Bad Ear—was Re: Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)

[Robin Landseadel]

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	". . . I was operating on the motto "Make it literary," a piece of
	bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.

	Equally embarrassing is the case of Bad Ear to be found
	marring much of the dialogue . . ."

> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Fri, August 27, 2010 8:36:45 PM
> Subject: Re: Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)
>
> if you want great dialogue you've come to the wrong movie. Pynchon
> doesn't excell at dialogue; that's just one of the reasond why certain
> readers and critics complain about his characters and his use of
> characterization; his characters don't look, talk, act, feel/think
> like real people. So, if your looking for such charaters, read _A Fine
> Balance_ by Mistry not _Midnight Children_ by Rushdie or _Moby-Dick_
> by Melville or any novel by Pynchon. Pynchon's characters talk like
> college professors, cartoons, mouthpieces, circus performers, Tube
> addicted parodies of TV cops on speed and paranoia...etc., but not
> like real people. Can P do a Pulp Fiction ironic depth with crazy song
> and a car chase? Sure. Can he write like Mistry, like Stienbeck, like
> Jane Austen? Hell no. Robin, you don't want me to get all pedantic on
> your ass, but you don't know shit about literature. Your wasting your
> time. maybe you should sut up.

I'm sutting as fast as I can.

	Another influence in "Under the Rose," too recent for me then to
	abuse to the extent I have done since, is Surrealism. I had been
	taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art, and it was
	the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention. Having as yet
	virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of
	the movement, and became fascinated instead with the simple
	idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements
	not normally found together to produce illogical and startling
	effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of
	managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill:
	any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr.,
	whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible
	effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, "One of the
	things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is,
	when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-
	sharp gunshot or it sounds awful."

You could hardly find a finer example of a really bad ear than this— 
this is downright embarrassing:

	"Capo di minghe!" The Gaucho sat back, shaking his head.

	With an obvious effort at controlling his temper, he addressed
	Signor Mantissa. "I'm not a small man," he explained patiently.
	"In fact I am rather a large man. And broad. I am built like a lion.
	Perhaps it's a racial trait. I come from the north, and there may
	be some tedesco blood in these veins. The tedeschi are taller
	than the Latin races. Taller and broader. Perhaps someday this
	body will run to fat, but now it is all muscle. So. I am big, non e
	vero? Good. Then let me inform you" his voice rising in violent
	crescendo- "that there would be room enough under your
	damnable Botticelli for me and the fattest whore in Florence,
	with plenty left over for her elephant of a mother to act as
	chaperone! How in God's name do you intend to walk 300
	meters with that? Will it be hidden in your pocket?"

	"Calm, commendatore," Signor Mantissa pleaded. "Anyone
	might be listening. It is a detail, I assure you. Provided for. The
	florist Cesare visited last night-"

	"Florist. Florist: you've let a florist into your confidence.
	Wouldn't it make you happier to publish your intentions in the
	evening newspapers?"

	"But he is safe. He is only providing the tree." "The tree."

	"The Judas tree. Small: some four meters, no taller. Cesare has
	been at work all morning, hollowing out the trunk. So we shall
	have to execute our plans soon, before the purple flowers die. "

	"Forgive what may be my appalling stupidity," the Gaucho said,
	"but as I understand it, you intend to roll up the Birth of Venus,
	hide it in the hollow trunk of a Judas tree, and carry it some 300
	meters, past an army of guards who will soon be aware of its
	theft, and out into Piazza della Signoria, where presumably you
	will then lose yourself in the crowds?"

	"Precisely. Early evening would be the best time-" "A rivederci."

	"V."—171

On Aug 28, 2010, at 4:47 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Even the reader/critics who exist via the template of James Wood's  
> deep
> but not broad lens of literature, loved Mason & Dixon for the  
> characters,
> reflected
> in their dialogue mostly...............

Call this a cartoon if it makes you feel better—Jay Ward's Wayback  
machine naturally comes to mind—but it's a first-rate cartoon:

	"My Thought precisely."

	"Now, Gents!" 'Tis a sudden, large Son of Neptune, backed by
	an uncertain number of comparably drunken Shipmates.
	"You've an interest in this Dog here?"

