Telegraph Avenue (was RE: Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco)

[Monte Davis]

One more sample of Chabon, no less his own writer for being as Pynch-y as
can be this time around.

Nat Jaffe, the other owner of the Oakland record store, is drunk-driving at
night on I-880, seeking the _Minnie Riperton_, party/promotional airship of
his nemesis G-Bad Goode:
_________________

He traced and retraced the barren cipher written in the darkness by airport
roads whose names 
commemorated heroes of aviation. The silence in the Saab was replaced by
humming as Nat's original 
curiosity about the zeppelin, half larkish, half irritated, mounted in the
darkness, until it 
became a full-blown longing and, as with Ahab's fish, the airship came to
bear the blame, in Nat's 
imagination, for all the ways in which the world was broken. And then, right
around the time Nat  
began to understand that he was drunk and lost and would never find the
motherfucker, and 
furthermore had probably already attracted the notice of Homeland Security's
flying robot thermal 
cameras -- around the time he realized that for some reason he was humming
the chord changes to 
"Loving You" -- it startled him: a zeppelin-shaped hole cut into the orangey
skyline of San 
Francisco.

What happened then: He must have swerved. Someone threw a big luminous net
at the car. After that
- all within the span of the three or four seconds it took him to crash
through the chain-link 
fence - came a lot of really interesting sounds. A ringing of bells. A
raking of tines. A boing, 
a thump, a scrape, a crunch. Finally, a gunshot bang, as the same clown who
had thrown the giant 
steel net at the car decided it would be funny to give Nat a face full of
airbag.

After that there was a gap in the archive. The next things Nat remembered
were a taste of salt in 
his nostrils, the blacktop sending the day's heat up through the soles of
his socks, the dwindling 
hiss of the Saab's radiator, and the consciousness - alas, not yet sober -
of having benefited 
from a miracle. He was fine, whole. And the God of Ahab at last had
delivered him from his lonely 
quest. He stood a hundred feet from his beast in its nighttime pasture. He
was not sure what had 
happened to his shoes.

As he started across the sweep of pavement toward the zeppelin, he tripped
some kind of sensor. 
Stanchions studded with floods lit up all around the airship, snapping it on
like a neon sign. Nat 
fell back into shadow and waited to see what happened. Expecting to find
himself confronted by a 
Bronco full of security guards, an android sentry equipped with lasers, a
lonely old night 
watchman named Pete or Whitey who would leap up from his chair, already
halfway to cardiac
arrest, as the latest _Field & Stream_ tumbled from his lap...
----------------

Even setting aside shared themes, stylistic echoes, and TRPreoccupations
(King Kong, Moby-Dick, big black dick-waving cylinders: compare & contrast),
I think most readers who enjoy TRP will enjoy the boing and thump and scrape
of _Telegraph Avenue_.

Monte

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Bekah
Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2013 8:50 PM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: 'Ian Livingston'; pynchon-l at waste.org; Michael Bailey
Subject: Re: Telegraph Avenue (was RE: Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco)

I need to read this!  This has been on my mind anyway.    I have old
connections to Telly and Shattuck and what used to be known as "Red Square"
(a dress shop - heh).   I also have moderate connections to Chabon's oeuvre
(some great, some so-so).   Must find time somewhere - somewhere -  

Bekah
On Mar 3, 2013, at 9:34 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> How is Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue (which I'm finishing now) being
received in its Oakland/Bay Area setting? Beyond the "Pynchonesque" and
"Nefastis Building" that Michael Bailey noted last fall, there are many
debts being paid and hommages offered, e.g.:
>  
> Former NFL star and Branson-like entrepreneur Gibson  "G Bad" Goode is 
> planning a huge new media store in Oakland, which threatens the fading 
> used-record shop co-owned by Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe. Goode 
> stakes Stallings for a ride in his airship, the _Minnie Riperton_ 
> ("She is black. She is beautiful. And she goes really high")
>  
> "Archy [was] unable to shake a feeling not just that he was stepping out
on Nat Jaffe, up here dining on shrimp and flattery and all kinds of piquant
sauces, but that he was in over his head, that he was going to be edged into
doing something or agreeing to something that he did not want to do or agree
to, into something at least that he did not understand, some kind of
business being transacted by Goode. memories of watching him on television
as he conducted instantaneous Einstein-deep analyses in the pocket under a
heavy rush (not to mention the simple fact that he was visiting the man in
the cabin of his personal zeppelin that flew on the gas of burning
dollars)."
>  
> Gasbags aside, anyone else hear the stylistic/paranoiac echoes here?
>  
> Chabon lives in Berkeley. As an East Coaster with only visiting
experience, I can't address the book's accuracy/authenticity with respect to
the real place. but as an American reader with multiple Californias of the
mind overlapping since the 1960s, I think he engages how we've "run out of
continent" there almost as well as Vineland did, and better than Inherent
Vice did.   
>  
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On 
> Behalf Of Ian Livingston
> Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2013 9:55 AM
> To: Bled Welder
> Cc: rich; "pynchon-l at waste.org"
> Subject: Re: Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco
>  
> Oakland does, indeed have abundant character and culture. It has been the
Bay Area slum for decades, where the arts and ideas fester like lilies on
the shore, are borne over the bay by rumor to be claimed by the elder
sister, while the younger, more impetuous one languishes in skankified
infamy. I like Oakland.
> 
> On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 3:16 AM, Bled Welder <bledwelder at gmail.com> wrote:
> But you're....Oakland.  What is that water that lays between. the 
> peninsula and Oakland?  Isn't there a large bridge?  Been over it many 
> times myself.
> 
> Not as in, walking, by byself.  Driving.  I think occasionally one has 
> the misfortune of landing somewhere called Oakland....
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 8:32 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary
> >
> > good piece on the effects of Google and its ilk on the culture of 
> > San Francisco. interesting contrast with Gold Rush in the 19th 
> > century and the mining rush in Wyoming, North Dakota and other 
> > places today. lots of Pynchonian echoes
> >
> > Rich
> >
> > 'All this is changing the character of what was once a great city of 
> > refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists. Like 
> > so many cities that flourished in the post-industrial era, it has 
> > become increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but 
> > still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, 
> > eccentrics and others who don't work sixty-hour weeks for 
> > corporations- though we may be a relic population. Boomtowns also 
> > drive out people who perform essential services for relatively 
> > modest salaries, the teachers, firefighters, mechanics and 
> > carpenters, along with people who might have time for civic 
> > engagement. I look in wonder at the store clerks and dishwashers, 
> > wondering how they hang on or how long their commute is. Sometimes 
> > the tech workers on their buses seem like bees who belong to a great 
> > hive, but the hive isn't civil society or a city; it's a corporation.'
> >
> > Last summer, I went to look at a house for sale whose listing hadn't 
> > mentioned that the house was inhabited. I looked in dismay at the 
> > pretty old house where a family's possessions had settled like silt 
> > over the decades: drum set, Bibles, faded framed portraits, 
> > furniture grimed with the years, cookware, toys. It was a display of 
> > what was about to be lost. The estate agent was on the front steps 
> > telling potential clients that they wouldn't even have to evict: 
> > just raise the rent far beyond what the residents can afford. Ye who 
> > seek homes, come destroy the homes of others more frail.
>