Biblioklept

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

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

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

Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 36 is a mess.

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

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

The noisy, buzzing chapter ends with Hop Wingdale offering Ace Lomax (along with “that Czechoslovakian robot” Zdeněk) a job “Escorting Jews to safety, one at a time or in truckloads.” Ace was once hired muscle — like Hicks, who started his “career” as a strikebreaker. But in Shadow Ticket we see the possibility for his changing sides. Redemption is possible. As the psychic Zoltán von Kiss suggests in Ch. 22: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.”

This novel believes in the promise of redemption.

Michel Tournier’s Friday (Book acquired, 12 Nov. 2025)

November 17, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday is getting a reprint (Norman Denny’s translation) from NYRB. Their blurb:

Friday is the Friday of Robinson Crusoe, and Michel Tournier’s retelling of Defoe’s tale of solitude and survival turns it on its head. Cast away on a tropical island, the God-fearing Crusoe hasn’t the least doubt what he must do: tame the wilderness and stamp it with the sign of civilization, a fool’s errand to which he devotes years and in which he comes close to succeeding. Then Friday shows up, infuriating him with his “irrepressible, lyrical, and blasphemous” laugh, and a new, more challenging task confronts the island’s self-proclaimed master. But after an unforeseen event destroys all of Crusoe’s work, it is up to Friday to teach him just how ignorant he is and always has been.

Friday was Tournier’s first novel, and it quickly found a wondering and delighted readership. Writing about the book in his autobiography, Tournier asks, “What was Friday to Daniel Defoe? Nothing: an animal, at best a creature waiting to receive his humanity from Robinson Crusoe, who as a European was in sole possession of all knowledge and wisdom.” In Friday, Tournier steps out of the secular world of the Western novel into the sacred precincts of universal mythology. The result is radiant, sensual, funny, and utterly unexpected—a modern masterpiece.

Sunday Comix

November 16, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

The cover for Middle Class Fantasies #1 by Jerry Lane, 1973, Cartoonists Co-op Press.

The Pond — Aron Wiesenfeld

November 12, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

The Pond, 2023 by Aron Wiesenfeld (b. 1972)

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

November 11, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

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

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

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

Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork

Chapter 33 is the big-budget action sequence of Shadow Ticket, in which the “pocket-size golem Zdeněk” and musician/secret agent Hop Wingdale rescue Ace Lomax from the clutches of the fascist Vladboys in their “Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline.” (Notably–significantly–Hicks is missing from the rescue team.)

The narrator informs us that the camp is “flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…briefly innocent as Fascism in its ‘springtime of beauty,’ as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…” We tend to think, rightly, that fascism is a rejection of progressive values, but it’s worth remembering that much of what we now think of as Modernism was wrapped up in proto-fascist idealizations of energy and action — consider Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism f’r’instance…

The camp where Ace is being held prisoner is a hotbed of action:

“Fascist adventurers have journeyed here from all over, Austrians sporting blue cornflowers and black grouse feathers, secret police, anti-Red goon squads, revolutionary cells, convicts escaped from internal exile and not sure where they are right now or what language they’re supposed to be speaking, colonial stooges in civvies in from as far afield as Indo-China and South America, irredentist aristos from the old Hungarian kingdom adrift in nostalgia, Polish freelancers working on spec for all of the above.”

I love the force of the sentence. For such a breezy novel, Shadow Ticket is dense. We might take it as a sketch of a much larger, thicker, denser novel.

Well so and anyway–

The deal is that Hop’s band shows up to play this fascist gig; he’s informed that they, the fascist paramilitary Vladboys, “are pretending to invade Fiume, which any number of potential clients want back.” The garrulous entertainment liaison who meets with the band opines that such an invasion would be “all over in a day or two. Anasa supo.”

