Heres an Essay I Wrote About The Bleeding Edge Book Trailer

Sat Oct 5 20:58:14 CDT 2013

The self-mocking is continuous from the opening; look up " macher" DEFINED as self- mocking when used; perhaps the closest to it is Prof Irwin Corey speaking for him at the NBAwards. 
The Bleeding Edge's narrator, that free indirect discourse, is close cousin, if not sibling, to the tone.

With this video, Pynchon " sez", hilariously: I know my neighbors, is why I can satirize US. 

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 2, 2013, at 9:55 PM, Oedipa Maas <jumpman23g at gmail.com> wrote:

> In Which Two Canons And Two Appeals In The Book Trailer For Thomas Pynchon’s Latest Novel Bleeding Edge Are Analyzed 
> 
> On September 3rd, 2013, after a seven month anticipation period, following the release of the Penguin Press’ 2013 catalog, the book trailer advertising Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge (http://vimeo.com/73716114), surfaced on the Internet. Initially, due to a number of characteristics regarding the delivery of the advertisement, what the main character of the ad chooses to argue, along with the ethos of this character, the book trailer ostensible appears hoaxy, but, like most things Pynchon creates, after a fourth or fifth viewing, things that at first glance appeared to be a hoax are unveiled and Pynchon’s twinkle is revealed in a way that is compatible with an attentive viewers logos, and also entices the careful (albeit obsessive) fan.
> This promotional video comes as the third in a series of book trailers for Thomas Pynchon’s novels, although this one was completely different. The book trailers that precede this one, have in common a sleekness and professionalism, that when compared to this most recent book trailer seem to be in no way related. For example, in an attempt to promote Pynchon’s novel, Inherent Vice, the author teamed up with a professional film crew and produced a movie-like trailer with the author, who has never given an Interview, narrating the promotional video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U). Then some time last year, Pynchon allowed his novels to be tablitized, and in an attempt to advertise, a second trailer was made that consists of impressive animating and captivating typefaces. Then comes the most recent trailer, which when compared to the other ones looks like an out of step black sheep. 
> Firstly, the video looks like it was filmed with a cheap handycam or even an iPhone. The typefaces in this video are simple and seem to placed on the screen in awkward positions, the filming is shaky, the video skips at certain points, and overall looks like something you might find a high school student throwing together and turning in at the last minute for an end of the year project. Aside from the subpar aesthetic value of this book trailer in comparison to the ones that preceded it, how this video got on the internet in the first place causes some concern about the ethos of those who created and uploaded the video. The first thing that seems initially fishy about the video is the fact that Pynchon and the Penguin Press decided to upload this video on an obscure Vimeo account with the username of The Penguin Press. Until the upload of this video, the account in question had only uploaded two other videos four weeks prior with strange titles like “Caffeine and Pregnancy” and “Alcohol and Pregnancy” with even stranger thumbnails. But what really makes this Vimeo account suspicious and triggers the thought that this video may be a hoax, is that the Penguin Press already has a YouTube account, with the name Penguin Books USA, that has been online since February 7th, 2008, has 4,039 subscribers, hundreds of videos and 9,629,267 views as of this week. If that doesn’t get ones hoax detector blinking, this YouTube account is the home of all Penguin’s official online videos and is also the place where the two previous book trailers were uploaded. With all that said, there is still a couple of things that make the delivery of this advertisement look suspicious at first or second glance. Namely, the video trailer for Inherent Vice uploaded on Penguin’s legitimate YouTube account reads, “Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon”, and the ostensibly hoaxy trailer uploaded on Vimeo reads “Bleeding Edge book trailer”, which in comparison looks like a subtle mistake of a hoax artist or impersonator, but as the attentive viewer/ Pynchon-head will find out if he or she looks close enough this is all done intentionally.
