there is a concern with the invisible world, which might be taken as the metaphysical world, or, the supernatural-but-not-baloney world. Perhaps these novelties that glow in the dark point in that direction?

Chapter 2 begins at the crime scene, the scene of an exploded bootlegger’s hoochwagon (the aforementioned REO Speed Wagon).

The “kid” motif develops with references to “Federal kiddies that nobody’s ever heard of,” “Chicago Latin kids,“ and “German storm kiddies.“ A page or two later soda jerk Hoagie Hivnak (of a certain “adenoidal brashness”) laments that his Ideal Pharmacy “was no place for kids, the words ‘soda fountain’ would send mothers all over town into fits, worse than ‘opium den.'” No more coke in the sodas for the “Leapers and sleigh riders” to enjoy.

Hoagie moves the plot forward, telling Hicks to “Track down Bruno Airmont wherever he’s got to.”

Chapter 3: We meet Hicks’s special lady, April Randazzo. She’s a femme fatale, folks, a singer-dancer making the late night speakeasy scene. Hicks and April seem like a suave match, but we learn that she has a fetish for married men: “A gold-accented ring finger has the same effect on April as a jigging spoon on a Lake trout, especially when kept on while kidding around, good as a framed copy of a marriage license hanging up on a love-nest wall.”

Note the kidding around there; perhaps Pynchon teases kidness as the illusion of a romanticized time of faux-innocence, an idealized (and ironized) notion of primeval purity. “Any town but this one / Couldn’t we be kids again” croons April in “what’s gotten to be her trademark ballad, backed by a minor-key semi-Cuban arrangement for accordion, saxes, banjo-uke, melancholically muted trumpet.”

Oh and before I forget, our glow-in-the dark fetish for this episode is delivered from Hicks’s “hip flask from which he pours not hooch but some slow green liquid, rubs it between his hands, runs both hands through his hair as an intensely herbal aroma fills the room…” (21). Hicks attests that his hair jelly “Lasts for days, glows in the dark” (21).

(Parenthetically–we get our first two Pynchon songs in this chapter, one from Hicks and one from April (as cited above.) The chapter ends with Hicks getting nudged again, this time to visit his Uncle Lefty, a retired cop.)

Chapter 4 starts at Uncle Lefty and Aunt Peony’s house. They, sorta, raised Hicks; like his protege Skeet (and every other hero), Hicks is an orphan.

Uncle Lefty has prepared a special “Surprise Casserole [in which] Hicks can detect sport peppers, canned pineapple, almost-familiar pork parts marinated in Uncle Lefty’s private cure, based on wildcat beer from a glazed-crock studio just across the Viaduct.” Here, a pineapple is a pineapple. But it can still be part of a surprise.

Uncle Lefty’s name is a bit ironic. He opines: “Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’ ”

Aunt Peony is more sympathetic. We learn that her words have taken on an edge as her marriage advanced, “as if some maidenly spirit, searching and pious, has set out on a trip Peony has no plans herself to make, toward a destiny quietly lifted away from her when she wasn’t looking.” Unlike Daphne (and April?), Peony failed to make her escape in good time.

We learn of Hicks’s fresh-out-of-school job as a strikebreaker. This job would generally make him on the wrong side in Pynchonian terms, but the novel extends some heartstrings his way, pulling him over to the light. Hicks, it seems, would not turn a Pinkerton villain the likes of which Pynchon castigated in Against the Day. His road to Damascus moment happens when his “lead-filled beavertail sap” disappears before he can decimate a striking “truculent little Bolshevik.” The metaphysics of this disappearing object has a profound effect on our hero.

A bit later in the chapter, Boynt offers a through-a-glass-darkly description of Milwaukee, Cream City USA, evoking, “Hitler kiddies, Sicilian mob, secret hallways and exit tunnels, smoke too thick to see through, half a dozen different languages, any lowlife thinks they can turn a nickel always after you for somethin, there’s your wholesome Cream City, kid, mental hygiene paradise but underneath running off of a heartbeat crazy as hell, that’s if it had a heart which it don’t.”

There’s the invisible world, but it might sometimes glow in the dark.

Chapter 4 segues into Chapter 5; Uncle Lefty tells Hicks to talk to ex-vaudeville mentalist Thessalie Wayward. They meet at Velocity Lunch, a cafe where “Today’s Special [is] a vivid green salad centerpiece the size and shape of a human brain, molded in lime Jell-O, versions of which have actually been observed to glow.” Hicks is hoping to learn more about the metaphysical disappearance of his beavertail sap–what divine hand intervened to prevent his killing another person?

Thessalie teaches him about ass and app: “Asported. When something disappears suddenly off to someplace else, in the business that’s called an asport. Coming in at you the other way, appearing out of nowhere, that’s an ‘apport.’ Happens in séances a lot, kind of side effect. Ass and app, as we say.”

After some speculation on this “unnamed force,” Thessalie sends Hicks out again, this time to “Talk to Lew.”

That Lew, as we see in Chapter 6, is none other than Lew Basnight, one of the many heroes of Pynchon’s opus Against the Day (which, so far, Shadow Ticket feels very much akin to). Lew’s chapter is beautiful, short and sweet, a kind of elegy for Western phantasia. He was already late to the Manifest Destiny goldrush: “Didn’t even get out there till late in life, after years of dancin the Pinkertonian around what only a couple of old-timers were still callin the Wild West anymore. Hell, I’m ready to go back…”

Pynchon then extends Lew’s fantasy of returning to a mythical Old West via “lucid dreaming… flown in from strange suburban distances, past radio antennas and skyscrapers, down the gloomy city canyons, skimming echo to echo, banking into the Dearborn station, flown invisible, ticketless, right onto the Santa Fe Chief. And away. Away, so easy…” An escape from the Modern world. Invisible, ticketless–that’s the fantasy.

Lew’s episode ends with a warning to Hicks not to become “another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation.”

In Chapter 7, Hicks takes his (his?) gal April to Chicago to see Dracula. April’s smitten by Bela Lugosi, and “Soon she is sending away to Johnson Smith down in Racine for a set of Glow-in-the-Dark Vampire Choppers, 35¢ postpaid.”

A paragraph later our hero is getting some bad news about his (his..?) gal April and one Don Peppino Infernacci. “April Randazzo is in fact the promised bride of evil,” we learn; Infernacci (good golly that name, Pynchon, chill) is “lord of the underworld.”