That last phrase, anasa supo, is Esperanto for duck soup, an American idiom referring to a task easily accomplished. Duck Soup is also of course the title of the 1933 Marx Brothers that centers (oh-so-anarchically) around the tiny nation of Freedonia–a bilocation of Fiume? Here’s a bit of bilocation from Duck Soup:

Hop and his band will play their swing tunes in “ruined limestone amphitheater, once dedicated to bloodletting presented as amusement, back when the Fifth Macedonian Legion were busy here invading and occupying.“

The entertainment menu is “A Gay Evening with Vlad Ţepeş,” with riffs including “Vlad’s Vegetarian Chef”…(“Turnip loaf again, remind me to have the chef impaled”) and “Vlad at the Office” (the Count laments that they never call him “Vlad the Spending Reducer.”)

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

Is this “Vlad Ţepeş” just a performer playing a character in the evening’s festivities, vamping on a riff–or is it, like, the Vlad Ţepeş, son of Vlad Dracul, Voivode of Wallachia, born half a century before the events of Shadow Ticket — like, Dracula man Vlad? A few paragraphs later, we are briefly introduced to the thug guarding Ace, “Csongor…a sort common in these parts, an apprentice vampire doomed never to develop past journeyman.” On one hand, the language here, and the general supernatural bent of Shadow Ticket suggests that these are like real (as in mythological) vampires — but the novel’s themes of bilocation also hedge the bet: vampire here could be a metaphor; the Vlad Ţepeş could be merely an actor playing a part.

Pynchon renders the scene in the kind of sexualized language we’d expect from vampire stories: “Vladboys have been building up, sending them out after prey each time in a more dangerous state of arousal. Trivial disputes are apt at any moment to erupt into violence. Local women go more and more in fear of their safety, cover their hair, stay in groups. The weirdly erotic charge accumulates, until vrrrooom! here’s the Vladboys out on another massive prowl…”

The prowl, as we’ve already learned, scores “Ace…an understandably welcome catch, with the Flathead an unexpected bonus, which the boys keep insisting is a Jewish motorcycle.” (The idiot vladboys reasoning? “Harley. David…Son, this is son of David, no?”)

Standing guard over their “welcome catch,” journeyman vampire Csongor takes interest in Ace’s tattoo: “’Die Todten reiten schnell,’ the Vladboy reads from the Gothic lettering there. ‘Something about the dead ride fast.'”

The phrase “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” appears in the opening chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a phrase recorded in Harker’s journal, which he identifies as the “line from [Gottfried August] Bürger’s ‘Lenore.'”

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

Csongor wants to know if the dead actually do ride fast. Ace’s answer is philosophical: “Over there, among the dead, time has no meaning anymore, so to get distance per hour you’d have to divide by zero, which even if it was legal would still give you infinite speed.”

But before he can really explain his riff on death-speed paradox though, Ace’s rescuers arrive: “the pocket-size golem Zdeněk [and] Hop Wingdale.” Our mini-golem is a cyborg: “Zdeněk’s left arm turns out to be a modified ZB-26 Czech light machine gun, with the magazine built into his shoulder.” He likens it to “one of many earthly variants of Azrael, the Angel of Death” — yet still spares Csongor.

The chapter ends with our heroic trio escaping the fascist camp, fleeing their captors with the aid of a “pocket-size model” of a “a Bangalore torpedo” that Zdeněk has improvised from “a few sticks of dynamite thoughtfully borrowed last week in Transylvania off of a freelance firefighting crew passing through en route to a Romanian oil-well fire everybody could see from fifty miles away.”

The massive fire Pynchon’s narrator refers to here is, with most everything in Shadow Ticket, an historical event. The “torch of Moreni” burned for almost two and a half years, from September 1929 to November 1932.

Chapter 34 opens with a sentence that lays out the situation for us: “Daphne looking for Hop has blundered out into a territory she thought she knew, which in fact the political situation has changed to something unrecognizable and poisonous.”