> Then, all the speculation that was written above, about the potential that this video could be a hoax was suppressed when the Penguin Press uploaded the same video, this time titled “Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon”, on their official YouTube account, Penguin Books USA a day later. At this point, the level of enticement grew for those that didn’t write off the video as a fraud or a joke, because once the press uploaded the video on their official account, the video was given new legitimacy and the credibility of the main character in the video rose. On this day, the questions changed from “Is this real? Is this a fake?” to “Why would the greatest living author OK the release of this video?” and “What is really going on?”
> Therefore, if one starts to examine this promotional video closely, they will find that the focus of this video is on a young man who is wearing a spin off t-shirt of a t-shirt that Pynchon was reportedly seen wearing in the late 1990’s which read “I’m not Thomas Pynchon”. The t-shirt that this young man is wearing in the book trailer read “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon”. The only problem here is that Pynchon was born on May 8th, 1937 and has throughout his career never been photographed or given an interview. So, it is safe to say that the young man is not Thomas Pynchon, because of this outright lie and weak attempt at impersonation, the young man’s invention (that he is Thomas Pynchon) appears to lose any trace of ethos that a rhetor may possess, but this is in fact done in jest and done so to get the audience focusing on this impersonation, and by doing so potentially mis-details about the authors personal life which are right below the surface of this video. The viewer must remember that it is Pynchon himself who supplied the Third Proverb for Paranoids in his 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, which reads, “If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers” (Pynchon 251). In addition to the blurring of credibility and legitimacy that the video and it’s creators have managed to achieve before the video reaches the 30-second mark on the video’s time-tracker, the setting that this video captures, coupled with the content of the Pynchon impersonator’s words enhance the distortion between what can be viewed as credible information and far-fetched play. 
> The video opens with a pan-shot overlooking the upper west side from a rooftop. Then, for the first time in the video, our Pynchon-imitator exclaims, “Listen”, quite arrogantly, “they call me the king of the upper west side”. The opening line of this video contains the juxtaposition of farce and classic Pynchon creativity, which is found throughout the video. Next, the sun is shining on this young man wearing a pair of party glasses with palm trees attached, an unbuttoned shirt, while holding a blunt in his hand. He goes on to say, in Pynchon’s self-mocking style, that “I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the whole hierarchy thing” and views himself as a “power player from the margins, kind of like Karl Rove, if Karl Rove were liberal and Jewish”. This is followed by our impersonator claiming to be an upper west side staple and involved in the pastrafia, which prompts the camera man to chime, “Whaaaaa, what’s that?”, to which the young man, who later identifies himself as Sleazus, replies punningly, “pastrami mafia”. The next shot we find Sleazus walking down an upper west side city block, chest bowed out, clearly displaying his “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon” shirt and pronouncing that usually his morning routine involves occupying Zabar's, a famous upper west side grocery store, for five to six hours. After walking the length of the block, this Sleazus character walks by the camera and whispers, “This is my neighborhood”. Then, viewers find Sleazus inside Zabar’s doing a half-lotus tree pose, in the way of other customers and claiming that he went to summer camp with a Zabar’s family member and as a result has the nepotistic hook-up at the place. To add credibility to the statement above, Slezus says that the employees call him “Precebe”, which he himself admits to not knowing the meaning, but adds “It sounds cool”. Well, as it turns out right when Sleazus finishes that sentence, on the screen comes text defining the Yiddish word, which means “twit or barnicle”. Jokes like this continue and are perplexing because with all the elements that decrease the video’s ethos are at the same time shrouded in play that makes it hard to get at what is legit information about the author or is just a joke. 
> During the middle half of the video, viewers watch Sleazus rudely order lox from Zabar’s and head back on the street, where he reminisces about when the upper west side was still a real melting pot. He adds that he remembers when “[the neighborhood] was still filled with Jews, Boricuas, and Dominicanos and then Robert Moses” at which point Sleazus breaks out into a politically incorrect song which goes, “Kick those Puerto Ricans out on the street/ it’s just a slum / tear it all down”. 
