review BE

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!  But is this online somewhere?  URL?

On 9/12/13, Phil Burnside <nudedeal at gmail.com> wrote:
> SEPTEMBER 12, 2013: [Vladimir Putin][North Korea][David Foster
> Wallace][Organic farming]
>
>
> ARCHIVE / 2013 / OCTOBER
> < Previous Article | Next Article >
> REVIEW — From the October 2013 issue
> First Family, Second Life
> Thomas Pynchon goes online
> By Joshua Cohen
>
>
>
>
>
> Single Page
> Printing Page
> Discussed in this essay:
> Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press. 496 pages. $28.95.
> P
> inco de Normandie sailed to England with William the Conqueror. His
> son, Hugh, held seven “knights’ fees in Lincolnshire” and four
> “bovates in Friskney.” Four centuries later, his descendant Edward
> Pynchon was ennobled and granted a coat of arms “per bend argent and
> sable, three roundles with a bordure engrailed, counterchanged.” By
> then the Pincheuns had settled snugly into gentry life in Essex.
> Nicholas Pinchon became High Sheriff of London in 1533, and his son,
> or nephew, John married Jane Empson, daughter of Sir Richard Empson, a
> minister to, and casualty of, the doomed regime of Henry VII. John’s
> son was also John, and his son was William Pynchon, who in 1630 sailed
> with John Winthrop to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which he
> was elected treasurer. He established the towns of Roxbury and, while
> pursuing the fur trade, Springfield, where he deposed the accused
> witches in the trial preceding Salem. He served as model for Colonel
> Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and in 1650
> wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, whose critique of
> Puritan Calvinism caused it to be burned in Boston and to become the
> New World’s first banned book, though only nine copies survived the
> pyre. (Among those who voted against the censure was William
> Hauthorne, Hawthorne’s first colonist ancestor.) This was the
> proto-American literary debut of a family that later included the
> Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823–1904), president of Trinity
> College, Hartford, and author of The Chemical Forces:
> Heat–Light–Electricity . . . An Introduction to Chemical Physics; Dr.
> Edwin Pynchon (1856–1914), author of “Surgical Correction of
> Deformities of the Nasal Septum”; and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., born
> in 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, author of V., The Crying of Lot
> 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against
> the Day, Inherent Vice, and now Bleeding Edge.
>
> Anyone who’s written at the end of so long and distinguished a line
> has been faced with a choice: either embrace the legacy or attempt to
> disassociate from it. (Hawthorne added the w to distance himself from
> John Hathorne, cruelest of the Salem magistrates.) This, of course, is
> merely a more public version of the decision of whether, and how, to
> transmute individual experience into prose. Thomas Pynchon — the most
> private, or publicly private, of American novelists — has been
> considering such disclosures for half a century now, in the way he’s
> handled both his famous family in his work and his own fame in life.
> The single overtly autobiographical statement he has provided to date
> appears in the introduction to a collection of his early and only
> short fiction, Slow Learner:
> Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had
> nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is
> nearly the direct opposite. . . . [F]or in fact the fiction both
> published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was
> precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by
> having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more
> shared levels of the life we all really live.
> I
> ’ve read that introduction a dozen times, and most of Pynchon’s novels
> at least twice, yet I’m still not sure what to make of this assertion.
> I’m still not sure whether V. (1963) — which takes as its premise the
> search for a mysterious, free-floating signifier that might be a woman
> named Victoria, and/or Veronica, and/or an incarnation of the goddess
> Venus, and/or the city of Valletta, and/or victory in WWI and/or WWII
> — becomes any clearer with the knowledge that Pynchon wrote it after
> serving in the Navy and attending Cornell, where he audited lectures
> by that shape-shifter Nabokov. Nor am I sure whether The Crying of Lot
> 49 (1966) — which concerns the machinations of a certain Yoyodyne,
> “one of the giants of the aerospace industry” — is enriched by the
> information that between 1960 and 1962 Pynchon lived in Seattle and
> worked for Boeing as a technical writer for the Bomarc
> interceptor-missile project. Then again, it strikes me that Pynchon’s
> defense-contracting stint finds direct expression in Gravity’s Rainbow
> (1973), that treatment of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. But
> I’m still confused as to whether I should read the hero of that novel
> — Tyrone Slothrop, an American G.I. whose erections foretell the
> ground-zero impacts of V-2s in London — as an embodiment of John
> Winthrop or, because Slothrop’s ancestor William Slothrop is portrayed
> as having published a controversial theological treatise called On
> Preterition, as a surrogate for the author himself.