Infernacci could be Hades, but April doesn’t strike me as a Persephone. But we’ll see.

Detail from *Proserpine*, 1882 by Rossetti

It still believes in night | A review of Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic novel Mevlido’s Dreams

October 5, 2025October 5, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Antoine Volodine’s 2007 novel Mevlido’s Dreams is a bleak, dystopian noir novel set several centuries in the future in the ruined city-state of Oulang-Oulane. Here, weary revolutionary Mevlido lives in a decaying ghetto called Henhouse Four, an eerie quarter inhabited by indigents, junkies, and other remnants of failed uprisings who must contend with the giant mutated birds who terrorize the borough.

Once a soldier of the revolution, Mevlido now serves as a policeman, yet he may also be a double or even triple agent, a sleeper sent through time from a kind of liminal afterlife, a bardo between death and rebirth. The novel drifts between waking and dream states, war memories and spectral futures, as Mevlido’s fragmented consciousness becomes a vessel for Volodine’s haunting post-exotic vision of history, language, and apocalypse.

About halfway through the novel, Mevlido’s bardo boss offers a handy summary of the apocalypse:

They’ve become an inexplicable species. They are just getting out of multiple wars of extermination, but a new conflict is already in sight. The population has decreased by a hundredfold, even more. Entire continents are currently uninhabitable. Those who have survived remain socially organized, but they no longer believe in themselves, or in society. They’ve inherited political systems to which they’ve lost the keys; for them ideology is a prayer devoid of meaning. The ruling classes have become criminalized, the poor obey them. Both classes act as if they were already dead. And as if, on top of that, they don’t even care. … Something in them has changed. You’d think that they no longer have the ability to differentiate between life, dreams, and death.

Our hero will be reborn into this turmoil, his consciousness a roiling mess of anxious irreality. “Even if I’m dreaming, I’m in reality,” he concludes at one point, as if to anchor himself in his mission. What that mission is, exactly, is never fully clear to Mevlido or the reader. Or perhaps the mission is very clear; as translator Gina M. Stamm puts it in her introduction, the plot of Mevlido’s Dreams “has the elements of a fairly classic tragic romance: man and woman are in love, the world prevents their being together, man descends into tragic circumstances.” This motif repeats in dreamlike iterations in the novel; Mevlido drifts through a post-exotic wasteland following orders no one remembers giving, haunted by his dead wife Verena Becker, whose presence threads through his days like a recurring dream or a flickering film reel.

We come to learn that Verena Becker died cruelly, murdered by the “child soldiers” who were pressed in to service by agents of the exploitative upper class. In Mevlido’s present time (or, more specifically one of Mevlido’s present times), the child soldiers are now “ex-child soldiers,” reviled refugees who hide under new identities, hoping to avoid the vengeance of people like Mevlido. The vengeance is not aimed just at these foot soldiers though; one of the novel’s heroes, Sonia Wolguelane, plots the assassination of the upper-echelon genociders who, now absolved of their war crimes, continue to rule the city-state with their one-time political foes. Here is Volodine’s description of one of the men Wolguelane assassinates:

Toni Müller, forty-nine years old, delegate to the Office of Fuel, policy officer during the final project of pacification of the remaining zones, initiator of the so-called controlled genocide practice, threatened with legal action after the disappearance of the Wongres, the Spanish, and the Myrzes, sued for not having been able to provide an explanation for the mysterious annihilation of the inhabitants of the Philippines. Amnestied. Director of the petroleum trusts in the remaining zones, billionaire, numerous books of economics published in his name, numerous honorific titles. During his last self-criticism, he admitted having constantly hidden from the masses the fact that he didn’t share the household chores with his wife.

While the apocalyptic stakes here are swollen to hyperbolic levels, Volodine’s critique of how the ruling class wields power nevertheless applies neatly to our own 21st-century blues. Henry Kissinger, for example, died fat and happy. I’m reminded too here of Thomas Pynchon’s critique of power, particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow, where the narrator laments that the Nazi war criminal Weissmann will not be punished but rather elevated, set to sit “among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” Look low for the preterite heroes of Mevlido’s Dreams though. They are the “faded zombies, probably candidates for another hallucinatory expedition, left-behinds who imagine they will be able to leave again.”

I am making the novel sound too grim. It is rich, and much of that richness comes from a bureaucratic, deadpan humor, the laughter of exhausted ideologues trapped in their own paperwork. But what happens to faith in any ideology when it is sundered from observable reality? Consider this exchange, in which a lost Mevlido tries to communicate with a band of men who fail to recognize him as a human being:

“Incredible,” says one of the normal ones, “it’s still talking.”

“And what is it talking about?” asks the red cap.

“About the night,” says the fat one.

“It’s talking about the night?” the bare-chested one asks, surprised.

“Yes, it must still believe in night,” says one of the normal ones.

“Incredible,” says the other normal one, “it still believes in night.”

And beneath the satire, there’s love. Volodine writes love as a metaphysical condition, a persistence that outlasts ideology, memory, and even death. The tenderness between Mevlido and Verena gives the novel its pulse. It’s the one human rhythm left in a mechanical world. Stamm’s translation conveys this rhythm in clipped, moody sentences, wounded and precise.

Like Volodine’s 2014 novel Radiant Terminus, Mevlido’s Dreams operates in the twilight between horror and tenderness. But Mevlido’s Dreams is quieter, more interior—a story of a single man’s dissolution told in flickering vignettes. It reads like the afterimage of a life projected on a cracked wall.

That light, dim and trembling, is what Volodine and Stamm preserve. Mevlido’s Dreams reads not like a film script but like a film itself: shadowy scenes unfolding in silence, broken by bursts of deadpan dialogue and ghostly humor. You can see the ash swirling, hear the echo of curses in an alley haunted by mutant birds.

Oulang-Oulane feels shot through a grim lens, intense, ugly, beautiful, like something from Tarkovsky’s Stalker or a Béla Tarr film, with scenes of desolation punctuated by tenderness. Volodine isn’t cinematic because he borrows film tropes, but because he composes through atmosphere and rhythm. His sentences drift like a camera through fog and memory.

That line above—“it still believes in night”—could be the novel’s credo. Dreaming isn’t retreat; it’s resistance. Writing, too. Mevlido’s Dreams works as both a political fable and a séance for the lost, a way of keeping consciousness flickering in the dark. Highly recommended.

Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney

September 29, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Dr. Bloodmoney, or, How We Got Along After the Bomb, Philip K. Dick, 1965. Dell Books (1980). Cover art by Richard Courtney (not credited; cover signed R. Courtney); no designer credited. 304 pages. Continue reading “Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney” →

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a frenetic, vital reimagining of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

September 28, 2025September 30, 2025 Edwin Turner4 Comments

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another takes Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland and sets it ablaze, reshaping its abstract paranoia and fractured narrative into something both deliriously immediate and ominously timeless.

The bones of Pynchon’s original are still present: a family broken by state violence; a daughter growing up without a mother; a father caught between shame and reluctant resistance. In PTA’s feverish recasting of Vineland, Zoyd Wheeler becomes Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former “Rocket Man” revolutionary burning out the past in a haze of weed smoke. Frenesi Gates is reimagined as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a revolutionary addicted to the sexual thrill of power. Prairie Wheeler morphs into Willa (Chase Infiniti — and like wow jeez that’s a Pynchonian name the young actress has there, isn’t it?). And villainous Brock Vond is warped into Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a grotesque embodiment of authoritarian menace. Timelines collapse into themselves, Reagan-era dread transposes into our own disturbed now. Vineland is set in 1984; in One Battle After Another, PTA shows that we’ve never really moved on from that dystopian year. PTA condenses Vineland’s sprawling flashbacks and absurd digressions into an action-forward narrative that’s far more linear yet equally dizzying. The result is enthralling.

The film’s plot might be distilled simply from its title. One Battle After Another follows the trajectory of most of Pynchon’s fiction: individual resistance to authoritarian evil. In PTA’s film, that resistance takes the form of the French 75, a loose clandestine revolutionary group to which Bob and his partner Perfidia once belonged. There’s really no retiring for French 75 agents though, and soon Willa is tangled in the same web her parents sought to sunder in their radical actions. Penn’s maniacal Colonel Lockjaw hunts her down. She’s on the run, and so is papa Bob.

Pynchon’s novels frequently contrast Us vs Them systems — preterite vs. elect; misfits vs. authoritarians; freaks vs. the Man. And like Pynchon’s work, One Battle After Another shows the invisible overlapping and hierarchical confusions these Us/Them systems engender. The French 75’s sympathies directly correlate with the values of the immigrant community in Baktan Cross, the fictional sanctuary city Bob and Willa take refuge in. The de facto leader of these immigrants, Francisco (Benicio Del Toro), aids Bob in his fevered search for Willa. Francisco’s zen calm offers a counterbalance to Bob’s mania. Another Us group are the Sisters of the Brave Beaver (One Battle After another is crammed with Pynchonian vagina jokes), weed-growing nuns who offer Willa a brief safe harbor.

These disparate pockets of rebellion resist the tyranny of the modern racist capitalist system, embodied by Colonel Lockjaw and the military forces he commands (seemingly without any government oversight). We first meet Lockjaw running a migrant detention center — one of many timely PTA updates to Vineland — and his weird, forced, masochistic machismo plays out on the screen with a mix of menace and despair. For all his power and evil though, there’s yet another Them he isn’t part of. That would be the Christmas Adventurers Club, a shadowy cabal of elites on a racist mission to rid the world of “freaks.” Lockjaw would do quite literally anything to become a member of this club; his drive to to become even more Them propels the narrative while showing that Us-Them systems rely on hierarchies to perpetuate oppression.

One Battle After Another zigzags through a whirlwind of absurdity, suffocating paranoia, and frantic action. The film balances chaotic humor with a darker exploration of the emotional impulses that underlie power and attraction. Colonel Lockjaw’s obsessive fixation on Perfidia (arguably the film’s closest connection to Vineland) underscores the irrational power dynamics of obsession and control. PTA frames their relationship—along with Lockjaw’s obsession with Willa—as a twisted mirror reflecting the power imbalances that define both the personal and the political in Us-Them systems. PTA’s films have always explored systems of exploitation that grind people down and the outsiders who try to navigate them; One Battle After Another is, thus far, his most sustained, howling effort in this vein.

The film is gorgeous, too, as fans would expect from PTA. Michael Bauman’s cinematography conveys frenzied energy without sacrificing cohesion or clarity. There are several outstanding set pieces, including a beautiful sequence in which Bob does his best to keep up with a trio of skateboarders traversing rooftops at night, their figures silhouetted against the flames of a riot below. The film’s climactic three-car chase scene is particularly magnificent, its every twist and turn symbolizing not just physical pursuit, but deeper spirals of control, conflict, and paranoia. It made me physical ill. (That’s high praise.)

And while, yes, One Battle After Another is a bona fide action film, it’s still larded with strange little morsels that we’d expect from a PTA film — the image of Lockjaw licking his comb before taking it to his hair, his face contorted in anxious hope, or Bob, in his threadworn bathrobe, shoplifting a pair of cheap sunglasses. (Parenthetically, while the bathrobe is on my mind — Battle plays as a sinister inversion to The Big Lebowski. I will file the pair away for a future double feature.) One of the film’s funniest moments comes from Willa, who, despite being apparently subjugated by Lockjaw, nevertheless delivers the kind of crushing blow that can only come from a teen: “Why is your shirt so tight?” Indeed, Chase Infiniti’s portrayal of Willa is a revelation. In a movie crammed with paranoia and plot twists, she imbues in Willa a kind of moral force. She’s not an anchor exactly, because nothing is steady here. But maybe she’s the string you follow through the labyrinth.

One Battle After Another is almost three hours long, but it never drags, thanks to the tight direction and enthralling plot. Long-time PTA collaborator Jonny Greenwood’s score also keeps the film moving at a quick pace. The score is ever-present — something that usually irritates me in a film — but here the music provides emotional cohesion. It’s also just really fucking pretty. Frenetic drumming and altered pianos meet up with swelling strings that suggest sirens, banshees. Take “Mean Alley,” for example, which initially greets the ear as if the guitar is out of tune, but then coheres into beautiful dissonance. And although Greenwood’s wall-to-wall score leaves little room for the needle drops we might expect from a PTA joint, the film deploys Tom Petty’s “American Girl” in a moment of transcendent bliss that brought a tear to my eye.

