Yet another reason I love Colombia

Being able to buy García Márquez novels at supermarket check-out counters.


(The last photo, from top to bottom: Cien años de soledad, El amor en los tiempos del cólera, El general en su laberinto, and La mala hora.)

I read El otoño del patriarca in a week, rushing to finish it before I had to leave Santa Marta (since it was A.'s copy and I couldn't bring much back with me because then I'd have even *more* to haul back from England in the summer. Which makes me wonder, because no matter how firmly I've resolved not to buy books, I seem to accumulate them regardless. Evidently, there is no escape.). The last three days consisted of swimming through 100 pages each--and I do mean swimming. This 398 page novel consists of six paragraphs. SIX. There are very specific reasons for this--which I'll probably investigate later. I know he was heavily influenced by Faulkner and the modernists, and when I finally read our copy of El olor de la guayaba (lengthy conversations he had with his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza), I'll know more. There's a whole section dedicated to this novel of his.

I think the reason I was able to sail through it so easily is that I didn't get hung up on trying to remember what was said at the beginning of each sentence. Sound strange? Ok. It's as if he's structured this novel like a flowing river. Each sentence is an individual current in this river, and you have to let yourself get swept away by it. Float along, see the sights, take in all that he's telling you. But don't get caught up in trying to remember the sequential order of things or where you started from, because then you'll spend your time trying to arrange and sort and categorize, reading it will become a chore, and you'll (ironically) miss what you were supposed to experience along the way.

Yes, he's very deliberate about the decisions he made. There is no dialogue punctuation, which helps the sensation of being carried along by something greater--a lone sailor in a rowboat. It's a little scary, but once you stop worrying about who is telling the story (there seem to be many voices telling it, many "I"s, the voices of various people in this coastal city) and simply take in the words as they come, it's an entrancing experience. I've felt like this reading Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce, but never quite this strong. Probably because I was reading great chunks of it at a time and simply enjoying the story--the intrigue, the horror, the tragedy, and (yes!) the humor. (What a marvelously wicked sense of humor García Márquez has!) I could almost hear the voice of this lonely, monomaniacal dictator--his verbal tics and repeated sayings, his "que carajo" and "no seas pendejo" and frequent pleas to his mother, Bendición Alvarado (of the sewing machine and myriad birds).

The best reading experience I've had in a long time.

A way out

A few lines from Paul Auster's Oracle Night...

Grace:

"I didn't get that far. But we would have found a way out. People can't die in their dreams, you know. Even if the door was locked, something would have happened to get us out. That's how it works. As long as you're dreaming, there's always a way out."

Trause:

"Thoughts are real," he said. "Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future."

Mario's elusive Blanca

Oh the joys of vacation reading! I picked up a copy of En ausencia de Blanca in Cartagena last January but have only now gotten around to reading it, thanks to A.'s unreserved enthusiasm for it (a link to a PDF of the first chapter of the Spanish original can be found here). Here's a bit from Mr. Orthofer's excellent review of the English translation by Esther Allen:

In her Absence is a nice study in contrasts, and Muñoz Molina presents these two mismatched mates and their backstory very well. The way the story unfolds gives it an air of mystery as well, hinting at parts of what happened all along the way, but only putting all the pieces together as the novel comes to its conclusion. There's something artificial about this story arc, twisted out of shape as it is (this -- in this order -- isn't how one would expect this particular domestic tale to be recounted), but it does allow Muñoz Molina to slowly fill out his portrait of the couple, and it's this he does very well.

In her Absence is an unlikely but still very appealing love story, and a rich characters-study. Muñoz Molina's writing is a pleasure to read, and he's fashioned a small but agreeable little novel here. Recommended.

Highly!

Why we love Ilse

Imagine Diana Barry saying this:

"If I hear of any more meddling and sneaking I'll slit your throats, and rip out your hearts, and tear your eyes out. Yes, and I'll cut off your ears and wear them pinned on my dress."

Confronting the uncanny

[This is my second post in the Emily of New Moon discussion over at Blogging Anne of Green Gables.]

I'm up to Chapter 14 ("Fancy Fed") and have so many notes I'm going to try to group them by theme. I think this is also pretty telling of my sense of the differences between Anne and Emily. The former had me merely keeping track of her literary allusions, the latter is leading me into slightly darker territory and urging me to do a little more than simply copy quotations. All is not "sweetness and light" here. Perhaps that is one of the reasons Anne has so many more readers?

In reading about "the flash" I'm reminded of the sudden stabs of "joy" that C.S. Lewis described as beginning in his early childhood. Without going too deeply into it, he later linked it to the German idea of Sehnsucht (or "longing") that was an aspect of German Romanticism and a key part of the work of Novalis (particularly, the "blue flower"), who (incidently) hugely influenced George MacDonald (the Scottish author of At the Back of the North Wind and many many other things (Tori Amos is said to be currently working on the music to a stage adaptation of The Light Princess)--Lewis Carroll credits him with giving him the courage to have Alice's Adventures in Wonderland published). Of course, Lewis was heavily influenced by MacDonald as well.