> Gravity’s Rainbow was written by hand on quadrille engineering paper,
> and on Kool cigarettes, coffee, and cheeseburgers (to name just the
> legal substances), in Mexico City and in a whitewashed bungalow on
> 33rd Street in Manhattan Beach, California. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize
> committee refused to honor the novel, despite the jurors’ unanimous
> recommendation (the committee called it “turgid” and “overwritten,”
> “obscene” and “unreadable”). But it went on to win the National Book
> Award in 1974, for which ceremony Pynchon dispatched a comedian,
> “Professor” Irwin Corey, to deliver a nonsensical improvised speech.
> In the Eighties, Pynchon left his agent, Candida Donadio, to be
> represented by Melanie Jackson, great-granddaughter of Theodore
> Roosevelt and granddaughter of Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court
> justice and Nuremberg prosecutor. The two married in the Nineties and
> had a son, Jackson, who was such a fan of The Simpsons that Pynchon
> made a cameo (his animation was drawn with a paper bag instead of a
> head). Only ten images of Pynchon are publicly available, including a
> video captured by CNN in 1997 that occasioned this rebuke: “ ‘Recluse’
> is a code word generated by journalists . . . meaning ‘doesn’t like to
> talk to reporters.’ ” Then there’s the photo published by the Times of
> London in 1997, which provoked legal threats from Henry Holt,
> Pynchon’s publisher at the time.
> What else? Pynchon was raised Catholic and attended Mass. He was the
> best friend of Richard Fariña (author of Been Down So Long It Looks
> Like Up to Me) and the best man at Fariña’s wedding to Mimi Baez
> (Joan’s sister). He was reportedly so ashamed of his Bugs Bunny teeth
> that he underwent extensive cosmetic dental surgery . . .
> All this information came to me via the Internet, which has
> established Pynchon as its literary divinity. Not Philip K. Dick, not
> William Gibson — it’s Pynchon who commands the largest and loudest
> community online. It’s a congregation of fanboys, academics,
> techno-anarchists, wannabe fictioneers, parents’ basement–dwellers,
> and burnouts — some using real names, some using fake names, many
> anonymous — who analyze and squabble over every scrap of the Shroud
> and sliver of the Cross, in search of the Message.
> In the early days of home-use Internet, back when the first major
> e-marketer appeared under the sobriquet Yoyodyne (sold to Yahoo in
> 1998 for $30 million in stock), users of Yahoo and AOL message boards
> and chat rooms asserted that Pynchon was J. D. Salinger or the
> Unabomber, a Branch Davidian or “Wanda Tinasky,” who in witty
> mock-Pynchonian letters to the editors of the Anderson Valley
> Advertiser identified “herself” as a bag lady living under a bridge in
> northern California. With the gradual uploading of scholarship in the
> form of journal PDFs and dissertation .docs, the Internet got its act
> together, and by the mid-Nineties the digital Pynchonverse had become
> a disciplined research collective of amateurs and professionals,
> though one that took a break every toke or two to speculate wildly.
> Hey, get a load of this — Pynchon’s working on a novel about Lewis &
> Clark (rather, Mason & Dixon); Michael Naumann, past publisher of
> Henry Holt and former German minister of culture, helped Pynchon
> gather materials concerning the David Hilbert circle in Göttingen, and
> said the author’s next book would trace the amours of the Russian
> mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (material appearing in Against the
> Day). Pynchon himself never participated in any of this, of course,
> though there were at least a dozen contributors I can remember who
> claimed to be him, or were suspected of being him. My favorite posted
> under the webonym Martin Scribler, and if you’re bored already:
> waste.org.