> The latter half of the trailer is full of subtle references to the novel the video is promoting, including allusions to the novels protagonist Maxine Tarnow, the computer program “DeepArcher” (pronounced departure). Sleazus goes on to describe Maxine as a “grade A MILF” and name drops the stories antagonist “Gabriel Ice”. In the promotional videos penultimate scene, viewers watch Sleazus on a park bench blend the reality of this world and the reality of the novel’s by reffering to Maxine as if she were a real person and adds that the last thing he heard about her was that she was chasing down leads and he actually doesn’t know where the story ends and that “[It’s] something to look into, if are examining the neighborhood”. In the final scene, the camera zooms in on Sleazus as he opens the lox he bought from Zabar’s earlier and claims that they are a natural exfoliant that the moisturizing conglomerates don’t want you to know about, before putting the lox on his face. Then a jumpcut brings viewers to the iridescent cloth-bound edition of Bleeding Edge with September 17th displayed next to it. The places filmed, jokes cracked and language communicated in this video advertisement cleverly distorts the credibility of the information that Sleazus provides himself, or as his shirt says “Tom Pynchon”, and clues about the Bleeding Edge which works as a very inventive form of enticement that increases the more the trailer is examined. 
> When watching this book trailer for the first or second time, maybe third time, the video seems to lack any sort of logic because of it’s origins, impersonation, farce and dirty jokes aside the production value and amature film-making while this apparent lack of logic may be the case for the seminal viewings of this book trailer, it seems that as the number of views increases so does the amount of logos that the video contains. This ultimately entices the viewer to go out and read this thing in order to see what it’s all about. For example, it has been known that Pynchon lives on the upper west side because of the release of the 2002 documentary, A Journey Into the Mind of P, so when Sleazus is walking down the street in his ironic t-shirt proclaiming that he spends five to six hours a day in Zabar’s, this is a hyperbolic joke, but it would not be surprising if Pynchon did shop there since it’s one of the famous grocery stores in the neighborhood. The same can be said about comments like “This is my neighborhood”, “I went to summer camp with a Zabar”, I’m a “power player from the margins”. All these comments seem to be only done in jest, but all of these things are highly likely despite being hidden beneath a layer of jokes. 
> One of the most subtle, but at the same time most telling moments in the video, in regards to the clever logic behind the creator’s motives is the song. If one reads Pynchon they are sure to meet characters that spontaneously break-out into song and here, although put in very slyly, viewers find Sleazus breaking out into song. The mere four seconds of the video this song takes up is a perfect example of how Pynchon’s wits are really at work. So, a song that at first appears racially charged, actually can transform into a reminder that maybe this is something Pynchon will be working with in the novel. And as it turns out, he does. The song mentioned above is actually the first song a character sings in the novel and does so in a less playful context. The blunt which Sleazus holds turns out to be connected to the story’s plot, along with the mention of Maxine as being a MILF and the allusion to DeepArcher which the book and Maxine’s journey revolves around. Before the purchase of this book, people would only be able to gleen from the information provided by the trailer in order to make connections. This is how Pynchon and the press came up with an ingenious ad. They cloak the whole thing in a cloud of illogical, rude and illegitimate smoke, but made the trailer funny and puzzling enough for viewers to desire more information. As viewers watch the video more, they realize the only way to affirm their speculations is to go out, get the book and read it.
> In closing, it is apparent that Pynchon, with the help of some of his buddies, came up with a promotional video that succeeded in weeding out the non-Pynchon-fans or those who lack a normal level of curiosity by layering the video with hoaxy, self-mocking and funny elements while maintaining underneath these layers a clever, witty, and logical advertisement that reeks of Pynchon and most importantly, advertises something to the consumer in an uncommon and unoppressive way.
> Works Cited
> [Pynchon], [Thomas ]. [Gravity’s Rainbow]. [New York New York] [Viking], [1973]. 
> 
> 
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