Pynchon has always soundtracked his novels. Pynchonwiki gives close to 400 musical references for Vineland, but I don’t think any of these tracks ended up in One Battle After Another. My giving this data is a weak way of transitioning to the sentence, This is a film inspired by Vineland, not an adaptation of it. And while PTA captures the soul of the book, the vibe, or spirit, or whatever you like to call it, is decidedly different: darker, edgier, uglier. He captures the same strange humor and frustration of Vineland, but it’s amplified here with a chaotic energy that matches our current moment.

It’s also instructive to compare One Battle After Another to PTA’s earlier Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice. While Inherent Vice was a hazy sunsoaked journey through the disorienting aftereffects of the muddled sixties, One Battle After Another feels darker, more urgent, as if the timeline of history has compressed itself into an unyielding present. Both films deal with the fracturing of the American dream, but One Battle After Another does so with a sharper edge, drawing clearer political parallels. In some ways, PTA’s Inherent Vice is closer to Pynchon’s Vineland in tone and theme, less angular, more forgiving.

With both of his Pynchon films, PTA foregrounds a sweet final note, a belief in love as a sustaining force against Them. To borrow my favorite lines from Pynchon’s opus Gravity’s Rainbow: “They are in love. Fuck the war.” In his adaptation of Inherent Vice, PTA pulled a loose thread from the novel to neatly weave back into a prettier picture. He allows Doc Sportello to restore the heroin-addicted musician Coy to his family. One Battle offers a similarly fractured, imperfect restoration of family, a rewriting of rat-sins answered on the ghost of radio waves. He cleans up Pynchon’s messiness, but doesn’t sacrifice the deep danger that underwrites radical love.

One Battle After Another feels dangerously prescient, or, more accurately, a diagnosis of the big ugly now. In PTA’s Inherent Vice, there was an underlying fractured partnership between Us and Them; weirdo Doc Sportello tried to find some kind of brotherhood of man with The Man, Detective Bigfoot. No humanity can be extended to Lockjaw — not even from the club that will refuse him. They are unforgiving of any perceived impurity. The themes of mass surveillance, state violence, and detention resonate deeply in today’s climate. The recent death of Assata Shakur—possibly one inspiration for Perfidia Beverly Hills—adds a haunting layer to the film’s exploration of systemic oppression, the ways in which the state seeks to control and erase voices of resistance. The political urgency is palpable, and will undoubtedly alienate a large section of the genpop normies that Warner Brothers has heavily advertised the film to. Some folks will always root for Them.

But fuck Them. One Battle After Another is a triumph, a dizzying, chaotic masterpiece that never loses its grip on the present—one battle after another, all too real, all too important. See it on the biggest screen you can.

A review of Rebecca Gransden’s novella Figures Crossing the Field towards the Group

September 21, 2025 Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

And yet, within that scraped-down ruin, Gransden finds a strange fullness: stark fields and broken voices bloom with uncanny images, fleeting surges of feeling, flashes of lyric intensity that make the blasted landscape thrum with life even as it crumbles. Consider this passage, in which our hero Flo encounters a band of freed apes:

Howls eke out through branch and twig, and bods slink down the fell trunks, climb in shift shads on the broke build roof, a mess of swol leaves and wet spikes. Lab apes crawl and tick, their mugs stretch flesh, their heads bolt. Freed by the flee, and left to lone, their house fell in and they, shy and of wound nerve, did peek to the wood, and then run out and claim the trees. They stay near to where they know, fear keeps them so. One ape chomps on a bat, its legs kick as it dies. Most of the lab apes have one eye, a square patch of bald skin, a rash and some scabs.

Figures propels forward with a loose, picaresque energy, its moody, elliptical atmosphere stretched across an almost shapeless structure. It’s best not to look for causality here; things just happen. This isn’t post-apocalyptic fiction. The apocalypse is underway. And Gransden’s language drifts on the fumes of that apocalypse. I often found myself reading lines aloud, even repeatedly, in gnarly little loops: “Town rats puff with nits in their ruffs” is a simultaneously abject and beautiful image. Or consider this lovely little passage:

A shock of white moth wings sings from the shrubs, makes Flo step back and near fall. White flies round her like a snow storm, and moth dust fills the small grove. A film forms on dark leaves and the air smells of old nests. Moths brush her,just close to push a soft stroke on her face. Small round white moths, small white moth round.

The monosyllabic narrative style that dominates Figures may challenge or, more frankly, irritate some readers. I found it hypnotic. Gransden’s characters are not bound to single syllables though. When Flo talks to someone she encounters (an insane royalist, say, or a man sacrificing his body as food to tiny furry beasts), they speak in normal, multi-syllabic dialogue. More fascinating is a solitary chapter that divides the novella in halves. “Public Information Dreams” reads almost like its own Ballardian short story. Told in a clinical, detached style, the chapter gives an incomplete picture of observations made from afar on two children, Kid P and Kid Q. A taste:

Observer: 35

Day: 163

10:37:45 am — Kid Q exits property by back door (3b) and moves to end of garden. Weather is bright sunshine, occasional cloud shadows. No occlusion. Kid Q walks back and forth between end of garden and house, carrying objects. Objects observed to be recording equipment as previously noted (ID476). Kid Q collects the objects together on an empty patch of lawn behind the garden shed. The patch of lawn is square and is mostly unseen from the house. It ends at an overgrown fence, approx. 6ft tall that marks the perimeter boundary of the property’s rear. Beyond the rear fence are fields but the garden is not visible from this location due to the density of the foliage (full description and photographs of the layout of the property and garden are included in additional notes, at this time in the process of compilation). Kid Q assembles the recording equipment. Video camera on tripod is situated in the corner behind the shed and arranged to point across the lawn square diagonally, taking in as much of the space as possible.

10:52:13 am — Kid P exits house by the open back door (3b). Observed to have a listless demeanour. Kid P joins Kid Q. Kid Q and Kid P engage in long conversation (see transcript).

Are Kid Q and Kid P Flo and her brother? If you care, this book probably isn’t for you.

Too, Gransden refuses to settle Flo’s quest—or the apocalypse itself—into any final meaning. The ruined England she describes is not a backdrop but a language, one that stutters, doubles back, and opens fissures rather than closing them. Flo walks north, chasing the shadow of her brother, but whether she finds him, or whether there is anything left to find, hardly matters. What matters is the walking, the scraping of words across ruin, the pulse of strange life inside the waste. Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group dwells in that space where endings blur into continuations, where survival is indistinguishable from loss, and where language itself flickers like the last light left to see by. Strange, gnarly, alive–great stuff.