> S
> erious literary discussion on the Internet began with Pynchon fans —
> which is just the type of generalization to spark a flame war with the
> science-fiction freaks, who’d claim that the Pynchonites showed up
> late to the party. I certainly did. It was 1994, and I was thirteen or
> fourteen when I found the Playboys in the basement and the Pynchon
> novels on a shelf in my father’s office. On the floor between was the
> new computer, a Gateway. Internet porn was difficult to find and slow
> to load, but the Pynchon guides, being text-based, were instantly
> gratifying. I read the threads — the rumor and gossip arbitrage,
> conspiracy swaps and paranoia — as if they were stray strands of
> Pynchon’s own narratology. I had a 28.8k dial-up modem and, despite
> all Pynchon’s warnings about technocracy’s incursions, no notion of
> what surveillance and social control lay ahead.
> It was the Web that educated me about contemporary literature, not
> through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there,
> but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what
> Pynchon — and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T.
> Vollmann and David Foster Wallace — were working toward in fiction: a
> plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the
> characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among
> institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections),
> and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I
> read about Modernism — big M — and postmodernism — small p — thanks to
> links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I
> couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a
> GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made
> by and intended for a small but discerning audience; postmodernism, by
> contrast, had popular or populist aspirations — it wanted to be
> famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements
> connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom
> LeClair to describe the methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don
> DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula LeGuin, Joseph McElroy
> — and Pynchon.
> Before these writers, books deployed closed systems of symbols that,
> if untangled, provided a substrate of meaning separate from, but
> communicating with, the action and dialogue (think of Fitzgerald’s ad
> for Dr. T. J. Eckleburg or Hemingway’s bullfighting). But these new
> writers favored books that operated on open systems, that treated the
> entire world symbolically, and that were inextricably enmeshed with
> the literary whole (think of the contrast between twentieth-century
> sensibility and eighteenth-century language in Mason & Dixon, or the
> palimpsest of genres — scientific, spy thriller, teen adventure,
> western — in Against the Day). Perhaps the paragon of the systems
> novel’s associative processes is the Byron the Bulb episode of
> Gravity’s Rainbow. An ostensibly immortal lightbulb named Byron
> illuminates, among other places, “an all-girl opium den” and “the home
> of a glass-blower who is afraid of the night” in Weimar Berlin, the
> brothel of a Hamburg prostitute whose “customer tonight is a
> cost-accountant who likes to have bulbs screwed into his asshole,” and
> the bunk of a Nazi scientist in a subterranean rocket factory in
> Nordhausen. It’s a section whose fifteen-year time frame also
> accommodates examinations of “ ‘Phoebus,’ the international light-bulb
> cartel, headquartered in Switzerland”; the mutual business interests
> of General Electric and Krupp; the production of filaments; and the
> synthesis of tungsten carbide.
> Fiction has long been described in the terms of a coeval technology,
> at least since the fade of the vacuum tube, but it was the genius of
> the systems novelists to produce fiction expressly along the same
> schematics. In the Seventies their novels could be said to function
> like transistors, while in the Eighties they could be said to function
> like integrated circuits. By the Nineties, however, systems technique
> had been usurped online: the Internet replicated its protocols, while
> the Web replicated its surface-shifting — the rapidly changing scenes,
> the characters introduced, developed, then dropped.
> Back when I frequented Amazon — before my favorite independent
> bookstores began closing and I quit the site, cold turkey, in 2006 — I
> was fascinated by how much it resembled the novels I was buying on it:
> I’d click on a book by Pynchon, and then lower down or on a sidebar of
> the page I’d find other titles to add to my cart, suggestions
> generated by the site’s algorithms, but also supplied by other users.
> People who bought Mason & Dixon also bought Vineland; if I clicked, I
> found that people who bought Vineland also bought books about the
> history of the FBI, the CIA, and the War on Drugs, and from there I’d
> be just a click or two away from the people who also bought
> fallout-shelter survival kits, pallets of canned meat, bottled water,
> and tinfoil. Wikipedia’s debut reinforced this organizational lesson.
