Month: March 2012

Quote of the week candidates

Naptimewriting3 Comments

Week Two had several outstanding choices for quote of the week.

What’s your vote? One of these or something else?

“Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be trusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides the raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world….The true war is a celebration of markets.” (124-5)

“Pointsman’s season of despair was well upon him….this war, this State he’d come to feel himself a citizen of, was to be adjourned and reconstituted as a peace—and that, professionally speaking, he’d hardly got a thing out of it.” (88)

The first, a devastating view of the reality of conflicts that are politically manufactured and controlled by wealth, is intensely cruel on several levels. And feels very true. Nauseatingly true.

The second captures what seems, thus far, a central tension of the novel. War is a monumental Hell experienced by all involved, and yet each still has to live each day. Live, as in eat and clean and think and have sex and work. But it’s war, and so none of that really happens in a way that feels normal? How do we not collapse into deep existential depression? How do moments like Roger and Jessica’s “Fuck the war. They were in love.” happen? And do they accumulate sufficient moments of humanity to allow the net reality of war to still be life?

Finally, my personal favorite:

“Ask them at ‘The White Visitation’ about the master plan of BBC’s eloquent Mryon Grunton, whose melted-toffee voice  has been finding its way for years into the fraying rust boucle of the wireless speakers and into English dreams, foggy, old heads, children at the edges of attention…” (87).

Why? Because it feels luxuriously normal and beautiful in a sea of cold and deadly and fearful.

How about you?

I’m late I’m late I’m late

Naptimewriting9 Comments

Isn’t it nice to have a blogger who will *never* risk broaching the spoiler line because she’s at least a week behind?

Okay. Again I present you with random ramblings that don’t yet approach a theory or textual dissection of any sort. I’m just here with a reader’s really raw response (RRRR) for your late-week bemusement. By current progress I’ll finish the novel four months behind the rest of you.

Now, I’m not saying I need a parade in my honor or anything, but how about a muted nod to my early noting of Infantile Penis References (IPRs) before I even read the Kryptosam section in which invisible ink messages are only intelligible once covered in sperm.

This kind of goofball phallocentrism is what I meant when I casually stereotyped the typical male postmodern writers’ obsession with sex. And I don’t know why it so irritates me. This is not a feminist rant about objectification (excluding the galling fact that messages revealed only to those possessing sperm require a sperm-producing event by either self or other, the very demand of which means those in power need either a penis or access to a penis).  There is just something methodical about the inclusion of penis observations that seems gratuitous. I know we need to talk about Slothrop’s “peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky” (31) and how Pirate felt physically in the presence of Scorpia (42) and Pointsman’s grotesque lusting after pretty children (58) and Slothrop’s subconscious fear of anal rape (75) and Captain Blicero’s sadistic staging (111). They are all important to the story and not gratuitous by themselves. But they add up to enough sexual input that we don’t need IPRs, too. Yet Pynchon gives us a masturbatory kryptosam sequence in which the human penis is so darned grandiose it holds the key to the Allied victory over the Nazis. Sperm saves the world in this novel, folks. I just can’t argue that penis references get any more juvenile or that sexual obsession gets any more exalted.

But wait…a few pages later, they do and it does. In the pinnacle of all IPRs, Slothrop is the adult legacy of actual infantile penis experimentation (99). And, his every psychological underpinning is said to, perhaps, stem from his early erections (100).

The problem, of course, is I set out to overlook the IPRs and the Gravity’s Rainbow obsequious reverence for ejaculation. And in two weeks of reading I’ve found an awfully good argument for the possibility that IPRs are the central point, not the marginalia. That this book is centered rather superciliously around rockets and penises and ejaculations as the Pillars of Civilization. That erections are the well written, funny, poignantly terrified of death end-all-be-all human existence.

 [Eye roll; deep sigh; resignation to persevere through this as I did through Hemingway’s The Penis Also Penises, better known as The Sun Also Rises.]