The Weimar days are over; “Hamburg, once the Swing Kid metropol” is now a Nazi hotbed, where “Blues licks have largely given way to major triads.” Conformity reigns; difference is punished. Daphne finds this out the hard way when she “wanders into a beer garden [Hop’s band] the Klezmopolitans once played at, formerly named the Midnight Mouse after a poem by Christian Morgenstern, now converted to a Sturmlokal” — she’s stumbled into a Nazi bar, and immediately finds herself imperiled by the not-so-subtle sexual predations of fascist goons (“Looking for me, Schätzchen?”)

But before our “Cheez Princess…become[s] fondue” she’s by Glow Tripforth del Vasto in her autogyro-cum-deus-ex-machina. They alight to a tavern; on the way Glow complains that because gyros “are forgiving ships…there’s the danger [of] The idiot appeal…romance on the cheap.” Modern convenience will puncture Gothic adventures of flight. Any idiot can fly.

Glow, headed to “some kind of anarchist sainthood” in Spain, drops Daphne in Fiume, but first delivers another one of several hey-we’re-about-to-be-in-some-bigger-mess-than-we-thought-we-were-going-to-be-in proclamations: “Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life.”

Glow adds, “I don’t care to know more than I need to about the mysteries of time…You’re expecting spiritual wisdom from little G. T. del V.? you’ll be waiting a long time, sucker.”

The dead might ride fast–but they’re still dead.

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

November 10, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

The Ex-Magician and Other Stories, Murilo Rubião, 1979. Translation by Thomas Colchie. Avon-Bard (1984). No cover artist or designer credited. 119 pages.

“Elisa”

Murilo Rubião

Translation by Thomas Colchie

I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me.

Proverbs, VIII:17

One afternoon—it was in the early days of April—she arrived at our home. She pushed open the gate quite naturally, which guarded our little front yard, as if she were simply obeying a time-worn habit. From up on the porch, where I was sitting, a needless observation slipped out:

“And what if we had a dog?”

“Dogs don’t frighten me,” she replied wearily.

With a certain difficulty (the suitcase she was carrying must have been quite heavy) she managed to climb the stairs. Before going in, at the front door she turned to me:

“Or men either.”

Surprised by her capacity to divine my thoughts, I made haste to extricate myself from what seemed to be an increasingly embarrassing situation:

“Terrible weather out today. If it goes on like this …”

I cut short the series of absurdities that now occurred to me and tried, rather awkwardly, to avoid her look of reproach.

Then she smiled a little, while I nervously squeezed my hands.

Our strange visitor quickly adjusted to the ways of the house. She seldom went out, and never appeared at the window.

Perhaps at first I hadn’t even noticed her beauty: so lovely, even when the spell was broken, with her half-smile. Tall, her skin so white, but such a pale white, almost transparent, and a gauntness that betrayed a profound degradation. Her eyes were brown, but I don’t wish to talk of them. They never left me.

She soon began to fill out more, to gain some coloring and, in her expression, to display a joyful tranquillity.

She didn’t tell us her name, where she came from, or what terrible events had so shaken her life. In the meantime, we respected her silence on such matters. To us, she was simply herself: someone who needed our care, our affection.

I was able to accept the long silences, the sudden questions. One night, without my expecting it, she asked me:

“Have you ever loved?”

When the answer was in the negative, she made obvious her disappointment. After a while she left the sitting room, without adding a word to what she had spoken. The next morning we discovered her room was empty.

Every afternoon, as dusk was about to fall, I would step out onto the porch, with the feeling that she might show up, any moment, at the corner. My sister Cordelia berated me:

“It’s useless, she won’t be back. If you were only less infatuated, you wouldn’t be having such hopes.”

A year after her flight—again it was April—she appeared at the front gate. Her face was sadder, with deep shadows under the eyes. In my own eyes, so overjoyed to see her, the tears welled up, and in an effort to provide her with a cordial reception I said:

“Careful, now we do have a little dog.”

