Reading Notes #3

I cannot believe that I'm having to research Tarot. (Also, I cannot believe that again I can get so lost so fast.) On the other hand, if I hadn't had to research Tarot, I'd never have encountered this, in Wikipedia: . Um, yeah.

Meanwhile, "the Tetractys isn't the only thing round here that's ineffable."

Trying to summarize the TWIT section, it's becoming clearer to me that this bit really is dense with new characters and new themes and it's all built on stuff I know nothing about--Tarot, development of southeastern Europe prior to World War I.

"[Clive Crouchmas] greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God which may never be spoken.
'Basically wishing long life and prosperity,' explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture."

Reading Notes #2

I'm about a fifth of the way through Against the Day, and I'm realizing that this is a conventional big novel--one theme, a limited cast (large, but limited in the sense that the major cast members are followed episodically through time and place), plots that fold out linearly--start at Point A, go to Point B. And I'm a bit disappointed, I guess. On the one hand, it's been over 30 years since Gravity's Rainbow was published and it's a safe bet that overall Against the Day will be read under far less influence of soft drugs, but still. If I'm going to go along with over a thousand pages about labor history and why labor and socialism are right and good--and, to be clear, I agree with the sentiment--I want weird-tasting wine gums and sexually aggressive cephalopods along the way. And I'm not really getting them. What happened to World's Fairs that become, well, whiter toward their centers (the "well" there makes the sentence for me) and Alaskan exhibits with special reindeer dances? Is the turn of the century American West so very dire for the common man that there's no absurd humor to be had? For an author whose major work is about the ending of World War II and the big bomb, is that even possible? Even the perfect set-ups that are here--say, English tourists on an Oscar Wilde tour of the West--are just left hanging, unplayed-with. It's as if somewhere around the 9/11 scenes, all the goofiness went away and we're left with nice moments that don't get explored for their absurdity and humor--or, on the other hand, for the anger behind them. We've got tasteful and well-done; I miss the flashy, showy stuff that doesn't always work but when it does, is magic.

Reading Notes #1

So I'm around 60 pages in and I'm struck by how much easier this is for me so far than Gravity's Rainbow was. It can't be that I'm a significantly better reader or that I've developed a better memory for character names. But I even remember random book-versus-reality questions that I'd like to follow up--for example, were the buildings at the Chicago Exhibition really made of I Can't Believe It's Not Marble? So I'm wondering whether Gravity's Rainbow functions like training wheels for Against the Day in the same way that V does, in turn, for Gravity's Rainbow, or whether Pynchon is intentionally marking characters better (who we need to keep track of, who X is when X reappears)--or what.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide what to do with this blog. I want the discipline of writing every day, but every day writing about a book? Maybe not. And then again, looking up every random weird word or might-be-historical event would probably be unnecessary, since the book's been out for several years and there's a wiki that I think must answer most questions. But then again again, when I was reading Gravity's Rainbow it took me what seemed like hours to get a definitive answer about what "reet pleats," which were mentioned in passing, are. (The whole phrase was something like "zoot suit with reet pleats." I already knew what a zoot suit is, but two online Pynchon references and an online fashion dictionary and a hardcopy fashion dictionary all took me nowhere closer to reet pleats--which, just for the record, are pleats that are cool or snappy or any other slangy word generally meaning "good," and not, as I assumed, any particular style of pleat like inverted or Fortuny.)

Last note for today, I was amused to see Frederick Jackson Turner show up in Against the Day. I totally called that one (in an as-yet unpublished entry, but this is my blog so you'll have to trust me--or not) way back before they even got to the fair. Careful reader (or American history knowledge) points for me!

Then again, some mention of bombs (in regard to Chums in Europe backstory) had me stopping to wonder whether bombs--as in bombs bursting in air giving proof through the night--had been invented by 1893. So maybe not so much on the American history front.

Why AtD? Why now? Why blog?

For the two years since I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's earlier long and difficult novel, I've been floating in a sea of accessible fiction and series mysteries, mostly bought used. And while there's nothing wrong with choosing your reading material based on what someone liked enough to trade for store credit, I'm beginning to feel the need for more structure, more meat. More direction. More reward. I miss images like Grigori the octopus oozing sullenly in the corner, cows drunk on fermented sileage uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them, a pit band tootling and blatting at one another. I miss throwaway lines about Beethoven just making you want to invade Poland. I miss bad puns and filk that I can't quite place to its source. Most of all I miss great writing.

On the other hand, Against the Day runs 1085 pages and is too big to fit in any handbag I own. It's a commitment not just in time and attention, but also to carrying a totebag so that I'll be able to read on the subway. And I'm still traumatized by having taken notes to try to get a handle on Gravity's Rainbow.

I'd like to finish Against the Day before Pynchon's new work, Inherent Vice, is released August 4th. I'm enough of a fangirl to want the experience of reading the new release when it's actually new--not when there's already a consensus opinion about it among other nonprofessional readers, not when it comes out in paperback, not when it's canonized in a course somewhere. And I'd like to have finished the previous work before starting the new one. (Yes, I most certainly do understand how dorky this sounds.)

As for the blog, I need the discipline. Two months to read over a thousand pages--over a thousand pages that are fun and funny but not easy or fast--that's a lot of discipline. Here goes.