Very few authors write compelling horrifying characters—villains who are so grotesque a readers should turn away, but who are also so human they elicit empathy. The captivating experience of reading Blicero is like taking an acting role as a sociopath. Pynchon’s writing allows us to see, at each turn, a human fear of mortality, a wounded childhood, a vulnerability that almost no other author I’ve read gives their beasts. Most successful evil characters are unredeemably disgusting, even when the author tries to reveal the wounds beneath their behavior and psychoses. Blicero seems an archetype I’ve never read before: the depraved monster  who is clearly human. He is what happens when a slightly icky person has his soul mutilated by war. He is humanity—warty and flawed—turned inside out into a raunchy and nasty mound oozing bile.

Freaks me out that I don’t hate him. I mean, I don’t like him. I’m not rooting for Blicero, let me be clear. I’d shove him in the Oven myself. But Pynchon has created a cruel, sadistic, pedophilic Nazi whose point of view I can appreciate. [shudder] And I’ve read those sections twice because I was so intrigued at being co-opted into seeing Blicero’s recognizable humanity.

So now I’m off to finish last week and read this week and do some other stuff. Let me know if you’re creeped out that I’m not exceedingly creeped out by Blicero. Or if you’re quite enjoying the IPRs. Or if you want to defend Hemingway, for some twisted reason (other than the Nick Adams stories).

WTF for Gravity’s Rainbow, Week 2

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

We had two WTFs this week. Read and take a crack at them in the comments if you have any ideas or suggestions.

From Carol:

Are there underlying themes or histories, other than technical texts, that would be helpful in making sense of this? Herero language, European colonialism, the entire war in Britain…it all seems so vast and yet so specific.  And I am saying this as a Joycean.  Somehow I thought that this novel’s being set 40 years later than Ulysses would make the context easier.  Not in the least, even with the companion text.  And I am finding it difficult to just enjoy the ride for the beauty of it.  But stay I will, if only to read again to see what hindsight might bring to the table!  Any thoughts most appreciated!

And from edmondcb:

So at the end of 1.17, Pointsman recalls that Slothrop had been with Darlene, and later a rocket struck only a few blocks away (striking St. Veronica’s hospital). I had assumed that the rockets struck the EXACT location of Slothrop’s sexual encounters, but I tracked back through the book and couldn’t decipher if this was true or if they simply struck in close proximity. Helping justify the latter is the fact that Slothrop has been to Darlene/Ms. Quoad’s before, even tracked her on his map (p. 19), and that exact location was clearly not destroyed. So my assumption was probably just off, though it seems weird that exactitude is such a prominent measure in this book, as with the fact that Slothrop and Mexico’s maps have stickers on the exact same squares, etc.

To muddy the waters even more, the EXACT location the rocket struck is the ward that Slothrop was recently in, being given drugs that caused him to think of shit and history, not of sex. And as far as I know, there was no “hardon” to speak of, which we have been lead to believe would bring a rocket to that exact location.

Am I reading too much into this, or is this supposed to be a shift in the paradigm? I mean, Slothrop did get booted to France…

Difficulty

Daryl L. L. Houston11 Comments

I keep my eye on tweets mentioning Gravity’s Rainbow and today saw one asking if GR was readable and worth it. The person also asked if his followers had read Infinite Jest, and which of the two books was better. Well, that judgment is awfully hard to make, but it sent me off to think about which was more difficult, since I tend to think Pynchon’s book is a lot harder to read than Wallace’s and so in some ways is less pleasurable and by extension not as good.

As evidence of GR‘s difficulty, I cite the fact that I read IJ for the first time in a 10-day marathon of 15-hour days over a Christmas holiday while in college. I pretty much couldn’t put the book down. As further evidence, I cite the probably half dozen times I read the first half dozen pages of GR before putting it aside. I believe I once read significantly more of the book but put it down again.

So, why was GR so much harder a book for me than IJ was? Part of it has to do, I suppose, with the fact that Pynchon writes about a lot of more or less factual things, and when confronted with so much real-world information that I didn’t know, or knew only very shallowly, I felt stupid and inadequate and didn’t want to feel that way anymore, so I quit. Wallace, on the other hand, writes less with history in mind and about experiences that aren’t so terribly different from my own. I never attended a tennis academy, but I have been a young man in locker rooms, and I’ve been to summer camps and eaten in cafeterias. I’ve never been addicted to drugs or spent time in a halfway house, but the experiences as Wallace presents them are very human experiences, whereas Pynchon so often writes at a greater distance from the people whose trials he’s documenting, and with a much greater emphasis (generally) on the technology and the argot of the fields and histories he writes about.