Bialik/Rilke (Two poetry collections acquired, 13 Sept. 2025)

September 18, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Two new collections from NYRB’s Poets imprint: On the Slaughter by Hayim Nahman Bialik, translated by Peter Cole, and Fifty Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Geoffrey Lehmann. NYRB’s Bialik blurb:

Few poets in the history of Hebrew have possessed the power and prescience of Hayim Nahman Bialik. Born in 1873 in a small Ukrainian village, he spent his most productive years in Odessa and in his fifties made his way to British Mandatory Palestine. He died in Vienna in 1934. His body of work opened a path from the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe into a more expansive Jewish humanism. In a line that stretches back to the Bible and the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, he stands out—in the words of Maxim Gorky—as “a modern Isaiah.” He remains to this day an iconic and shockingly relevant poet, essayist, and tutelary spirit.

Translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, On the Slaughter presents Bialik for the first time in English as a masterful artist, someone far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his reputation as the national poet of the Jewish people might suggest. This compact collection offers readers a panoramic view of Bialik’s inner and outer landscapes—from his visionary “poems of wrath” that respond in startling fashion to the devastations of pogroms and revolutionary unrest to quietly sublime lyrics of longing and withering self-assessment. The volume also includes a sampling of slyly sophisticated verse for children, and a moving introduction that bridges Bialik’s moment and our own.

And “The Grown-up,” a poem from Rilke in Lehmann’s translation:

“The Grown-up”

All stood on her, all that has ever been
and was the world, and stood, its fears and grace,
as trees stand straight and rooted in one place, and solemn, like the memory of a race
or Ark of God, all-seeing and not seen.

She carried it; knowledge of who they are,
the flyers, those who flee, the distant ones,
the monsters and the awkward, diffident sons,
casually like a brimming water jar
on her calm head. Then in the midst of play,
preparing, changing slowly, cell by cell,
she did not sense the first white veil that fell
across her open face, bland as the day,

almost opaque, never to lift again.
And she forgot the answers she once knew,
leaving some vagueness she could not explain:
in you, the child who you have been, in you.

Birthday stacks | Not really a blog about Biblioklept turning nineteen

September 9, 2025September 10, 2025 Biblioklept7 Comments

A few weekends ago we did the take-your-kid-to-college thing, made the ninety-minute SW drive to Gainesville, FL to move our daughter into her first place on her own. She’s living in the same apartment complex her mom lived in, only under a different name. (The apartment complex has a different name. Not my daughter or wife — although I guess my wife has something of a different name, having taken my own last name up as hers.) There was some nostalgia, some weird feelings, etc. But mostly excitement, followed by backache, muscle ache, and an intense week of schlepping even more stuff around my house, cleaning, painting, refinishing, etc. as we repurposed our daughter’s room into an office and my wife’s old office into a studio space for our son.

This process displaced many many books. The house was already littered with stacks, with at least two established semi-permanent piles of incoming volumes and TBRs and etc., but somehow all the furniture relocation led to an entire bookcase heading south and west of Biblioklept World Headquarters. I culled what I could and vowed to get to the rest later. And here we are.

I started this blog on 9 Sept. 2006, nineteen years ago today. I don’t think I would have remembered this connection, even though I’ve blogged about Biblioklept’s birthday several times before, if I hadn’t heard the local sportscaster on his local morning-commute sports show give a shoutout to his wife, whose birthday is today. I thought, Oh, that’s Biblioklept’s birthday too.

(The local sportscaster’s wife is his second wife, or maybe third, I’m not really sure. But he used to be married, way back in the gay nineties, to the news anchor. They were our little big town’s version of a celebrity couple, maybe. (I remember I took a date to Barnes & Nobles and then the Chili’s by the Barnes & Noble — these places are long gone — and I saw the sportscaster and his anchor wife bickering in the Chili’s parking lot before I ate fajitas or whatever.) The sportscaster’s news anchor wife had an affair with the weatherman, a bold blond surfer specimen who frequently wore suspenders on air. This affair was something of an open secret, and I think some of the people involved were fired, or shuffled to different networks. It’s like the most low rent version of prime Fleetwood Mac you could imagine.

Anyway, the anchor and the weatherman are still married. He still does the weather and she’s the mayor of the city now. Her ex covers local sports on TV, the web, and the radio. I listen to his show in the mornings as a diversion from reality. It’s not very good, but it’s better than the complacent centrism of NPR. I haven’t been able to listen to music on morning drives in decades (I would have to pull the vehicle over and weep); I cannot follow audiobooks or even podcasts in the mornings; I take the inane meaningless chatter for aural breakfast. Today was the sportscaster’s current wife’s birthday. And Biblioklept’s.)

So well and anyway, I thought, I should do some kind of birthday post for the blog. So again, here we are. (Or maybe you have wisely left by this point.)

How about those promised stacks, those totem poles that keep getting moved from room to room? Here’s one:

What these books have in common is that some of them used to be in a bookcase that is now in Gainesville and I don’t know where to put them. All the B.S. Johnson books came from a B.S. Johnson jag I went on a few years ago, and they ended up tucked away — can’t stick them on the shelf of American postmodernists, right? And Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry? What an amazing novel? How have I not reread it. I got the Tim Tebow and Werner Herzog books for Christmas and I read them both. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is maybe my richest reading experience of the past year.

Here’s another picture of a stack of books:

I got another copy of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway a few weeks ago, which I think led to me pulling out some Woolfs (Wolves?); everything else here seems random, chaotic, emblematic maybe of my self-disgust—what am I doing with all these books? Of course I want to own a hardback first of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, even if I can’t find a proper home for it, right? And why wouldn’t I snap up every Alasdair Gray novel I come across? I think all these Evan Dara books were stacked up in the same missing bookcase that the B.S. Johnson books were stacked in; now they are loose, reminding me of the novelist’s diminishing career. Do I really need to hold on to Permanent Earthquake? The novel is terrible and the book itself is a cheaply-bound print-on-demand thing. It makes me feel sad. The Lost Scrapbook is amazing.

I was 27 when I started this blog.

What am I even doing here?

The Gordon Lish books were almost certainly smashed up against the B.S. Johnson and Evan Dara books — I think I wasn’t sure where to shelf them. I have been very mad at Gordon Lish for a few years now for reasons I promised not to divulge but which basically have to do with his being a flaming asshole. I finished Markus Werner’s novel The Frog in the Throat a week ago and the ending made me tear up. It’s a novel about aging and failure and fear; it’s very, very funny. The late great David Berman once said that Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers was his favorite novel. I loved it and I suppose I’ll refuse to read another Robert Stone novel. (Why?)

