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Wed Oct 8 01:10:22 UTC 2025

I also can’t help but thinking of the late great Dave Monroe, P-Lister extraordinaire, and noted denizen & staple of the great city of Milwaukee… a cosmic tribute! 

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On Tuesday, October 7th, 2025 at 4:21 PM, Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thomas Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' a complex view of Milwaukee in 1932
> https://eu.jsonline.com/story/life/2025/10/07/thomas-pynchon-shadow-ticket-a-complex-view-of-milwaukee-in-1932/86497937007/
> 
> 
> Thomas Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' offers a complicated view of
> Depression-era Milwaukee
> ------------------------------
> Jim Higgins https://www.jsonline.com/staff/2647460001/jim-higgins/
> 
> Milwaukee
> Journal Sentinel
> 
> Wisconsin Book of the Month highlights a book — new, newish or neglected —
> by a state writer or on a Milwaukee or Wisconsin subject that Journal
> Sentinel book editor Jim Higgins recommends you read this month. This
> feature appears in the newspaper the second Sunday of each month and is
> usually posted online the preceding Wednesday. Want to suggest a book?
> Email jhiggins at journalsentinel.com jhiggins at journalsentinel.com.
> 
> 
> Milwaukee references begin flowing on the first page of "Shadow Ticket"
> https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316427/shadow-ticket-by-thomas-pynchon/
> 
> (Penguin
> Press), the new novel from the famously brilliant and equally famously
> privacy-guarding Thomas Pynchon.
> 
> The story begins with private investigator Hicks McTaggart on a job in the
> Third Ward in 1932, and a passing reference to the late Vito Guardalabene
> (1845-1921), widely considered an early crime boss of the city.
> 
> But the sign that Pynchon is serious about setting the novel here comes on
> Page 2 with these words: "… even at the combination drug and hardware store
> plus lunch counter known as Oriental Drugs, heart and soul of the East Side
> and Hicks's usual source of reliable lowdown in Milwaukee."
> 
> Since the surprise announcement
> https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/2025/04/09/thomas-pynchon-shadow-ticket-milwaukee-setting/83013428007/
> 
> of
> the now 88-year-old author's book, I've had to educate and sell some
> younger friends and colleagues on who Pynchon is and why he matters. For
> literary-minded Boomers like me, Pynchon is the towering postmodernist who
> won the National Book Award in 1974 for "Gravity's Rainbow." In college
> many of us read "The Crying of Lot 49," the rare early Pynchon novel short
> enough to be taught in survey courses.
> 
> Fans of "The Simpsons" may remember Pynchon for voicing himself in two
> episodes, https://www.cbr.com/the-simpsons-thomas-pynchon-cameos/ with
> 
> his character wearing a paper bag over his head. In the current moment,
> reviewers lauding Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie "One Battle After
> Another" are reminding people it's directly inspired by Pynchon's novel
> "Vineland."
> 
> Pynchon for the TL;DR crowd: A torrent of antic narrative hijinks, a
> mishmash of high and low culture, conspiracy theories, secret movements,
> funny character names and parodic song insertions (he's read many issues of
> Mad magazine).
> 
> "Shadow Ticket" has all of those ingredients.
> 
> McTaggart, a former strikebreaker turned operative for the Unamalgamated
> detective agency, is investigating a mysterious explosion that blew up a
> hooch wagon (Prohibition is still the law) when he's assigned to find a
> cheese heiress, Daphne Airmont, who has run away with a swing musician.
> Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' is filled with Milwaukee references
> 
> The first half of this novel, set in our fair city, frequently reads like
> the manic, erudite prose equivalent of Firesign Theatre's "The Further
> Adventures of Nick Danger," an affectionate, genre-savvy sendup of private
> eye stories. (There are frequent references to a mythical Gumshoe's Manual.)
> 
> Period Milwaukee references flow like Korbel brandy on payday: Shorewood,
> Ideal Pharmacy, Yankee Hill, Bronzeville, Schuster's, Billie the Brownie,
> West Allis, North Division High School, lake effect snow, the Holton Street
> Viaduct, the QWERTY typewriter, the young Les Paul, Polish flats, Brewer's
> Hill.
> 
> Comically, there's a Don DeLillo-style mention of a Department of Cheese
> Studies at the University of Wisconsin branch in Sheboygan.
> 
> When McTaggart is handed a suspicious package, he knows where to take it
> for a peek inside. Milwaukee is "also the birthplace of the shoe-store
> X-ray machine," the novel's omniscient narrator notes. The machines were
> real.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20081217103205/http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm
> 
> Multiple
> claimants asserted inventing or developing shoe-fitting fluoroscopes in
> Milwaukee.
> 
> The explosion and McTaggart's past bring in serious references to the 1917
> Milwaukee police station bombing,
> https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2017/11/22/1917-milwaukee-bombing-worst-loss-police-life-until-9-11/886589001/
> 
> the
> largest loss of American police life in a single event until the Sept. 11
> terrorist attacks; and the Rolling Mills Massacre in Bay View in 1886.
> 
> Pynchon also includes a scene where a runaway is aided by friends living on
> a "secret" Ojibwe reservation up the Lake Michigan coast from Milwaukee.
> This might be a case of Pynchon writing into his fiction a popular rumor of
> the time.
> 
> In a startling passage, McTaggart's Uncle Lefty quotes the Milwaukee
> Journal calling Adolf Hitler "that intelligent young German Fascist." A
> version of this quote actually appeared in the Dec. 8, 1931, Milwaukee
> Sentinel, in a column by well-known editor and wheeler-dealer Arthur
> Brisbane, who referred to Hitler as "the intelligent young German Fascist."
> Brisbane had some Milwaukee history. He bought a Milwaukee newspaper called
> the Evening Wisconsin in 1918, then flipped it to compadre William Randolph
> Hearst in 1919. (Hearst bought the Sentinel in 1924 and merged the other
> paper into it.) But this 1931 comment seems to be part of a syndicated
> column of observations by Brisbane.
> 
> This quotation is no throwaway; it may help a reader understand one of the
> reasons Pynchon chose Milwaukee as a setting. Another early passage states,
> "This being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than
> Heinz has pickles." It would have been easy to find both socialists and
> fascist sympathizers in Milwaukee in the early 1930s.
> 
> In the weirder, darker back half of the novel, McTaggart — still nominally
> in pursuit of the cheese heiress — is dragged off to Europe, where he gets
> mixed up with government agencies, spies, fascists, con men and weird
> mystics. He lands in Fiume, a battered remnant of the Austro-Hungarian
> empire, cheekily described as "the Milwaukee of the Adriatic," for the
> denouement.
> 
> Pynchonian weirdness continues: there's discussion of an international fake
> cheese conspiracy, and of obsessed collectors sexually attracted to lamps.
> But it's not all fun and games. "This is the year when it all begins to
> come apart … a violent collapse of civil order," a character tells
> McTaggart. A fascism is growing that cares nothing for the frequently
> redrawn borders of states.
> 
> It would be reductive to say that "Shadow Ticket" either is or isn't a
> comment on the power grabs of our time. Pynchon has always written about
> fascism, conspiracy theories and anarchy. But it is not hard to find
> resonance with the present.
> 
> If you've never read Pynchon, would you enjoy this book? Do you enjoy
> listening to a Robin Williams monologue? His narration comes at you with
> that kind of speed of thought and play. If you'd like to see what
> Depression-era Milwaukee looked like to a great 20th-century American
> writer, give it a try.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l