> As of the date of this writing, the voluminous Thomas Pynchon wiki —
> which if printed out would surely eclipse the oeuvre of its subject —
> links to a list of American tax resisters (Pynchon refused to pay any
> war-designated tax increase in 1968); the American tax resisters wiki
> links to the Redemption Movement (a group maintaining that when
> America abandoned the gold standard, in 1933, it continued to back its
> debts by pledging its citizens’ lives to foreign governments as
> collateral); which in turn links to the wiki for The Matrix (1999);
> linking to Laurence Fishburne; linking, no doubt, to Kevin Bacon.
> W
> hen news of the publication of Bleeding Edge went around Twitter this
> spring, it set off a surge of chatter on the usual sites, but not for
> the usual reasons. This wasn’t just another Pynchon book; this wasn’t
> even just another Pynchon book with the Internet in the margins
> (ARPANET, which was developed in the Sixties and Seventies by an arm
> of the American military, had a cameo in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice).
> Rather, this would be a book dramatizing it all front and center, “a
> historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet,”
> according to the P.R. copy. I was excited, but also wary. As a reader
> I was hoping for Pynchon’s ultimate reckoning with the surveillance
> state he’d been railing against since the reign of J. Edgar Hoover — a
> culminant tilt at an institution of spying and mass mind-manipulation
> more powerful, and more voluntarily submitted to, than anything ever
> dreamed up by Reagan, Nixon, the KGB, the Stasi, or the Nazi SS. But
> as a novelist I also worried about how Pynchon would write about the
> very technology that has plagiarized his methods, and that has made
> the sporadic lapses of fact in his meticulous research — indeed, that
> has made his face — a matter of public record.[*]Ahem, ahem: the novel
> was also about 9/11.
> [*] The day after the book’s galley was delivered to me — this was
> just after the Prism scandal broke — I took it along to a dermatology
> appointment and started reading it on the subway. Immediately a man
> stomped across the car and without saying anything stuck out his
> iPhone and snapped a shot of the cover. He was white, stocky, about
> 5'6", and jumped out at West 4th Street — in other words,
> demographically representative. Later that evening I found the pic
> posted online. It had already received a few hundred likes. In the
> weeks that followed, Bleeding Edge galleys appeared on eBay, being
> auctioned — being purchased — for upwards of $1,500.
> “Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting
> edge” — so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the
> novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers
> such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor
> scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a
> presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the
> towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall
> Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron,
> lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or
> that was actually hyped to have existed — a real estate figment like
> NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (most of that area was
> originally just the Village).
> Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of
> generic deracinated White People who went out West like the
> prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Zen
> gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for grit
> — or at least for the yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The
> other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying — or not
> yet postidentity — strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color:
> the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the
> social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the
> “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.
> Meanwhile, “on the Yupper West Side” — Pynchon’s own neighborhood —
> Maxine Tarnow is just trying to get her life back together. She’s a
> gun-toting fraud investigator who’s recently had her certification
> revoked for unwittingly abetting an embezzlement, and a doting single
> mother of two precocious young boys, Ziggy and Otis, whose
> stock-trader father, Horst Loeffler, keeps offices in the World Trade
> Center and casual mistresses throughout the boroughs. Filmmaker Reg
> Despard, hired by a computer-security firm called hashslingrz to make
> an in-house documentary, retains Maxine to background-check his
> employer’s finances once his access is curtailed by CEO Gabriel Ice,
> “One of the boy billionaires who walked away in one piece when the
> dotcom fever broke.” This would be the same Ice who’s after the source
> code for a clandestine second-life website called DeepArcher
> (pronounced “departure”), developed by Maxine’s acquaintances Lucas
> and Justin, two Valley vets out to raise a ruckus, and capital, in the
> Alley.
