AtDTDA : 12 "My Native land is not a country" 326

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

            Robin:
            Again, consider the regional boundaries in this 
            passage of Tesla's:

            "My native land is not a country but an artifact of
            Habsburg foreign policy, known as 'the Military
            Frontier,' and to us as Granitza. The town was
            very small, above the Adriatic coast in the
            Velebit range, where certain places were better
            than others for . . . what would you call them?
            Visual experiences that might prove useful."

            Pynchon's notions concerning regional/national 
            boundaries are central to GR (the "Zone", after 
            all. is a temporary region of Anarchy), M & D and 
            AtD. And Trieste is an exemplar of that sort of 
            stateless floating world:

            Richard Fiero:
            Tesla's later years have been traditionally described as 
            unbalanced and obsessive and the result of emotional 
            appeasement for the early death of his brother.  I don't 
            think the author is in this case instructing us in geopolitics. 
            "Visual experiences"? That's Tesla. 

This is kind of funny. Where I'm pointing is towards Trieste, a spot on the map
that takes up a fair amount of space in Against the Day. I've got multi-colored 
post-it tabs throughout my now thoroughly trashed copy of the book---pages
159-340 fell out en masse during this third excursion---and the pink tabs are
for arrows and spoor that would tie Against the Day to The Crying of Lot 49. 
The longer I read the book, the more tabs go in (I'm using wood glue to get
the pages back into the so called spine of the novel---[suddenly switches to
Ben Stein's voice]: "Anybody? Anybody?"). All colors of these addictive little 
tabs are in play, including the hard to find orange and chartruse, but there's 
a new twist, little multi-colored metalflake stars [courtesy of a teacher's 
supply shop right by Trader Joe's] on top of some of these tabs, to make 
particular episodes JUMP RIGHT OUT AT YOU, like the "Great Beast/Lapdog" 
scene [bright yellow tab (yellow=joke), purple star on 666/heliotrope star on 
665---that's right, one tab can have multiple simultaneous directions of spin 
dependent on angle of refraction!!! Just like bi-location, but much cheaper!!!
---pink tab on 665 with heliotrope star on account of Ruberta Chirpington-
Groin's being on a "Magic Mountain" spa-circuit that includes plenty of home-
brewed/non-Thurn & Taxis stamps from the Hotels in the Swiss Alps [and 
heilotrope being kinda pink on pink. . . .

. . . .there's a tie between purple [spiritual/occult/psycotropics/any 
combination of the three] and green [anarchism/gilded age politics] but pink 
is gaining on the both of them, the spoor of Gengis Cohen seeping into the 
ductwork of this operation, slowing down our daily transmission of "The Slow 
and the Stuppefied" all up and down the ranges. In any case, Trieste is 
critically important in what is to follow---as are bogus stamps and world-wide 
occult conspiracies, garbled or possibly encrypted communications and 
revelations either delayed, deferred or misdirected.

And Pynchon's writings are meant to read on multiple levels, not just in the
the tallow and corn-oil light of Candlebrow U., but also from the light genera-
ted by the powers that dwell deep in the Earth's consciousness and located
somewhere among the 10 sephiroth as well. At a certain point in one's readings 
the question must come up: what are the man's talking points, what subjects 
are most likely to come up and how often do they come up? As far as I can tell, 
Pynchon doesn't spend much time on Tesla's personal problems, but he does 
burn up an extraordinary number of pages on Anarchy and issues concerning 
national boundries/identities in Against the Day. Tesla's notion of free power 
is very anarchist and plays in AtD pretty much as such. Tesla's family problems, 
as far as I can tell, are pretty much absent from AtD.

I think this passage from "Back to the Future: On Thomas Pynchon's 
Against the Day" by William Logan is relevant here:

            Pynchon seems to have boarded the bus with the 
            Merry Pranksters and never gotten off. He’s a 
            throwback, a hipster, a true dreamer, and a truer 
            cynic. All the bad methods of writing he confesses 
            to at the beginning of Slow Learner he’s using still, 
            and just as blithely when pushing seventy as when 
            he was wet-eared in college. Some of the flair is 
            gone, used up or burned off since he started writing 
            nearly half a century ago, like a chemical process 
            that on repetition grows less efficient and the 
            resulting solution less potent, until it does not work 
            at all. Yet he has matured in many ways, grown 
            rueful and ramshackle. This gives Against the Day 
            its bittersweet sadness for a fin de siècle world that 
            had only begun to adore science and invention, a 
            world that had not yet learned to distrust them. 
            Those states and bodies politic knew the horrors 
            of the Crimean and Civil Wars but not yet those of 
            the Great War. After that heroic disaster—fought, 
            so everyone was told, to end war—the common 
            man might have thought things were looking up. 
            Pynchon’s task has been to remind us that worse 
            was to come.

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/summer/logan-pynchon-against-the-day/

I really don't think I'm projecting my values into Pynchon's writings, I 
certainly don't find myself in sympathy with many aspects of OBA's
writing [his way with women, for one, where his tendency to turn 
characters into ciphers turns women---more often than not---into 
sex objects, which is kinda sixties too, if you think about it] , but there's 
just tonnes of 60's stuff in the author's work, and in many ways
the "60's stuff" is the central theme in Pynchon's scribblings. I wouldn't
say that about a lot of writers I read, admire, enjoy, but there's just no 
sense in pretending that Pynchon isn't an exemplar of 60's values. I
wouldn't call DeLillo a particularly "60's" writer (or Nick Tosches, or 
David Foster Wallace, or Salman Rushdie), I would say Tom Robbins 
and Richard Brautigan pretty much are/were "Hippie" writers, and there's 
more than a trace of that sensibility found in TRP's writings [though he also
has a tendancy to undercut the twee-ness that we find in those gentler 
souls]. Kurt Vonnegut's and Joseph Heller's points of view overlap [very 
often] with Pynchon's. And some of Our Beloved Author's more obvious 
influences [like William S. Burroughs or Jorge Luis Borges or Jack Kerouac 
or James Joyce] are avatars/icons of the "sixties sensibility" as well.  I just 
don't buy into the notion that postmodern concepts are dominant or ruling 
forces in Pynchon's writing. I think Pynchon's essentialy "60's" sensibility is.