“But her master is still gentle, isn’t he? Or has he turned fierce during my absence?”

I extended my hands, which she held for a long time. And then, no longer able to suppress my concern, I asked her:

“Where did you go? What have you done all this time?”

“I wandered around and did nothing. Except maybe love a little,” she concluded, shaking her head sadly.

Her life among us returned to its former pace. But I felt uneasy. Cordélia observed me pityingly, implying I should no longer conceal my passion.

I lacked, however, the courage, and so put off my first declaration of love.

Several months later Elisa—yes, she finally told us her name—departed again.

And since I was left knowing her name, I suggested to my sister we should move to a different place. Cordélia, although extremely attached to our house, raised no objection and limited herself to asking:

“And Elisa? How will she be able to find us when she returns?”

I managed, with an effort, to conceal my anxiety, and repeated like an idiot:

“Yes, how will she?”

Sunday Comix

November 9, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

“Ada” by Willie Mendes. The piece is the back cover of Insect Fear #2, March 1970, The Print Mint.

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

November 8, 2025November 8, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

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

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

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

Chapter 30 opens in “The Vienna branch of MI3b, daytime, a modest-size office decorated with a movie poster of Lilian Harvey waltzing with Willy Fritsch in Der Kongreß tanzt and an ancient map of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy.”

Der Kongreß tanzt (The Congress Dances) is a 1931 UFA production set in Vienna, 1815 — if you want to go down the rabbit hole, maybe start with this contemporary New York Times review of the film. The Congress Dances was Weimar UFA’s tentpole shot at competing with Hollywood; later the production company would be subsumed by the Nazis. A current throughout Pynchon’s works has been something like, resist the military-industrial-entertainment complex. It’s worth noting the emphasis on dancing here, a motif in Shadow Ticket. Is dancing a form of transcendent resistance? Or is it a narcotizing agent?

The Habsburg Dual Monarchy, formed in 1867 after the Austro-Prussian War, joined two distinct nations under one emperor — a kind of bilocation — leaving ethnic and nationalist tensions unresolved. These divisions weakened the empire, contributing to the instability that helped spark World War I and, after its collapse, left a fragmented Central Europe whose resentments helped set the stage for World War II.

We are in that stage-setting right now, in that fragmented, fragmenting Central Europe, in the office of British Military Intelligence Section 3 where secret agent couple Alf and Pip Quarrender have been called before “Station chief Arvo Thorp.” Thorp informs the Quarrenders that their asset Vassily Midoff is “seeking to join a motorcycle rally in progress at the moment” — the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed that everyone’s set out on — and “that someone must be sent round” to cut off that loose end posthaste. The Quarrenders are upset — “But he was ours, Thorp…Our bloke” — but orders are orders. They do question the rationale of the orders though, wondering if it was simply “too much effort to keep all [Vassily’s] allegiances straight.” Here we have a neat little summary of how some readers may feel sussing motives and plot points from Shadow Ticket.

Codebreaker Alf gets something proximal to an “answer” when he intercepts an encrypted message floating around various intelligence agencies: Vassily “has apparently been promoted to deputy operations officer of an unacknowledged narkomat, a Blavatskian brotherhood of psychical masters and adepts located someplace out in the wild Far East.” Pynchon further underlines Shadow Ticket’s haunted themes, bringing up Stalin’s “chief crypto genius Gleb Bokii [who] is also running a secret lab specializing in the paranormal.”

But Alf can’t fully crack the code (natch), receiving “only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it.” In a chilly series of sentences, Alf, pushed by “some invisible power,” continues chipping at the encryption against his better judgment. But the encryption is, well, cryptic, even as it portends a future yet to come (including the ominous not that Stalin, “threatened by supernatural forces [would] probably go after Jews first.”