But there’s something else, too. (Well, there’s lots else, but one something else I’ll write about for now.) For all the guff Wallace took about writing a too-long book, being self-indulgent with the end notes,  needing an editor, etc., it occurred to me tonight that IJ is actually very user friendly in a way that certain important books we’ve read here (or may yet read here) are not.

It all starts with Ulysses, of course. Joyce gave us pretty much unfettered access to the inside of Leopold Bloom’s head and wrote often without much in the way of transition or explicit stage direction. It’s really hard to get oriented within the book, and by the time you settle in to the style of one episode, Joyce goes off and changes the game on you by writing in another mode altogether. In 1973 and 1975 we got Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’s JR. Gaddis too puts you inside the heads of his characters with precious little in the way of landmarks to help you navigate the prose. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue, JR requires that you learn how to read it before you can really begin to understand what it’s even saying. It’s fun, but capital-D Difficult. Pynchon’s not as freewheeling as Gaddis, since Pynchon at least breaks his book down into sections and provides exposition. But he also makes those crazy leaps. Miss a “. . . .” in the text as he jumps from one time or place to another and you’ll find yourself suddenly lost. Wait, when the fuck did I start reading about dodo birds? I thought this was a story about Hansel and Gretel.

Infinite Jest covers a lot of people over a period of time that’s kind of hard to pin down as you’re reading. Like Pynchon, Wallace provides landmarks in the form of clear section breaks. But unlike Pynchon, he tends to stay within the boundaries of a defined section. If he’s writing about Mario, you don’t suddenly find an unmarked leap over to Marathe and Steeply at another time and place within the same section. Further, Wallace conveniently puts a lot of the extra, technical, information in end notes. He’s been accused, on the basis of the 100 pages of notes, of being antagonistic to the reader, but it occurs to me that maybe putting the tangential information in end notes is his attempt at something like mercy. Where his forebears just dump the info on you inline, Wallace gives you a little break, slows down the information intake just a touch.

It’s as if Joyce came to the conclusion that he could lay on his readers everything in a character’s head and the postmodernists extended that idea, trying to give their readers not just the contents of their characters’ heads but everything under the sun and doing so in a way that sort of mimicked the awful burden of information-influx after the rise of radio and television and billboards. Wallace, then, says “too much,” or, if not “too much,” something like “slow down; let’s take this in pieces.”

And for me, I think that’s part of what makes Infinite Jest a much easier book than Gravity’s Rainbow. For all the information Wallace’s book contains, its information flow is more modulated than these earlier books, and it’s a relief. One reads that Wallace was also a proponent of a new sincerity, that he rejected the postmodern tendency toward irony as ultimately a non-productive (if not outright toxic) mode to write in. It’s interesting to me to suggest, then, that he sought to throttle information overload as he hoped to throttle irony, that he was pulling back from his smirking, hyper-intelligent forebears in a couple of ways, an après-garde all his own.

Slothrop and Orin

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

This isn’t likely to make too much sense if you haven’t read Infinite Jest, and it may also contain mild IJ spoilers. I offer it more as a set of idle observations than as any sort of thesis.

In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, we meet womanizer Orin Incandenza, about whom I wrote the following a few years ago:

A bit more on Orin. His name can be switched around to “iron,” “noir,” and “orni,” which, this last, makes me think of ornithology. He plays football for the Cardinals and is actually made to don fake wings (I think) and like a jetpack and fly down onto the field earlier in the book. Then a bird falls out of the sky into his apartment’s pool (oddly reminiscent of the end of Barton Fink, starring John Turturro, whom I peg as a shoo-in for playing JOI and/or JOI’s father in a movie adaptation of Infinite Jest). Then, on page 294, we have Orin engaging Joelle “entirely through stylized repetitive motions,” making me think of the mating dances of birds.

Orin has a habit of tracing the infinity sign with his finger on the flanks of the girls he has bedded. Like Orin, Slothrop traces a mathematical sign as he sows his oats, though in his case, it’s a Poisson distribution scrawled over a map of London.