> Maxine’s inquiries into DeepArcher and hashslingrz serve as the book’s
> basic binary. The former gets her caught up in an insomniac second
> life in which she wanders through an unregulated cyberniche, a “framed
> lucid dream,” that morphs in appearance and purpose according to user
> input — mediascapes of ghetto squalor one moment and pristine desert
> the next, all “in shadow-modulated 256-color daylight, no titles, no
> music,” untainted by advertising. The latter entangles her in the
> physical world, what Pynchon calls “meatspace,” investigating a host
> of sketchy (in every sense) personalities: Nicholas Windust, a federal
> agent whose first job was “spotting for the planes that bombed the
> presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende” on 9/11/73, and who
> went on to run “interrogation enhancement” and “noncompliant-subject
> relocation” squads in South and Central America; Avi, Maxine’s
> brother-in-law, a recovering Mossad agent; Rocky, a fugazi Cosa Nostra
> venture capitalist; Igor and his stooges Misha and Grisha, Russian
> gangsters who’ve invested with Bernie Madoff. All or some of these
> characters point to the idea that the U.S. government, or rogue
> elements within it, was aware of and maybe even plotted — perhaps in
> league with Ice — the 9/11 attacks (for which readers will have to
> wait until page 316).
> Obviously, the opposite might also be the truth. Ice, through his
> partners in the Middle East and shell companies in the Emirates, might
> be a hero, if not of America then of the right — laundering money for
> the undisclosed locations of the “war on terror,” coming soon to a
> screen near you.
> But wait, there’s more — if you enjoyed 9/11, you might also enjoy red
> herring, which aren’t native to the coast of Long Island, unlike the
> Montauk Project. This actual paranormal conspiracy theory — regarded
> as the successor to the Philadelphia Experiment — is, in Pynchon’s
> telling, “a kind of boot camp for military time travelers” that
> kidnaps, starves, beats, and sodomizes American preadolescents. They —
> “Boys, typically” — are trained to become the agents of tomorrow, or
> yesterday, “Assigned to secret cadres to be sent on government
> missions back and forth in Time, under orders to create alternative
> histories which will benefit higher levels of command who have sent
> them out.” Now, keep in mind that this explanation of the Montauk
> Project, which is supposedly accessible by a tunnel under Ice’s
> vacation property, comes to Maxine not in meatspace but in DeepArcher,
> from an Adderall-addled “IT samurai” named Eric Outfield, or rather
> from his avatar, whose “soul patch pulses incandescent green.”
> P
> age 316:
> Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a
> newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same
> time. Something bad is going on downtown. “A plane just crashed into
> the World Trade Center,” according to the Indian guy behind the
> counter.
“What, like a private plane?”
“A commercial jet.”
Uh-oh.
> Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to
> worse. All day long. At around noon the school calls and says they’re
> shutting down for the day, could she please come and collect her kids.
> Everybody’s on edge. Nods, headshakes, not a lot of social
> conversation.
“Mom, was Dad down there at his office today?”
“He was
> staying over at Jake’s last night, but I think he’s mostly been
> working from his computer. So chances are he didn’t even go in.”
“But
> you haven’t heard from him?”
“Everybody’s been trying to get through
> to everybody, lines are swamped, he’ll call, I’m not worrying, don’t
> you guys, OK?”
> Maxine — part JAP, part MILF — consoles her guys, as does Pynchon’s
> flattest style in what’s inevitably the book’s roughest stretch
> (roughest to read and to write, I’d imagine). The novel’s zany
> tangents and waves of punning fall away for a spell. We’re left with a
> possibly husbandless woman on the couch alongside her possibly
> fatherless children, who’ve temporarily forgotten their game
> cartridges because the on-screen carnage is so compellingly
> uncontrollable. That excerpt’s last quoted line and its implications
> are key to every family’s sense of frustrated codependence. Sometimes
> the phones work and sometimes they don’t, leaving Dad — Horst — in
> limbo incommunicado, his fate in the hands of God, or Wolf Blitzer.
> The attacks of 9/11 gave rise to bad invasions, bad occupations, and
> bad laws, but one of their greatest impacts on the home front was how
> they encouraged a society of total contact with a furious and mortal
> urgency (which Pynchon reinforces by using the present tense).