Alf concludes that Vassily “may have gone mad, he may in fact have crossed a line forbidden or invisible to the likes of us, thrown by some occult switchwork over onto an alternate branch line of history.” The “alternative branch line” again evokes the novel’s themes of bilocation (which I’ve tried to enumerate in previous riffs).

(The bigger Pynchonian bilocation is frequently visible/invisible, in the spiritualist-materialist sense — which perhaps finds a moral corollary in convenient/inconvenient.)

So well and anyway–the Quarrenders track down the Russian Trans-Trianon caravan and locate Vassily, but he manages to escape on a Rio-bound zeppelin painted like a watermelon, to their relief.

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

“Hicks, Slide, and Zdeněk come rolling into a parts depot deep in the Transylvanian forest,” at the beginning of Chapter 31. (Slide is an American journalist; Zdeněk is a non-gigantic golem, if you need help keeping track.) They are on the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle route, presumably tracking Hop Wingdale. Or Daphne Airmont. Or Bruno Airmont. Or…?

Here in “actual Transylvania, the vampire motherland itself,” the trio drives through “hairpin turns frequented by vengeful spirits, passages cursed by some local shaman, marsh life you wouldn’t want swarming around you after dark…And the bats of course.” According to Zdeněk these vampire bats “are the Unbreathing, who go about their business in a silence not even broken by pulsebeats.”

Slide’s brought along his Leica camera to “cover the supernatural angle,” but the pictures all end up blank: “a vampire’s allergy to silver, an ambivalence as to light itself…” I’ve foregrounded Shadow Ticket’s Gothic motifs and impulses throughout my notes. I don’t really know what I could add to, like, golems and vampires in Transylvania.

A diagram of the internal mechanisms of a Leica I camera

Noting that the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle route allows for “impulses disallowed in normal society” to be acted upon, the narration then gives over to one of my favorite little bits in Shadow Ticket, a self-contained episode of “spontaneous pig rescue.” The pig in question is “a Mangalica, a popular breed in Hungary at the moment, curly-coated as a sheep, black upper half, blonde lower. And that face! One of the more lovable pig faces, surrounded by ringlets and curls.”

Pynchon’s porcophilia is well-documented, with pigs showing favorably throughout his work–particularly in Mason & Dixon and in Gravity’s Rainbow, where Tyrone Slothrop takes on the role (and costume) of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero, and then later wanders through the Zone with a sweet pig as his companion-guide, while the narrator sings:

“A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt–
A pig is a pal, who’ll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.”

Back to Hicks: “wandering the compound one day hears a piano in the distance, recognizes the tune as ‘Star of the County Down,’ a longtime favorite of Irish drinkers he’s known.” It turns out that none other than Pip Quarrender is singing and playing the song — which she identifies as “Dives and Lazarus,” a traditional English folk song that that adapts a riff from the Gospel of Luke. Pips notes that it’s “technically it’s a Christmas carol, though uncomfortable for the average churchgoer given its rather keen element of class hostility.” We have here another bilocation, a song with two separate but real co-existing lives. (Throw in a little class warfare, too.)

Hicks then runs into Terike, who’s concerned that Ace Lomax is missing, on the run from she-knows-not-what (it’s Bruno). The chapter ends with “Zdeněk the golem [locating] Hop Wingdale en route to a Croatian guerrilla training camp near the Hungarian border.” He decides to go check it out.

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

The band pulls in to a “towering wooden cylinder set in a clearing, filled with the snarling of low-displacement bike engines.” Their gig is at a Wall of Death motor cycle stunt show.

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

Pynchon invokes the image of a wall of death late in Gravity’s Rainbow: “somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone.” The metaphor here of course is the wall between the living and the dead.

It turns out that Ace Lomax has been stunt riding on the Wall of Death for tips. Prompted by the band, he sings a Western tune: “Things were so jake, at the O.K. Corral— / Till those Earps and Clantons came along—.” The fantasy here is of an unspoiled West which eventually succumbs to the violence of competing agencies.