And like Orin, Slothrop is frequently associated with birds, especially in the pastoral section 1.4, in which he appears in the company of an owl, girls called Wrens, peacocks, and hummingbirds and in which he sports an erection (his “cock,” if we want to stretch the bird motif a bit) as a rocket explodes. This section also happens to deal pretty heavily in the contrast between the earth and the sky, a dichotomy the sky-bound but (if I recall correctly) acrophobic Orin also contemplates.

Both men sport a very special appendage, and both are subject to paranoia. As Orin begins to fear that he’s being followed and ultimately has his fears confirmed and culminating in his being taken prisoner, so Slothrop begins to feel as if he’s being watched, and as if his cubicle is a trap (early in 1.15). Also probably not significant but certainly attention-getting for me was the reference early in 1.15 to “Enfields” — a name whose singular form will resonate with readers of Wallace’s novel.

Unlike Orin, Slothrop at least writes nice letters home to his mother.

[insert “Angel” song title here]

Paul Debraski7 Comments

I didn’t really feel like this was a WTF question, so I wanted to raise a discussion about this, without providing much in the way of analysis.

In this week’s reading there’s a twice mentioned and once explicated sequence in which Basher St. Blaise and his wingman see an Angel.  Basher doesn’t ever say anything about it, but Cherrycoke learns details by examining artifacts that were on basher’s person at the time.

I’m not going to focus on the Cherrycoke part (which is cool in and of itself) but on the Angel part.  There are several other mentions of the word Angel in this week’s reading alone.  They cover a wide range of ideas as well, and I’m curious if there is any connection, implied or direct between what Basher saw and any of the other uses of the word angel.

Here’s Basher’s scene (a big block quote for context):

Basher St. Blaise’s angel, miles beyond designating, rising over
Lübeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes underneath its feet, an obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down a thousand peaked roofs as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white
abyss. . . . For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:

St. Blaise: Freakshow Two, did you see that, over.

Wingman: This is Freakshow Two—affirmative.

St. Blaise: Good.

No one else on the mission seemed to’ve had radio communication. After the raid, St. Blaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies rippleless as could be expected—but others remembered how, for the few
moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished from the earphones. Some may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or dish antennas of winter fleets down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher and his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at heaven… (151).

So the key here is that St. Blaise saw an angel.  Here are the other instances of the word Angel (just in this week’s reading).  Most of them come before the above quote and I can’t help but wonder if they are meant to make us question what Basher saw.

The first comes with Osbie Feel and his mushroom (and while I don’t make any connection on this one, it is interesting that he chose this particular species, which is really called Destroying Angel):

Now and then the geometry of her restlessness brings her to glance in a doorway at his boyish fussing with the Amanita muscaria (for it is this peculiar relative of the poisonous Destroying Angel that claims Osbie’s attention, or what passes with him for attention) (93).

The second, and more prominent one is with Pirate and Katje.  It would be crazy of Basher was talking about a windmill instead of a real Angel, but again, it’s an interesting name choice (and also makes me think of Don Quixote):

an enormous sky all sea-clouds in full march, all and plum, behind her, detects danger in her loneliness, realizes he’s never heard her name, not till the meeting by the windmill known as ‘The Angel'” (106).

The third is about starlings (I think).  It starts bout birds, at any rate.  And I couldn’t help wondering if there is meant to be some kind of connection between the birds and what Basher saw.  But this novel is so much about the “Psi” that perhaps these birds are a red herring to the skeptical.

the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them ‘angels” (112).

The fourth also references birds, but then it switches to a more Spiritual sense of angels:

Up across the downs, past the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they dropped exhausted out of the sky, a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers sit in the un-heated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out in the court of the King.(134)

The fifth references bombs, but I think is about much more than that:

Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight.  Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen (135).

And the sixth and final is from Pointsman’s point of view about Slothrop

But now with Slothrop in it—sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise, whatever he is … will it change now? (143).

So there you have it seven different uses of the word angel, creating several different possibilities of what Basher saw.  Or, perhaps Basher’s vision just adds to the whole picture of a book about death, ghosts, angels and the afterlife.

And the WTFs Come Rolling In!