For some years, David Berman kept Biblioklept on the blog roll of his blog Menthol Mountains. That’s like the proudest I’ve ever been of anything that ever happened on this blog. I miss him.

Last stack — not really the last stack, there are at least three others, but I’m getting tired of this, in several senses:

John Keene’s collection/semi-novel Counternarratives is one of the best things I’ve read in forever. He refracts history through these layered polyphonic fictions that pull truth from the margins. My favorite piece in the collection reads like a riff on Melville’s Benito Cereno. I read Leonora Carrington’s novel The Stone Door, realized I misread it, then read it again. I have about four tabs open attempting to properly review it, but alas! I don’t know. I keep failing to find a grip into Di Benedetto’s The Suicides; maybe it’ll take soon. I started reading Antoine Volodine’s Mevlido’s Dreams around 12:30am this morning. It’s much funnier so far than I would have imagined. I’d mislaid the novel maybe a year ago; it was in a pile in the back of a bookcase that is now south and west of here.

I don’t have a way out of this post. I’ll do this blog at least one more year. Odysseus did twenty years, right? That’s a ridiculous stupid fucking sentence, the previous one.

This summer has been the weirdest one of my life, but it’s over now, right?

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

September 8, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed, 1972. Avon Bard Books (1978). Cover art by Andrew Rhodes (not credited); no designer credited. 256 pages.

A perfect novel. Reed’s five-novel run from ’67 to ’76 is astounding (the later stuff is good too).

From Mumbo Jumbo:

…Faust was an actual person. Somewhere between 1510 and 1540 this “wandering conjurer and medical quack” made his travels about the southwest German Empire, telling people his knowledge of “secret things.” I always puzzled over why such a legend was so basic to the Western mind; but I’ve thought about it and now I think I know the answer. Can’t you imagine this man traveling about with his bad herbs, love philters, physicks and potions, charms, overcharging the peasants but dazzling them with his badly constructed Greek and sometimes labeling his “wonder cures” with gibberish titles like “Polyunsaturated 99½% pure.” Hocus-pocus. He makes a living and can always get a free night’s lodging at an inn with his ability to prescribe cures and tell fortunes, that is, predict the future. You see he travels about the Empire and is able to serve as a kind of national radio for people in the locales. Well 1 day while he is leeching people, cutting hair or raising the dead who only have diseases which give the manifestations of death, something really works. He knows that he’s a bokor adept at card tricks, but something really works. He tries it again and it works. He continues to repeat this performance and each time it works. The peasants begin to look upon him as a supernatural being and he encourages the tales about him, that he heals the sick and performs marvels. He becomes wealthy with his ability to do The Work. Royalty visits him. He is a counselor to the king. He lives in a castle. Peasants whisper, a Black man, a very bearded devil himself visits him. That strange coach they saw, the 1 with the eyes as decorations drawn to his castle by wild-looking black horses. They say that he has made a pact with the devil because he invites the Africans who work in various cities throughout the Empire to his castle. There were 1000s in Europe at the time: blackamoors who worked as butlers, coachmen, footmen, pint-sized page boys; and conjurors whom only the depraved consulted. The villagers hear “Arabian” music, drums coming from the place but as soon as the series of meetings begin it all comes to a halt. Rumors circulate that Faust is dead. The village whispers that the Black men have collected. That is the nagging notion of Western man. China had rocketry, Africa iron furnaces, but he didn’t know when to stop with his newly found Work. That’s the basic wound. He will create fancy systems 13 letters long to convince himself he doesn’t have this wound. What is the wound? Someone will even call it guilt. But guilt implies a conscience. Is Faust capable of charity? No it isn’t guilt but the knowledge in his heart that he is a bokor. A charlatan who has sent 1000000s to the churchyard with his charlatan panaceas. Western man doesn’t know the difference between a houngan and a bokor. He once knew this difference but the knowledge was lost when the Atonists crushed the opposition. When they converted a Roman emperor and began rampaging and book-burning. His sorcery, white magic, his bokorism will improve. Soon he will be able to annihilate 1000000s by pushing a button. I do not believe that a Yellow or Black hand will push this button but a robot-like descendant of Faust the quack will. The dreaded bokor, a humbug who doesn’t know when to stop.

Mass-market Monday | John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

September 1, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939. Penguin Books (1979). Cover design by Neil Stuart. 502 pages.

While it is not fair to call The Grapes of Wrath underrated I think it continues to be under-read. There’s something corny and beautiful I love in Steinbeck’s prose, and while the novel is not without its problems, it remains a sympathetic and convincing depiction of people — laborers — resisting the dehumanizing machinations of capital. Here is Chapter Twenty-One, one of the many stand-alone intercalary vignettes that flesh out the Joad’s saga–

The moving, questing people were migrants now. Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had eaten or starved on the produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people. Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamed with moving people. There in the Middle- and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not formed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.

And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them—hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.

And the latter was true, for how can a man without property know the ache of ownership? And the defending people said, They bring disease, they’re filthy. We can’t have them in the schools. They’re strangers. How’d you like to have your sister go out with one of ’em?

The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them—armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can’t let these Okies get out of hand. And the men who were armed did not own the land, but they thought they did. And the clerks who drilled at night owned nothing, and the little storekeepers possessed only a drawerful of debts. But even a debt is something, even a job is something. The clerk thought, I get fifteen dollars a week. S’pose a goddamn Okie would work for twelve? And the little storekeeper thought, How could I compete with a debtless man?

And the migrants streamed in on the highways and their hunger was in their eyes, and their need was in their eyes. They had no argument, no system, nothing but their numbers and their needs. When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it—fought with a low wage. If that fella’ll work for thirty cents, I’ll work for twenty-five.

If he’ll take twenty-five, I’ll do it for twenty.

No, me, I’m hungry. I’ll work for fifteen. I’ll work for food. The kids. You ought to see them. Little boils, like, comin’ out, an’ they can’t run aroun’. Give ’em some windfall fruit, an’ they bloated up. Me. I’ll work for a little piece of meat.

And this was good, for wages went down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again.