Ace recognizes Hop and congratulates his being “still vertical.” He proceeds to tell the musician that Bruno Airmont had tried to get Ace to assassinate Hop, but he decided that wasn’t his gig and hit the road: “By nightfall he’s in Bratislava and slipping unnoticed in among a convoy of Trans-Trianon machinery.” In their discussion about the Wall of Death, Hop brings up motordrome physics: “Somebody said it’s safe long as you keep moving fast enough, something about centrifugal force.” We get here a repetition of one of Shadow Ticket’s major themes, neatly summed up by Stuffy Keegan back in Ch. 20: “as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free.”

Ace then hits the road. He fails to check in back at the Trans-Trianon base camp, causing Terike’s cryptic road-adventuress face…to drift into disarray. She decides to light out looking for him.

The chapter ends with the narrator telling us that it turns “out that in some walled-in maze of a mountain town Ace has missed a turn…and ends up running on fumes.” He’s pursued by not only wolves but also the fascist Vladboys, “who also run this terrain in packs.” The fascist gang are on what I take to be dirt bikes, faster than Ace’s Harley. The last line, “Ace finds himself in the hands of the Vladboys,” sets up a nice opportunity for a big dramatic climactic rescue scene.

Spontaneous pig rescue | A self-contained episode from Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket

November 8, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

What seems to’ve begun happening out here on the route with some regularity is that impulses disallowed in normal society are surfacing unexpectedly and being acted upon. Some more benevolent than others, spontaneous pig rescue, for example.

Unaccustomed bustle one day in the repair shop, where the ill-tempered Sándor Zsupka, across whose path few who have ever ventured care to do so again, currently on the run from a number of felony charges, including actual bodily harm, is putting together a pig-customized helmet and goggles combination revealing along with his criminal activities a gift for millinery.

“This is your…”

“Spirit guide, and even a spirit guide can do with some extra windproofing now and then. Further questions?”

“Never seen a pig quite like this…”

She’s a Mangalica, a popular breed in Hungary at the moment, curly-coated as a sheep, black upper half, blonde lower. And that face! One of the more lovable pig faces, surrounded by ringlets and curls. Squeezita Thickly should only look half this adorable.

No more than idly cruising the countryside, Sándor happened to get off on one of those fateful back roads, and there in a steep farmyard were a family and their livestock, a cute meet, you’d say, though not half as cute as the pig herself. “Oh and this is Erzsébet, we’re eating her for Christmas.”

Hell they are. Sándor and some barroom accomplices perform a snatch-and-grab in the middle of the night, the pig pretending to be asleep, as she is picked up, installed in the sidecar of Sándor’s rig, and spirited away, just like that. Next thing anybody knows she’s riding in the sidecar, done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine. Anybody feels like commenting, they don’t.

A self-contained episode from Thomas Pynchon’s 2025 novel Shadow Ticket.

Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy (Book acquired, Oct. 2025)

November 5, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy is new in English translation from publisher NYRB and translator and Peter Behrman de Sinéty. NYRB’s blurb–

Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.

Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.

The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”

Non Compus Mentis — Benjamin Cañas

November 4, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Non Compus Mentis, 1976 by Benjamin Cañas (1933-1987)

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

November 3, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

Nova Express, William S. Burroughs, 1964. Evergreen Black Cat Books (1965). 155 pages. The cover by artist Grove Press mainstay Roy Kuhlman is not credited.