	"Wish'd a word with him only," Mason's quick to assure them.

	"Hey! I know you two,— ye're the ones with all the strange
	Machinery, sailing in the Seahorse. Well,- ye're in luck, for we're
	all Seahorses here, I'm Fender-Belly Bodine, Captain of the
	Foretop, and these are my Mates,— " Cheering. "— But you can
	call me Fender. Now,— our plan, is to snatch this Critter, and for
	you Gents to then keep it in with your own highly guarded
	Cargo, out of sight of the Master-at-Arms, until we reach a likely
	Island,—"

	"Island ... " "Snatch ... " both Surveyors a bit in a daze.

	"I've been out more than once to the Indies,- there's a million
	islands out there, each more likely than the last, and I tell you a
	handful of Sailors with their wits about them, and that talking
	Dog to keep the Savages amused, why, we could be kings."

	"Long life to Kings!" cry several sailors. "Aye and to Cooch
	Girls!"

	"— and Coconut-Ale!"

	"Hold," cautions Mason. "I've heard they eat dogs out there."

	"Wrap 'em in palm leaves," Dixon solemnly, "and bake 'em on
	the beach ... ?"

	"First time you turn your back," Mason warns, "that Dog's going
	to be some Savage's Luncheon."

	"Rrrrrraahff! Excuse me?" says the Learned D., "as I seem to be
	the Topick here, I do feel impelled, to make an Observation?"

	"That's all right, then, Fido," Bodine making vague petting
	motions,

	"- trust us, there's a good bow-wow .... "

	Mason & Dixon—21

> He did get better----again, imho, when it was what the fictional
> vision required---at character via dialogue
> later in his career......

This sequence, from Inherent Vice, mimics/distorts a lot of ideas  
found in the vicinity of the L.A. Noir. At the same time, there is a  
very clear differentiation of voice and word selection, a vivid  
difference between Bigfoot and Doc. What the vocal difference reminds  
me of most of all is that of Walter Sobchak and the Dude. Of course,  
Inherent Vice is not only a tribute/parody to Chandler's L.A., it's  
also part of an ongoing formula of Noir Parodies, the Big Lebowski  
being one of the better & better known examples. Sobchak has developed  
elements of his "Act" from movies like "Rambo".  Bigfoot,has more  
explicit ties to Hollywood.

	"Hope you don't mind if we go take a Code 7 someplace?"
	Bigfoot reaching under the table and dragging out a Ralph's
	shopping bag with what looked like several kilos of paperwork
	in it, getting up, and heading out the door, motioning Doc to
	follow. They went downstairs and out to a Japanese greasy
	spoon around the corner where the Swedish pancakes with
	lingonberries couldn't be beat, and which arrived in fact no
	more than a minute and a half after Bigfoot had put his head in
	the door.

	"Ethnic as always, Bigfoot."

	''I'd share these with you, but then you'd be addicted and it 	
	would be something else on my conscience." Bigfoot started in
	scarfing.

	Those pancakes sure looked good. Maybe Doc could spoil
	Bigfoot's appetite or something. He found himself purring
	maliciously. ''Aren't you ever bitter that you missed being up
	there on Cielo Drive? Stompin around that famous crime scene
	with the rest of the high-living heat, wipin out them fingerprints,
	leavin your own, so forth?"

	Having grabbed a second fork from Doc's setup and eating now
	with both hands, "Minor concerns, Sportello, that's only ego and
	regret. Everybody's got that-well, everybody who works for a
	living. But do you want to know the truth?"

	"Uhnnh ... no?"

	"Here it is anyway. The truth is ... right now everybody's really,
	fucking, scared."

	"Who-you people? All 'em burrito hounds up in Homicide? 	
	Scared of what? Charlie Manson?"

	"Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer
	and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of
	old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don't remember and the
	Watts rioting you do-it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool,
	till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some
	playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them
	in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim
	around looking for what's bleeding, but they don't find anything,
	all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness
	reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each
	other."

	Doc considered this for a bit. "What's in 'em lingonberries,
	Bigfoot?" "It's like," Bigfoot had continued, "there's this evil
	subgod who rules over Southern California? who off and on will
	wake from his slumber and allow the dark forces that are
	always lying there just out of the sunlight to come forth?"

