Beer: All In The Family

[Robin Landseadel]

Looks like others will be doing all the heavy lifting on this overview  
of our mascot's latest. This group read is a bit sudden, though the  
players invested in this discussion are clearly up to the task. As of  
now I'm investing my time and energies to a set of paintings of Hindu  
Yantras for a show in early December. I am finding the opening up, the  
revealing of layers in this exegesis of Bleeding Edge worth the  
tagging along. I'll drop in with comments from time to time, but  
understand, my heart belongs to Laxshmi.

There's a way Pynchon's collected works are considered one big message  
in code, seeing as code is central to his work. But beyond the Genius/ 
Idiot Savant of Punnery, creator of indigestible foodstuffs and  
naughty Rocket Limericks, there is a person, that guy of no particular  
outstanding visible appearance, throwing those switches and levers.  
There is the narratorial voice, never once relinquished up to the  
First Person of Chandler's tarnished Knight, but stuck like glue by  
the Lord Overlunch of these stories, semi-omniscient and more  
observant than most. And that person, that voice, is growing up in  
public, first rejecting family, or at least acting as if "Family" was  
some sort of poison in his first three books. Family becomes more far  
more poignant and central in the tale of Vineland, hopeful too, as is  
the introduction to Slow Learner. Family and Family ties are  
wonderfully interwoven into the Glorious Fugue that is Mason & Dixon.  
Family is absolutely central to The Traversi vs. Vibes central plots  
that animate Against the Day.

I would go further, and have gone further, noting how the Family  
History of the Pynchons, going back to William, founder of Springfield  
the first, [Jedidiah be damned] is such a big part of all of the  
author's writings. The Vibes of AtD are a mirror reflection of the  
Pynchons of Yacht racing and the New York Stock Exchange, America's  
Nobility until undercut by a manipulation of Pynchon & Co. stock,  
something to do with the propaganda potential of sound on film and big  
players squeezing out the mavericks. Those funny stamps in CoL49? Tax  
Stamps? {Lord Overlunch almighty, do we need tax stamps for stock  
transfers these days or what?}. The History of the Great, Heretical  
Pynchons is worthy of a Pynchon-sized tome, all by its lonesome. A  
very high percentage of outliers to be found there in Tom's ancestors..

Could we say that on some level, our beloved author has been coasting  
on the last two? It certainly feels that way. But I think the biggest  
shift, crossing over the two most recent books in a way not really  
witnessed in the previous books, is a real sense of comfort and  
stability in the family. Of course, we have all noted how Pynchon  
clearly has been influenced by Ross Macdonald. The Lew Archer series  
of novels place internal family conflict at the center of his crime  
novels, something I would say that Pynchon has picked up and ran with  
in the last two books, but notable from the opening Blue Jays through  
the closing Blue Jay feathers of Vineland as well.

If you've read this far, note that I'm going to get very spoilerish  
here, so if that sort of thing bothers you, avert your eyes.

We get a sense that things between Doc and his parents are semi- 
copacetic, the sense that "family", as screwed up as they are, are  
pretty much alright in Inherent Vice. In Bleeding Edge, domesticity,  
in the context of the Upper West Side, 2001, is at the center of the  
story. I don't know if one would consider Doc Sportello 'privileged'— 
I'd consider myself lucky to be living in those times at/near  
Manhattan Beach, I could easily picture a more boring existence. But  
it's credible to say that Doc is on the preterite side of the fence.  
Maxi, like Oed, is not. And, while Oedipa leaves us with the perhaps  
the most self-consciously cliff-hanging ending in fiction, Bleeding  
Edge ends, domesticity wise, with a happy ending.

If there is a Great curve here, it's not towards greater and more  
paranoid levels of complication, which are inevitable anyway, Moore's  
Law never sleeps and neither do NSA's servers. That's where "They" are  
headed, though Maxi is on some level, part of they, just like the rest  
of us whether we know it or not. But, past that, there's the karmic  
responsibility of raising your young. Somewhere along the line, if one  
is to grow up, one realizes that one is not immortal but that one  
leaves one's karma behind in the form of family and the  
responsibilities and rewards that family incurs. I would say that  
Pynchon as a young man was the sort of person that Pynchon, the now  
rather old man, would have problems hanging out with. In fact, the  
author said as much in the introduction to Slow Learner. Mind you,  
what I am writing is in reference to that simulacra of this person,  
the writings of this author and what the voice of this author is  
telling us. But it's not as if his books are entirely in code or that  
the codes used are all that hard to decipher. Looks like he uses  
Google, just like the rest of us mere mortals, has a thing for the  
Brady Bunch too, or so I  have heard.

One of the things that Bleeding Edge tells us is that Horst is not so  
bad after all, even if it means that the Jewish Mother marries into  
the Elect power structure that brought on the Holocaust. It's a  
living, like Daffy Duck will tell you, this is the sort of dealing  
with the devil we all deal in. Oedipa was shocked—shocked to see all  
the preterite suffering that was previously buried to her, as she  
quested for her novel's McGuffin. Maxi was, is and shall evermore be  
the knowing one—been there, done that, lost the tee-shirt, always  
sufficiently self-aware to know when she's going in too deep, always  
drawing on her various "Spidy Senses" to cover her ass. So, for once,  
we have a "winner" in the center of the novel, a chosen one, though  
what really makes Maxi a "winner" is all stuff that the author  
witnessed watching his son grow up in the Upper West Side, with a  
Professional, High-Ticket, knows her stuff inside and out Mother for a  
wife. I would say that a lot of the 'family' element popping out in  
Bleeding Edge is autobiographically based, much as the lurid scene of  
Doc Sportello has all sorts of signposts to times and places within  
the author's personal experience.

We have traversed from the Human Yo-Yo of Benny Profane, like a cur  
without a home, lost on the subway, to semi-cozy domestic scene on the  
Upper West Side, from feeling orphaned, to living in the neighborhood  
with the [Jeepers!] Tree of Life visible on the morning walk to  
school, all lit up like Stonehenge rotated specially for the morning  
of the Spring Equinox.

If everything connects, it connects the deepest in family.

Meanwhile, here's the announcement for my upcoming show.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=629225230463071&set=a.262126650506266.79156.100001267982193&type=1&theater-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l