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

A couple of WTFs have come in today, which was nice, as I wasn’t sure the whole WTF thing would be of interest to anybody. I think what I’d like to try doing with these is maybe a weekly roundup in which I post or summarize the WTFs, provide any answers I may have, and of course let the conversation take its course in the comments. I’ll figure tentatively on posting these on Thursdays. This gives people time to wrap up the week’s reading if they’re a little behind, to digest any posts that come early in the week, and then to track any discussion through the end of the week. So, if you’ve got any WTFs, send ’em in and look for a roundup this Thursday.

Temptation

Daryl L. L. Houston16 Comments

I may be dim, but both times I’ve read this far into Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve been puzzled by the scene in which, chasing tail after his discharge from the abreaction ward, Slothrop lands himself in an old lady’s flat eating nasty candy. It’s a funny enough scene, but it always seemed sort of out of place amid the pretty serious stuff surrounding it.

It took a return to exercise after a lapse and the subsequent temptation of a box of Girl Scout cookies to open my eyes to what’s going on here. There it lay on the dresser, not even my favorite kind (Samoas win that title), but open, by gar, and all but leaping into my mouth as I dismounted the exercise machine and wiped away my sweat. Heart still pounding from exertion, I casually inspected the nutritional information printed on the box of cookies. Seven grams of fat and 170 calories in a serving; one cookie would cost me 2.3 grams of fat and 57 calories. As I did a little cost-benefit analysis, the connection struck me.

Blicero and Katje and Gottfried enact over and over again a fetishized game of Hansel and Gretel, and just a few pages later, Slothrop finds himself invited into an old crone’s house to feast on candy. Slothrop’s little confectionary adventure is a light-hearted callback to and dramatization of the folktale that Blicero appropriates. And the lesson in that folktale (bad parenting exemplum aside) and in Pynchon’s dual retelling of it has to do with temptation and its payoffs.

Blicero succumbs to the temptation of bedding a woman he suspects may be working for the British. Although he knows he’ll finally be given a push from behind into some oven or another, he’s certain it won’t come in the form of an air raid thanks to betrayal by Katje. But then she does leave, and he prepares for the worst, paying for his temptation in two, somewhat paradoxical, ways — he is, first, convinced that he was wrong to trust Katje after all and, second, denied the consummation of the betrayal he fears. Accustomed to controlling his playthings, he is now stripped altogether of control, and even of the illusion of making of his fate a sort of gift (a form of control in its own right, if what one reads about the rules in a sadomasochistic partnership is accurate — ie, that control of a situation is always just a single safe word away for the person being subjugated).

Slothrop’s temptation too comes at a cost, for we learn in 1.17 that the abreaction ward from which he has just been discharged has been bombed, and with it poor Spectro, who back in 1.8 shared a tense moment with Pointsman in which he tried to steer the behaviorist away from the temptation to try to experiment on Slothrop. Dipping his wick after entering that candy-strewn apartment costs lives, including that of a rare ally. (Of course, it’s not at all clear whether coitus is the cause or the effect here; still, I think the point is worth considering.)

Pointsman too confronts a great temptation. He’s tired of collecting the spit of dogs and isn’t terribly interested in studying the octopus Grigori, no matter how big and smart he is. He wants a man to poke and prod, and he wants in particular the man whose secret all the scientists paranormal and otherwise also covet. As 1.17 closes, we find Pointsman constructing rationalizations for designing an experiment around Slothrop, suffering be damned (“the man will suffer — perhaps, in some clinical way, be destroyed”), and he has his eye on the Nobel. It’s not just the shiny trophy he has his eye on, though; there’s something Faustian about Pointsman, and the connection Pynchon makes between his quest for knowledge and Theseus’s triumph in the labyrinth seems telling, for like Theseus, in order to win, Pointsman must destroy the creature that lies at the center of the labyrinth once he’s wended his way through it. Pointsman’s fall to temptation comes at the ultimate cost, in other words, of what scrap of humanity he may have left.

(It also occurs to me that like Theseus with his yarn, Hansel and Gretel leave breadcrumbs behind to help find their way out of their peril.)

Candy. Quim. Fame. Knowledge. Girl Scout cookies seem pretty insignificant as I ladder up that list, but it’s still hard not to feel a little satisfaction at having resisted.