And now the great owners and the companies invented a new method. A great owner bought a cannery. And when the peaches and the pears were ripe he cut the price of fruit below the cost of raising it. And as cannery owner he paid himself a low price for the fruit and kept the price of canned goods up and took his profit. And the little farmers who owned no canneries lost their farms, and they were taken by the great owners, the banks, and the companies who also owned the canneries. As time went on, there were fewer farms. The little farmers moved into town for a while and exhausted their credit, exhausted their friends, their relatives. And then they too went on the highways. And the roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work.

And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.

A visit to Cormac McCarthy’s “enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library”

August 29, 2025August 29, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Photograph of Cormac McCarthy’s living room by Wayne Martin Belger

The September/October issue of Smithonian Magazine includes a visit to the late Cormac McCarthy’s house in New Mexico. The piece is by Richard Grant, who explains how the visit came about:

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

It’s a long feature and contributes more information to McCarthy’s biography than I would have thought (please, Josh Brolin, give us McCarthy’s full story about “drinking wine with André the Giant in Paris”). Grant also focuses heavily on the scholarship going into cataloging McCarthy’s library. Grant describes “looking through a batch [of books to be cataloged] about Cistercian abbeys, violin makers, metaphysics, meta-ontology, the incest taboo and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.” We learn that McCarthy owned at least thirteen editions of Moby-Dick. Scholars found uncashed royalty checks to the tune of ten grand bookmarking William Faulkner’s niece’s memoir. Grant also shares some of McCarthy’s annotations, like this one:

In his copy of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, McCarthy penciled his opinion of slip-on dress shoes: ‘disgusting.’ Further down the same page, next to a sentence praising shiny-buckled monk-strap shoes, he wrote, ‘yet more horror.’

The photographs by Wayne Martin Belger are likely to particularly interest McCarthy nerds. My favorite of the batch is a slip of paper in McCarthy’s handwriting, posed atop a Wittgenstein volume. The slip includes what appears to be a rough budget, notes on “Spengler’s number,” and a short grocery list:

“TARTAR SAUCE

CELERY SALT.”

I also dig Belger’s photograph of McCarthy’s gun barrel schematic; check out the piece for more:

Photograph of “Gun books and catalogs including a schematic, hand-drawn by McCarthy, of a plan to make a gun barrel” by Wayne Martin Belger

Mass-market Monday | Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma

August 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839, Stendhal. Translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Signet Classics (1962). No cover artist credited. 502 pages.

I have fond memories of reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. These memories turn out to be faulty, or perhaps more accurately, not indicative of the experience I had of actually reading the book. I went back and read the riffs I wrote nine years ago on the novel, and words like “boredom” and “slog” pop up. From my last riff on the novel:

Balzac was a great admirer of Charterhouse, as was Italo Calvino, and countless writers too. Indeed, the novel is, I suppose, a cult favorite for writers, which makes sense: Stendhal crowds each page with such psychological realism, such rich life, that every paragraph seems its own novel. I’ll admit that by page 400 or so I was exhausted though.

I’ve noted here a few times that Charterhouse is a “Modernist” novel; perhaps “proto-Modernist” is the term I need. (Again—I’m sure that countless lit critics have sussed over this; pardon my ignorant American ass). And yet Charterhouse also points back at the novels before it, the serialized novels, the epistolary novels, the romances and histories and etceteras of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. My favorite lines of the novel were often our ironic narrator’s brief asides like, “Doubtless the reader grows tired…” or “The conversation went on for hours more in trivial detail…” or “The letter went on for pages more after the same fashion…” (These aren’t actual quotes, dear reader, but I think I offer a fair paraphrase here). Stendhal’s modernism, or Modernism, or proto-Modernism, or whatever, is his wily irony, his winking at the novel’s formal characteristics. My own failing, then, is to perhaps want more of this. As I wrote last time I riffed on it, what I suppose I want is a postmodern condensation of The Charterhouse of Parma, such as Donald Barthelme’s 1968 story “Eugénie Grandet,” which parodied Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet.

How much of Balzac’s novel is lovingly leapt through right here?!

This wish of mine is of course my failure, not the novel’s.

The Charterhouse of Parma is undoubtedly an oddity, a work of genius, often thrilling, and often an utter slog. I suppose I’m glad that I finally finished it after so many years of trying, but I’m not sure if I got what I wanted out of it. The failure is mine.

I’ll close with the novel’s final line though, which I adore:

TO THE HAPPY FEW

Annotations on The Guardian’s ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s books

August 18, 2025August 19, 2025 Biblioklept5 Comments

Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel Shadow Ticket is out fifty days from now. In anticipation, there’s a piece today in The Guardian by John Keenan ranking Pynchon’s books to date.

I undertook a similar silly project just over a year ago on this blog in a post titled “A(nother) completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels” (this list was a correction to a previous 2018 list I foolishly compiled). Lists like these are obviously personal judgments (like, opinions man).

But Keenan’s list is wrong. So here are my annotations.

9. Keenan selects Slow Learner, writing,

A collection of early short stories that is chiefly of interest for the introduction, in which the author spells out why he thinks they fail. Pynchon does not spare himself but, unfortunately, he is right. For aficionados only.

I didn’t include Slow Learner in my rankings because it is not a novel. Pynchon’s intro to it is probably the best thing in it. I agree with Keenan’s assessment here.

8. Keenan selects Against the Day, writing,

Practically plotless, prolix and gargantuan, this novel landed with a thump following a nine-year gap. Characters fragment and double in a bewildering array, the style pastiches pulp novels, adventure stories and science fiction. It does not add up to more than the sum of its admittedly ingenious parts.

This assessment is egregious. Against the Day is perhaps the most directly political of Pynchon’s novels, and, in my estimation, the clearest (if not the most concise) expression of Pynchon’s political sympathies. I ranked it #3, writing: “I think this novel would make an excellent American history textbook. Its thesis: resist the military-industrial-entertainment-complex. Start here!”

7. Keenan selects Bleeding Edge, writing,

Pynchon’s most recent novel is a lightweight. The protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, mother of two, longsuffering partner to a feckless financier, finds herself chasing shadows around Manhattan’s Silicon Alley. Maxine’s skills as a fraud investigator are put to the test unravelling the machinations of the nasty controller of a computer security firm who will do anything to get his hands on a virtual reality simulator called DeepArcher (geddit?). There are plentiful puns, red herrings and surnames that serve as possibly unhelpful acronyms – the usual Pynchon ingredients, in other words. Here they fail to cohere into an entirely satisfying whole.