> Nowadays, to lose touch is to die; if you’re ever buried by rubble,
> the first thing you do is call and pray that the signal’s strong
> enough to let your last words live at least on voicemail. Before 9/11,
> the online world was engaged with at home, in a chair, at a desk.
> Having a cell phone — Pynchon prefers “mobile phone” — wasn’t a social
> norm, let alone a requirement akin to having a heart, or a brain, or
> lungs. In Bleeding Edge, cell phones ring fewer than a dozen times,
> and their occasional presence merely accentuates their absence.
> If one of the barest necessities of fiction is keeping two characters
> apart for enough time for a misunderstanding to ensue — a
> misunderstanding that can be resolved only by the protagonists
> individually moving toward each other, and toward the book’s
> conclusion — cell phones have become the chief antagonists of fiction.
> Today, we’re rarely denied the opportunity of contact, and all
> contacts — phone numbers and email addresses — can be digitally
> exhumed. Pynchon, by setting his novel on the cusp of the attacks,
> makes desperate comedy out of this last chance at inaccessibility,
> this final dark and silent millennial moment. He does so by
> exaggerating all the improbabilities and coincidence tricks of a
> previous information revolution — that of the Victorian novel, whose
> outlandishness was later called realism.
> In the Victorian novel, chance is a mechanism of resolution: two
> characters, separated for a bit, “suddenly” meet in a street, or at
> the theater. In Pynchon’s books, chance is a religious or spiritual
> mechanism. Meetings must have “meanings,” mysteries. In V., graffiti
> in a toilet stall spurs an electricity seminar when the image turns
> out to be a diagram for a band-pass filter. In Lot 49, the recurring
> doodle of a muted postal horn leads to the exposure of an underground
> mail network that has been passing correspondence via trash cans since
> the French Revolution. Bleeding Edge has a cruder approach, familiar
> from Pynchon’s other historical novels (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason &
> Dixon, and Against the Day), in which happenstance provides the
> pretext for information exchange: Maxine is lazing by her office
> window when she notices Igor’s limousine (its Cyrillic bumper sticker
> translates as my other limo is a maybach); she gets in, only to find
> March Kelleher, a renegade lefty blogger who just happens to be Ice’s
> mother-in-law. March has to courier Igor’s Madoff money (thanks to
> Maxine’s tip, Igor cashed out just in time) to Sid, March’s ex-husband
> and a drug runner, up at “a dance club near Vermilyea.” Why not,
> Maxine goes along; once the deal is done, Sid offers to return them to
> the 79th Street Boat Basin in his antique motorboat, but the DEA gives
> chase and the trio flee down the Hudson, losing their pursuers by the
> Island of Meadows, a wetlands preserve just off the coast of Staten
> Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. This boat ride is merely an excuse for
> March and Sid to discuss their daughter, Tallis, and their son-in-law,
> Ice, which itself is merely an excuse to dump tons of data on Maxine
> and the reader both. But the indulgences are justified by Pynchon’s
> beautiful way with the trash:
> This little island reminds [Maxine] of something, and it takes her a
> minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and
> prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething
> foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be
> crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient
> estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the
> rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers
> after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in
> its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised
> by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index
> and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless
> ends.
> All the events described above occur in Pynchon’s shortest sentences
> and shortest paragraphs to date, in fewer than a dozen pages. The
> result is a breathless major bandwidth rush and a dizzily profound
> book about the Internet that accomplishes something of which the
> Internet has rarely been capable. It doesn’t quite make the reader
> believe that American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were brought
> down by Stinger missiles launched from a rooftop in Hell’s Kitchen,
> but it does make the reader believe why and how someone else might
> believe this — why and how March Kelleher might believe this — and
> that, fellow citizens, is sympathy, or empathy, or literature.
