review BE

[Keith Davis]

This was great up to the point where he started discussing BE and I had to
shut it down, for now.


On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:14 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't need nor like psychoanalists of folks they've never met.
>
>
> On Thursday, September 12, 2013, Phil Burnside 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
>
>


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