	"Wow, and ... and you've ... seen him? This 'evil subgod,' maybe
	he ... he talks to you?"

	"Yes and he looks just like a hippie pothead freak! Something,
	huh?" Wondering what this was about, Doc, trying to be helpful,
	said, "Well, what I've been noticing since Charlie Manson got
	popped is a lot less eye contact from the straight world. You
	folks all used to be like a crowd at the zoo—'Oh, look, the male
	one is carrying the baby and the female one is paying for the
	groceries,' sorta thing, but now it's like, 'Pretend they're not even
	there, 'cause maybe they'll mass murder our ass. "

	"It's all turned to sick fascination," opined Bigfoot, "and
	meantime the whole field of homicide's being stood on its ear-
	bye-bye Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, yes we've seen
	the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I'm afraid.
	We've found the gateway to hell, and it's asking far too much of
	your L.A. civilian not to want to go crowding on through it, horny
	and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of
	overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it-brings us all that
	much closer to the end of the world."

	Bigfoot ran a deep scan of the place from the toilets in back out
	to the desert light of the street and lifted the Ralph's bag onto
	the table. "This Coy Harlingen matter. I didn't want to discuss it
	up in the office." He began to bring out ungainly wads of papers
	of different sizes, colors, and states of deterioration. "I pulled the
	tub on this expecting what we technically call zip shit. Imagine
	my surprise at finding how many of my colleagues, at how many
	far-flung outposts of law enforcement, not to mention levels of
	power, have had their lunchhooks all over it. Coy Harlingen not
	only used multiple aka's, he also had a number of offices
	running him, typically at the same time. Among which-I hope I
	don't shock or offend-have been unavoidably those elements
	who wouldn't mind if Coy really did end up under a granite slab
	with his final alias carved thereon."

	"Coy's overdose, or whatever it was-there must be a lot of
	monthly IPRs on that by now. Any chance of having a look?"

	"Except that Brother Noguchi's shop could never quite bring
	themselves to call it a homicide, so nobody was ever required
	to file any progress reports, intra-, extra-, non-, whatever. On the
	face of it, just one more OD, one less junkie, case cleared."

	Once Doc would have said, "Well, that's that, can I go now?" But
	with this new fascist model Bigfoot, the one he'd recently found
	out maybe he couldn't trust after all, the old style of needling
	somehow wasn't as much fun anymore. "You mean it would be
	a routine case, except for all this paperwork," is what he said,
	carefully, "which even just eyeballing it does seem a little out of
	proportion. Like the one pink li'l DOA slip would've been
	enough."

	''Ah, you noticed. It's certainly the kind of documentary attention
	dead folks don't see too much of. You would almost think Coy
	Harlingen was really alive someplace and kicking. Wouldn't
	you. Resurrected."

	"So what have you found out?"

	"Technically, Sportello, I am not even aware this case exists.
	Cool with you? Groovy? Why do you think we're down here and
	not upstairs?"

	"Some Internal Affairs soap opera, I figure, which you're
	deperate to keep me away from. Now what could that be?"

	"Fair enough. What I want to keep you away from is vast,
	Sportello, vast. On the other hand, if there is something trivial I
	can let you in on from time to time, why get too paranoid about
	it?" He rooted around in the Ralph's bag and found a long
	speckled box nearly full of three-by-five index cards. "Why, what
	have we here? Oh, but you know what these are."

	"Field Interrogation Reports. Souvenirs of everybody you guys
	ever stopped and hassled. And this sure looks like a lot of them
	for one junkie saxophone player."

	"Why don't you just flip through these quickly, see if there's
	anything that looks familiar."

	"Evelyn Wood, don't fail me now." Doc began to run through the
	cards, trying to keep alert for one of Bigfoot's rude surprises. He
	had met a few close-up magicians and knew about the practice
	of "forcing" a card on a spectator. He saw no reason for Bigfoot
	to be above this kind of trickery.

	And what do you know. What was this? Doc had nearly half a
	second to decide if the card he'd caught sight of was worth
	keeping from Bigfoot, and then he remembered that Bigfoot
	already knew which one it was. "Here," he said pointing. "I know
	I've seen that name someplace."