Anyway, what's important for now is just to keep in mind this sense of something "other" that illuminates and inspires Emily at unexpected times.

Now. Aside from the trauma of the death of her father and sudden changes in her life, the first glimpse Emily gets of something truly strange is when Cousin Jimmy is showing her around his garden (in Chapter 7, "The Book of Yesterday"):

Emily's heart swelled with pride.

"It's a noble house," she said.

"And what about my garden?" demanded Cousin Jimmy jealousy [sic].

"It's fit for a queen," said Emily, gravely and sincerely.

Cousin Jimmy nodded, well pleased, and then a strange sound crept into his voice and an odd look into his eyes.

"There is a spell woven round this garden. The blight shall spare it and the green worm pass it by. Drought dares not invade it and the rain comes here most gently."

Emily took an involuntary step backward--she almost felt like running away. But now Cousin Jimmy was himself again.

This happens throughout the books--Cousin Jimmy's "spells" are attributed to the fact that he nearly died after being accidentally knocked into a well as a child (by Aunt Elizabeth). He's never been the same since...and also composes poetry, which he keeps "in his head" and will recite only "when the spirit moves him."

And then we come to Chapter 10 ("Growing Pains"). I don't want to describe too much of the story for those who have not yet read it, but Emily is about to have her hair cut off against her will:

Aunt Elizabeth returned with the scissors; they clicked suggestively as she opened them; that click, as if by magic, seemed to loosen something--some strange formidable power in Emily's soul. She turned deliberately around and faced her aunt. She felt her brows drawing together in an unaccustomed way--she felt an uprush as from unknown depths of some irresistible surge of energy.

"Aunt Elizabeth," she said, looking straight at the lady with the scissors, "my hair is not going to be cut off. Let me hear no more of this."

An amazing thing happened to Aunt Elizabeth. She turned pale--she laid the scissors down--she looked aghast for one moment at the transformed or possessed child before her--and then for the first time in her life Elizabeth Murray turned tail and fled--literally fled--to the kitchen.

"What is the matter, Elizabeth?" cried Laura, coming in from the cook-house.

"I saw--father--looking from her face," gasped Elizabeth, trembling. "And she said, 'Let me hear no more of this'--just as he always said it--his very words."

Emily overheard her and ran to the sideboard mirror. She had had, while she was speaking, an uncanny feeling of wearing somebody else's face instead of her own.

She is also frightened of what has happened, especially since it's completely involuntary. She can't assume "the Murray look" when she wants to.

Of course, something else happens that enables Aunt Elizabeth to get back at Emily, and she is "locked in the spare room and told that she must stay there till bedtime."

It's really interesting to do a parallel reading of this scene with the famous one in Jane Eyre. There are a lot of similarities: the dark room, the large bed, the fact that people have died there, the type of fear that invades the souls of these two young girls, etc. But where Jane passes out, Emily climbs out the window.

What I want to point out is that in describing the room, Montgomery adds something else:

Worst of all, right across the room from her, high up on top of the black wardrobe, was a huge, stuffed, white Arctic owl, staring at her with uncanny eyes.

There's that word again. I've checked with this handy "search" feature and Montgomery uses the word "uncanny" at least eight times--the first two within three or four pages of each other. (Also, you can find "possessed" at least five times and "possess" three. But this search tool is not perfect because it misses all of the uses of these words. For example, it says that there are no instances of "possession," although it's right there in Chapter 13.)

This part of Emily's story strongly reminds me of one of the better digressions in Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves (or at least, one of the few I still remember, having read the book about seven years ago). It begins with the contemplation of the word "uncanny" and extends into a long quotation from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time:

In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: "the nothing and nowhere". But here "uncanniness" also means "not-being-at home."

The narrator quoting Heidegger then picks up the thread and says,

Nevertheless regardless of how extensive his analysis is here, Heidegger still fails to point out that unheimlich when used as an adverb means "dreadfully," "awfully," "heaps of," and "an awful lot of." Largeness has always been a condition of the weird and unsafe; it is overwhelming, too much or too big. Thus that which is uncanny or unheimlich is neither homey nor protective, nor comforting nor familiar. It is alien, exposed, and unsettling [...].

I also came across another exploration of this word in my academic reading. This is from J. Hillis Miller's essay, "The Critic as Host" (in specifically referring to work by Thackeray and Hardy):

These sad love stories of a domestic affection which nevertheless introduces the uncanny, the alien, the parasitical into the closed economy of the home, the Unheimlich into the Heimlich, no doubt describe well enough the way some people may feel about the relation of a 'deconstructive' interpretation to 'the obvious or univocal meaning'. The parasite is destroying the host. The alien has invaded the house [...].