Bleeding Edge is not top-tier Pynchon, but it’s hardly lightweight. I ranked it #6, writing,

Reading Bleeding Edge helped evoke all the weirdness the 2000s were about to lay out for us. It made me angry again, or reminded me of the anger that I’d sustain for most of the decade. It reminded me of our huge ideological failure after 9/11, an ideological failure we are watching somehow fail even more today. But I also loved the novel’s unexpectedly sweet domestic plot, and found a kind of solace even in its affirmation of family, even as its final image pointed to the kind of radical inconclusiveness at the heart of being a parent.

6. Keenan selects Vineland, writing,

It is 1984, the year of Reagan’s re-election but for Zoyd Wheeler, Los Angeles-based veteran of the radical left, time has stopped. His wife, Frenesi, has left him to raise their daughter, Prairie, alone and he resorts to dismal acts of self-sabotage in order to qualify for government benefits. Prairie, in turn, flees the family coop to track down her mother, a subversive turned informant in league with federal baddy Brock Vond. Pynchon’s themes are prescient – surveillance, media saturation, generational miscommunication – but his aim is off.

I don’t think “Pynchon’s aim is off” is the best metaphor here. I think he hits what he shoots at — his targets are clear, and he’s an author, right? His characters are props he can set out where he likes, guaranteeing a bullseye. But that’s not always satisfying. I think the execution of Vineland is a bit slapdash. The book has always had cult status among Pynchon aficionados, perhaps stemming from a contrarian spirit. Paul Thomas Anderson’s (very) loose film adaptation, One Battle After Another, has also appeared to prompt a lot of reading, rereading, and online chatter about Vineland. I ranked it last in my list, at #8, writing that, “Vineland is ultimately depressing and easily my least-favorite Pynchon novel, but it does have some exquisite prose moments.”

5. Keenan selects V., writing,

Sincerity is not a quality readily associated with Pynchon, but his debut novel displays an affection for his characters that would later take second place to irony. The story bounces between Benny Profane, unemployed sailor, and Herbert Stencil, obsessive seeker of the elusive V. The language shows its age in places, but the plight of people determined to keep themselves in the dark is as relevant as ever.

I love V. and also had it at #5 on my list. Keenan is right that “sincerity” is not associated with Pynchon, but absolutely incorrect that Pynchon’s mode of affection is displaced by irony in the later novels. It’s clear that Pynchon loves Jeremiah Dixon, Charles Mason, Webb Traverse, Roger Mexico, Maxine Tarnow, etc. In my list, I wrote,

I’ll repeat my endorsement that “V. makes a good starting place for anyone new to Pynchon” and recommend that anyone interested in Pynchon but daunted by the scope check out the book from their library and read the ninth chapter, the story of of Kurt Mondaugen.

4. Keenan selects The Crying of Lot 49, writing,

The author regretted publishing this novel but he was being unduly harsh on himself. Short, funny and shot through with allusions you can choose to follow or ignore, the story of Oedipa Maas’s search for the meaning behind the supposed rivalry of postal companies is the literary equivalent of non-Euclidean geometry.

I also had Crying at #4. I wrote,

The Crying of Lot 49 is probably a better novel than V. but I think I like V. better. 49 is very funny and showcases Pynchon’s tonality of paranoia/hope wrapped up in zaniness/horror. It’s an excellent sophomore novel, but also dense, claustrophobic even. I guess I like the Pynchon sprawl a bit better.

3. Keenan selects Inherent Vice, writing,

Wilfully weird, often sordid and occasionally borderline unintelligible, Pynchon’s seventh novel was adapted for the big screen by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. The adaptation was nominated for an Oscar, making Pynchon as mainstream as he’s ever likely to get. Larry “Doc” Sportello is a private investigator with a broken heart and a huge appetite for marijuana. His ex-girlfriend reappears out of nowhere, implores Doc to find her married lover, then promptly vanishes again. At the heart of the murky tale lurks the sinister presence of the Golden Fang, a vessel that means, as Doc surmises, “a lot of things to a lot of people” – all of them unsavoury.

I love Inherent Vice, but it’s hardly top-three! I had it at #7, above Vineland.

2. Keenan selects Gravity’s Rainbow, writing,

This kaleidoscopic tour de force cemented Pynchon’s reputation as a writer of baffling, farcical and profound genius. A chief delight is his brilliant ear for dialogue which is given full rein in this twisted tale of allied intelligence officers, Nazis, scientists and seers united by a MacGuffin in the shape of a mysterious rocket. The action arcs from London under bombardment to a postwar zone of surrender. What is striking is how the themes explored here – forever wars, technological domination, uncontrollable cartels – have become staples of internet discourse.

I had Mason & Dixon at #2 and Gravity’s Rainbow at #1.

1 . Keenan selects Mason & Dixon, writing,

Pynchon gives the 18th-century novel a postmodern twist to explore the relationship between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. . . The author layers fact over anachronistic fiction, scientific inquiry over conspiratorial rumour, and tragedy over knockabout farce, in a virtuoso display of storytelling. . . It is a ripping yarn spun for the incredulous enjoyment of both the cleric’s family and the grateful reader.

Here’s what I wrote in my (thoroughly unnecessary) list:

2. Mason & Dixon (1997)

A measurement of the world and a story about friendship. It would be Pynchon’s best novel if he hadn’t written—

1. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

The best book.

Rankings are stupid fun, and I appreciate Keenan giving me an opening for some stupid fun on a Monday morning when I should really be prepping for the onset of the fall semester. I’ll close with a more honest ranking — all of these books are good, most are excellent, and at least two are American classics. It might be better to rank Pynchon’s oeuvre on one of those dorky tier lists.

So here is my dorky unnecessary Pynchon tier list:

Category: Books

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

The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 19-20

“I don’t know why Against the Day hasn’t been banned” | Ishmael Reed on Thomas Pynchon

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

Halloween all year long | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 8-14

Glows in the dark | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 1-7

It still believes in night | A review of Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic novel Mevlido’s Dreams

Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a frenetic, vital reimagining of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

A review of Rebecca Gransden’s novella Figures Crossing the Field towards the Group

Bialik/Rilke (Two poetry collections acquired, 13 Sept. 2025)

Birthday stacks | Not really a blog about Biblioklept turning nineteen

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

Mass-market Monday | John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

A visit to Cormac McCarthy’s “enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library”

Mass-market Monday | Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma

Annotations on The Guardian’s ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s books

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