I picked up this mass-market Burroughs at A Capella Books in Atlanta this weekend. We drove up on Thursday to see the American indie rock band Big Thief play at the Fox Theatre. The theater is gorgeous, its interior a lavish orientalist fantasy draped in rich reds and golds, royal blues, and warm ambers, all illuminated under a ceiling painted to resemble a twinkling night sky. The sound was pretty bad and the crowd was worse. Several groups around me talked throughout the concert, and the general vibe was soured by the crowd’s inability to pick a lane when it came to standing-or-not-standing. Big Thief started in a moody jammy mood jamming on an extended version of “No Fear” from their new album Double Infinity. They followed it up with three more songs from the new album, and while the playing was polished and strong, with plentiful harmonic textures coming from the guitars, the audience didn’t really respond in a strong way until they played two “hits” back to back — “Vampire Empire” and “Simulation Swarm.” The audience then fell into this weird rhythm of people rising to their feet like reverse dominoes when people closer to the stage decided to stand and sway to more familiar “hits,” only to sit down when Big Thief played a newer song. The jerky rhythm led to hissed arguments and then not-so-hissed arguments throughout the theater — again, the mood was really odd, and the band didn’t seem to really connect with the audience. At one point, guitarist Buck Meek said something like, “You can dance to this new one, too” — but the few people who tried eventually quit. After “Not” and “Masterpiece,” Big Thief decided to workshop a new song, stopping at one point to adjust the rhythm. Again, the reaction to this tinkering was mixed. The highlight of the show for me was a dreamy, hazy, heavy reworking of “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You” in which the band seemed to tune totally in to their sound. (I had also managed to get the guys behind me to shut the fuck up after a very tense exchange, so I could actually appreciate the sounds without their banal chomping.) The band managed to get the crowd on their feet two more times — once with “Spud Infinity” near the end of their set, and then again when the crowd called for the obligatory encore. (It’s worth noting that much of the crowd headed to the exits right away, determined to beat awful Atlanta traffic.) Big Thief then played exactly one song (“Change”) and left, signalling for the house lights to come on. I have never seen a band play only one song at an encore. Some of the people I was with had a better time than I did. The show mostly reminded me of seeing Wilco in an old theater — this was close to twenty years ago, I guess — and their failure to connect with the audience. There’s not a lot of room to boogie in those old seats. That’s not what a theater is designed for. I saw Yo La Tengo around the same time in the same theater and they absolutely understood the space they were playing in and mapped their show around it. I still have a sour taste in my mouth from the concert, but the rest of the weekend was fun–good food, good times, etc. I even dressed up for Halloween — as Bob Ferguson from One Battle After Another. It’s such an easy costume (jeans, flannel robe, black beanie, oversized sunglasses) that I thought the Beltline would be littered with other lazy dickheads with the same dickhead idea, but it wasn’t. Everyone I interacted with thought I was going for the Dude. In my review of One Battle After Another I made the bathrobe connection writing that PTA’s film plays “as a sinister inversion to The Big Lebowski. I will file the pair away for a future double feature.” Later that night, after perhaps too many okay not perhaps definitely too many libations I rewatched The Beach Bum on my laptop. That’s the triple feature — Battle, Lebowski, Bum.

So here’s a snippet from Nova Express, just so I won’t be accused of bait n’ switch:

“Mr. Martin, and you board members, vulgar stupid Americans, you will regret calling in the Mayan Aztec Gods with your synthetic mushrooms. Remember we keep exact junk measure of the pain inflicted and that pain must be paid in full. Is that clear enough Mr. Intolerable Martin, or shall I make it even clearer? Allow me to introduce myself: The Mayan God Of Pain And Fear from the white hot plains of Venus which does not mean a God of vulgarity, cowardice, ugliness and stupidity. There is a cool spot on the surface of Venus three hundred degrees cooler than the surrounding area. I have held that spot against all contestants for five hundred thousand years. Now you expect to use me as your ‘errand boy’ and ‘strikebreaker’ summoned up by an IBM machine and a handful of virus crystals? How long could you hold that spot, you ‘board members’? About thirty seconds I think with all your guard dogs. And you thought to channel my energies for ‘operation total disposal’? Your ‘operations’ there or here this or that come and go and are no more. Give my name back. That name must be paid for. You have not paid. My name is not yours to use. Henceforth I think about thirty seconds is written.”

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

November 2, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

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