> H
> ere’s another intrigue from the Internet, though this one is
> verifiable: William Pynchon’s magistrate son, John, was a friend of
> the colony’s road surveyor, Miles Morgan, “the hero of Springfield,”
> who in 1675 defended the town against the Wampanoag tribe, and was the
> forefather of J. P. Morgan (Pynchon was the presiding official at
> Miles Morgan’s wedding). The Pynchon and Morgan families would go on
> to maintain business ties for the next 300 years, until the stock
> market crashed the country into Depression. By that time, Pynchon &
> Co. had become one of America’s most prominent brokerages (and the
> publisher of pamphlets surveying investment prospects, including
> Electric Light and Power: A Survey of World Development). According to
> Charles Hollander, writing in the journal Pynchon Notes, Pynchon & Co.
> was destroyed by its brief liaison with Chase Bank — the Rockefeller
> bank — in what might’ve been a speculation trap aimed at damaging this
> close associate of the Morgans. The Pynchon family had to auction off
> their property and furniture and, in debt from a reclamatory lawsuit,
> senior partner George M. Pynchon Jr. committed suicide. In Hollander’s
> reading, much of Pynchon’s fiction plays out as revenge against the
> Rockefellers and their dismantling of the Morgan economy of steel,
> coal, and railroads in favor of an economy of plastics, oil, and
> weaponry.
> Bleeding Edge, written during our Depression Redux, deals with the
> next economy — the virtual — in which the Rockefellers aren’t the born
> elite but the products of meritocracy. Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Bezos,
> Jobs, Gates: six sons of American sprawl, three of whom are Jews, one
> of whom is also a Soviet émigré; one born to a teenage mother and
> adopted by a Cuban immigrant stepfather; another given up for adoption
> at birth by his Syrian father and American mother. They are us and we
> are them, not just biographically but in that we help create what they
> sell us and improve their services — along with their fortunes — all
> just by our use.
> It follows that the old Pynchonite dichotomy of Us vs. Them doesn’t
> apply anymore. In canonical Pynchon, when the military police closed
> in, when the federales swooped down, there was always a stained
> mattress to crash on in the Village, or a band of pot growers in
> Mendocino County who’d stash you. You’d be safe there, in whichever
> countercultural cult — the Whole Sick Crew (V.), or the People’s
> Republic of Rock and Roll (Vineland); you’d be safe, that is, until
> your friends got bought out, or sold themselves, and became agents,
> too, or at least collaborating adults who read non-fiction or nothing
> at all. If Pynchon’s characters were left behind by America, they
> denied that America and terrorized only themselves. They regarded any
> America that would reject them as fake, and only their own inner
> America as real — a country not of grandly insistent progress and
> Horatio Alger success, but of Henry Adams regret, and failure. A
> country of the “preterite” — a characterization Pynchon attributed to
> William Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow — meaning the passed-over, the
> neglected, the abandoned; the Melvilles, not the Hawthornes.
> Bleeding Edge, however, offers an indication that Pynchon has finally
> given up on seeking the soul of the nation his family helped found.
> For Pynchon — the embattled bard of the counterculture, disabused of
> all allegiance — the last redoubt has become the family, and the last
> war to be waged is between our virtual identities and the bonds of
> blood; a war to keep the Virtual from corrupting the Blood, if not
> forever, then for time enough to let the lil’ Ziggy and Otis
> Tarnow-Loefflers of this world live with the merest pretense of
> freedom (childhood). Pynchon understands that in the future there will
> be no secrets, no hidden complots — everything will be aired and any
> second life, whether in the cloud or in the firmament, will be
> despoiled or denied us. Adult sanity, then, must depend not on the
> lives we make online, but on the lives we make off it — our kids — on
> how we love them, and how we raise them, and the virtues and
> good-taste imperatives we pass on to them from our progenitors. Smirk
> if you’re a smirker and claim this as the conclusion of an
> embourgeoised aging-hippie novelist gone soft (or of the mafia and the
> Jews), but I’m not sure whether Pynchon means this emphasis on
> consanguinity in the spirit of salvation or of damnation. It is,
> regardless, sweetly sad. Sweet and low-down sad. The online moguls
> have tried to persuade us that we’re not losing a nation, we’re
> gaining a world. Pynchon proposes that both are mere second lives,
> fakes. Only family is real.
>