review BE

[Joseph Tracy]

The whole riff on the competition/interaction  between fiction and non-fiction is pretty rich. 
On Sep 12, 2013, at 8:09 PM, John Bailey wrote:

> Wow, save a copy of this one for after you've read the book. A few
> bits of serious and admirable Literary Criticism in the middle of this
> that go way further than "reviews" usually do. Esp the challenge of
> mobile phones to literature and the function of chance in Pynchon.
> 
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> There I am tripartite: fanboy, burnout and (sometime) basement dweller analyzing and squabbling. Cause as Lethem says, it is only reading Pycnhon which teaches you how to read Pynchon. it never ends...
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad
>> 
>> On Sep 12, 2013, at 7:16 PM, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Ooh! Ooh! Which one am I?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>>>