	"Puck Beaverton," Bigfoot nodded, taking it out of the box.
	"Excellent choice. One of Mickey Wolfmann's jailbird
	praetorians. Let's see now." He pretended to read off the card.
	"Sheriff's people happen to run into liim at the Venice home of
	the very dealer who sold Coy Harlingen the smack that killed
	him. Or didn't kill him, as the case may be." He pushed the FIR
	card across the Formica, and Doc scanned it doubtfully.
	"Subject, unemployed, claims to be a friend of Leonard Jermain
	Loosemeat, aka EI Drano. 'I just came over to playa couple
	games of pool.' Subject seemed unusually nervous in
	Beaverton's company. That's it? What was Puck doing at Coy's
	dealer's place? Do you think."

	Bigfoot shrugged. "Maybe there to buy?" ''Any record of him
	using?"

	"Somebody'd have to look." Which must have sounded jive-ass
	even to Bigfoot, because he added, "Puck's file could be in
	storage by now, far, far away, someplace like Fontana or
	beyond. Unless ... " A hustler's pause, as if a thought had just
	struck him.

	"Let's hear it, Bigfoot."

	IV—208-211

Something to ask: is there any sequence in "V." that has this much  
dialog, that uses this much dialog to convey this much plot?

> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 4:51 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> Realism (which includes any resemblance to "real" dialogue) never has
>> been (ever) Pynchon's strength.  His strength has always been ideas,
>> concepts, constructs.

Are you just reading someone else's critique or did you come up with  
this on your own?

In later Pynchon, the weird interconnected concepts—"The Author Is Up  
To His Usual Tricks"— integrate themselves into the dialog. At the  
same time they become part of the speaker's personality—whatever tics  
these characters might have brought to the story become part of their  
speech patterns.

In earlier Pynchon, characters seem to have no personality at all.

	She hadn't moved from the car.
	"Benny," one fingernail touched his face.
	"Wha."
	"Will you be my friend?"
	"You look like you have enough."
	She looked down the quarry. "Why don't we make believe none
	of the other is real," she said: "no Bennington, no
	Schlozhauer's, and no Five Towns. Only this quarry: the dead
	rocks that were here before us and will be after us."
	"Why."
	"Isn't that the world?"
	''They teach you that in freshman geology or something?"
	She looked hurt. "It's just something I know.
	"Benny," she cried-a little cry-"be my friend, is all."
	He shrugged.
	"Write."
	''Now don't expect—"
	"How the road is. Your boy's road that I'll never see, with its
	Diesels and dust, roadhouses, crossroads saloons. That's all.
	What it's like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton. Places I
	won't know."
	He scratched his stomach. "Sure."

	"V."—20

This is later Pynchon. This may be a cartoon, but it is a well-drawn  
cartoon, there's loads of varieties of inflection here::

	"What here are you looking at, you wish to steal eine ...
	Wassermelone perhaps?"

	"OOOOO," went several folks in earshot. The insultee, a large
	and dangerous looking individual, could not believe he was
	hearing this. His mouth began to open slowly as the Austrian
	prince continued-

	"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 egresses, "; quite unappealing woman, indeed
	she is so fat, that to get from her tits tc her ass, one has to take
	the 'El'! Tried once to get into the Exposition, the' say, no, no,
	lady, this is the World's Fair, not the World's Ugly!"

	"Whatchyou doin, you fool, you can get y'ass killed talking like
	that, wha are you, from England or some shit?"

	"Urn, Your Royal Highness?" Lew murmured, "if we could just
	have; word-"

	"It is all right! I know how to talk to these people! I have studied
	their culture! Listen- 'st los, Hund? Boogie-boogie, ja?"

	Against the Day, 48

>> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Robin Landseadel
>> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Take all the exception you like, there's things I really love in  
>>> Pynchon's
>>> writing that don't really start flourishing until Vineland, dialog  
>>> in
>>> particular.
>>>
>>> "Self-criticism's an amazing technique, it shouldn't work but it  
>>> does."

	". . . education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on
	forever. "