NEWSPEAK Blog

blogging Pynchon, pgs 44-77

oh-kay. Pynchon's back. He finally let go of the pseudo-adventure novel parody, and came back to the prose-poetry I love in his writing, that makes reading one of these monster books worth the trouble. Sentences 16 lines long - sometimes he just does not see the need to end a sentence, does he? Turns of phrase like "extravagantly kept promises of island girls" and "millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls."  Flashes of wisdom like "...in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all be, taking care of this baby here, long as he didn't fret about the time or any need he might've thought he had to get on with some larger plan..."(is there a mother- or father- taking care of a small child out there who doesn't relate to that statement?). Belly laughs like," 'If the US was a person,' he later became fond of saying, 'and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio, would instantly be plunged into darkness.' "

All the same, you're in Pynchon-world. Characters are introduced, as it were, without introduction - I keep flipping back, thinking - do I know who this is?  Science is semi-magical. There are Austro-Hungarian arch dukes making hilarious attempts at the dozens - " ' Something about...your...wait... deine Mutti, as you would say, your... your mama, she plays third base for the Chicago White Stockings, nicht wahr?' as customers begin tentatively to move toward the egress, 'a quite unappealing woman, indeed she is so fat, that to get from her tits to her ass, one has to take the El! Tried once to get into the Exposition, they say, no, no, lady, this is the World's Fair, not the World's Ugly!' " And OK, just now typing this I got the quip about Fair vs. Ugly. The man is just too smart for me.

So. The Aeronaut boy-scout troop has gone off somewhere. Lew, the Kafkaesque character, has headed for Denver, Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek (!). And we're hangin' with a new guy, a Merle Rideout, the one who has to raise the baby and also becomes a photographer along the way (allowing Pynchon all sorts of light-related prose poetry.) Who at one point makes some ball lighting a playmate for his daughter Dally (said baby, all grown up). And who, on page 77, is in Colorado.

The plot is - maybe - coming together. Hang on tight.

blogging Pynchon, part 1

I read Gravity's Rainbow and V in my early twenties, trying to live an educated life in a Seattle making up its mind between punk and disco. I don't know why I picked V up - it wasn't for a class, and nobody I knew was reading it. But it immediately became clear that, although I did not understand most of it, it was great text. Like prose poetry - part of its charm lay in trying to discover what meaning, or, more likely, meanings, lay in its page. At the time I was discovering Coltrane too, and the two went together beautifully.

Gravity's Rainbow was harder. As I recall, it took at least 6 months to slog through, and I still don't quite get it. A friend once described Pynchon as being "like Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake." I disagree. Far from automatic writing, Pynchon's novels are methodically, thoroughly thought out in their craziness.

As his newest publication, Against the Day, proves.

Herewith the blog, then - The first few chapters concern a group of boys making their way across a late ninenteenth century America - in an airship. To make sure we suspend disbelief, Pynchon writes this section in a pulp-adventure-novel style. One would expect this to be a bit irritating, with all the quotes around words like "mess" (as in: the boys had a "mess" of catfish for dinner), but it's charming. The characters so far are cardboard, but it's shiny cardboard. Leafing forward in the book, this storyline clearly evolves to something else, something more serious and less, well, smarmy; but for now I'm willing to go along on the airship ride.

I first heard the book discussed on an NPR show. The broadcaster (I think it was Lia Hansen) asked the reviewer whether he expected someone to actually read it, or if it was a sort of attractive paperweight... he proudly shared that he was two thirds of the way through it.

It's an arctic day out there. Perfect to sit by the fire and see if I can beat him..

A Bright Shining Addiction

I admit it: I am helpless before a higher power AND I may owe an apology to my ex- husband (yikes!)

My formerly beloved amazed me with his capacity to sit at the keyboard, playing Tetris, King's Quest, and solitaire, as I made my way past him with full laundry baskets and indicated not-so-gently that there were things to be done in and out of the house, that were way more constructive than pointing and clicking. I would, of course, never become so besotted by a bunch of bright pixels on a computer screen, I thought in those days.

That view persisted, in my mind, until, casting about for some indoor activities while eight-year-old Jake vacationed at my house, I downloaded a demo version of Bejeweled. Naturally, I had to help him figure out how to play.... and so I was captured. By the end of break, I had acquired my own copy and was doing a fair imitation of my ex-husband – impervious to the phone's signal, the dishes piling in the sink, or even bedtime, as I single-mindedly tried to beat my last score. Pathetic.

Exacerbating the pathos is the simplicity of the game. This is no complex Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Game (I do too know what MMRPG means, kids!). You get an array of "jewels" - polygons in several bright colors and shapes – and your job is to make rows of three by exchanging the places of adjacent polygons. The game is more exciting in its timed version, as you try to beat the clock by acquiring more points and thus delaying the "timed out" signal. Still. How is something so simple, so addictive?

Because it is. Google "video game addiction," and you get thousands of hits, even undergraduate college papers, on the phenomenon. One psychiatrist wrote in 1998 about how she fell prey to solitaire as she was attempting, and failing, to learn another program on her computer. As her frustration grew, she reported, she turned the game on earlier and earlier in the evenings, neglecting both friends and work for the easier world of the game. Clearly not your father's psychiatrist, there. So I'm not the first relatively analytical, book-readin' non-American-idol-watchin’ individual to get caught up in this particular net.

Another article discusses the extent of computer game addiction in South Korea, where stressed-out execs stop by internet cafes on the way home to get their fill of macho superiority with a mouse, not a Sake. Was that the lure for me – a way to de-stress? I don't think so – frankly, my life now is way less agitating than it was in those laundry-basket carrying days of my marriage. I tell myself, and perhaps truthfully, that I am even learning a few skills on Bejeweled. Playing the timed game requires absolute attention, to a point I have never quite achieved in any other environment, except perhaps while playing music. You can't panic, either – if you start wildly flailing your mouse as your time runs out, you won't recover. Perhaps it's a form of meditation, allowing my brain to turn off everything else for an hour or so. Without all that tiresome Lotus-position sitting.

It's a bit like cruising on an internet dating site– in that environment, too, you don't lose anything real, but you do hazard a bit of pride every time you wink or send an email to someone. When single, I tend to hang out at the match site every night, shopping for men the way other women shop for shoes. Even when there are no signals going the other way, it can be fun, and a wink or an email can be wildly energizing – perhaps the same way as getting a high score on a game.

I'm not shopping for men just now – I have a boyfriend. Well, I have one when we're not too busy playing Bejeweled... Which reminds me… time to try to beat that 159,000 point score.