The editors added a footnote to "Unheimlich" and explain that it's "the German word for 'uncanny'. Miller implies that Heimlich means 'homely'. Heim is indeed the German word for 'home', but heimlich means 'secret'. For once Miller seems to have underestimated the duplicity of language."

Wheels within wheels...

And I suddenly remember that both the Emily books and Jane Eyre each contain decidedly uncanny events that help resolve their respective plots.

It may seem that I'm exaggerating these darker themes and a "normal" reader wouldn't really notice them so much. But as a girl reading these books, I remember being creeped out a lot...especially as the series progressed. I can't separate this current reading of the first Emily book from my knowledge of the last two, and I particularly notice how skilfully Montgomery has set the stage for what comes later. Forgive the comparison, but an example is what Rowling has done with the world of Harry Potter. People, places, and objects are present in the first book that take on greater (and darker) significance as the books progress, but because of the protagonists' age and the newness of everything, the unsuspecting reader takes it all as a matter of course. All the more reason why the subsequent unfolding of events seems so revelatory.

The miracle of reading

There have been petty complaints that David Markson has written the same book one too many times, but The Last Novel is a revelation. He could do this sort of thing forever and each time it would be new again. There are hundreds of worlds within this collection of carefully chosen lines. I always come away from his work with a vibrant sense of the endless possibilities of life and literature.

Turning from the last page back to the first launched me adrift in silent contemplation...because it's not only clever, but probing and compassionate as well.

Here are a few bits from the many on various aspects of reading:

     The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.
     Announced Petronius.

     You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.
     Flaubert put it.

     The report that to keep him from sitting with a book for sixteen hours a day, Edmund Wilson's parents bought him a baseball uniform. Which he happily put on--and sat in with a book for sixteen hours a day.

     Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.
     Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.

     Somewhat similarly, Roddy Doyle. A complete waste of time--Finnegans Wake.
     Though in his instance at least acknowledging that he had read only three pages.

     Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
     The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

     I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head--it harmonises the soul.
     Said Laurence Sterne.

Call her "Em'ly" at your own risk

[This is my first contribution to the Emily of New Moon discussion over at Blogging Anne of Green Gables]

I first read the Emily books as a teenager living in Colombia and was struck by the subtle sense of danger that's threaded through them. I've mentioned that although I've always considered Anne a friend, I personally identify more with Emily--not because she seems more "human" or has more faults (which certainly is an argument that could be made), but because the world in which she lives is more hazardous; hence, real. We never really fear for Anne in the various environments and "scrapes" in which she finds herself, but Emily's situation is much more precarious. The physical setting of New Moon and the fragile condition of her internal state deepen the reader's concern. Plus, Emily's world is simply darker... By the time you hit Emily's Quest, you wonder whether Montgomery was influenced by Villette in evoking the novel's tone. (In her journals, she mentions not being able to forgive Charlotte for the ending--but it would be interesting to compare the dates to see if this was before or after the last Emily book was published.)

I'm reading this one more slowly and am only at Chapter 7 (it's hard for me to slow down once I start rereading these books!). I don't think I'll list the literary allusions in the same way I did with Anne, but I do plan on mentioning them. Aside from the clear references to The Pilgrim's Progress and the Song of Solomon (her comments about the former always make me smile because they're so true!), I also suspect that George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind may have inspired the "Wind Woman." (I easily imagine Emily flying away with her like Diamond did.)

I was also reminded of Jane Eyre (which I am almost positive influenced these novels). It begins with this exchange with Ellen Greene:

"I don't think I want Aunt Ruth to take me," said Emily deliberately, after a moment's reflection.

"Well, you won't have the choosing likely. You ought to be thankful to get a home anywhere. Remember you're not of much importance."

"I am important to myself," cried Emily proudly.

I was immediately reminded of one of Jane's famous lines to Rochester:

"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

I have some thoughts about "the flash" as well, but I'll save them for another post. I look forward to reading other thoughts on this brilliant little book.

Misreading Coetzee

At Matilda, Perry Middlemiss has posted a couple of reactions to J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year. In my opinion, the NewsBlaze review completely misses the point and even misidentifies the author with the narrator:

First of all, the desultoriness with which the author hops from one topic to another - thematically unrelated - topic destroys the book's coherence. Few of the topics are developed to a thought-arousing level and the author's person continues to overshadow his views.

"First of all," the reviewer seems to be unaware of the quite obvious Nabokov reference. The character "C" is writing brief mini-essays for a collection entitled Strong Opinions. It's too obvious, but I'll say it anyway: they're "thematically related" in that they are all "strong opinions." Also, the novel's coherence is located in the parallel narratives and the interplay between C's "opinions" and what takes place in the story's action. The plot and the essay portions of the text are inextricably intertwined.

That also holds for the story in which the characters feel like 'voice generators' for communicating the author's mind and not as palpable human figures. There is no climax and the book remains as plain at the end as at the very beginning.

I probably shouldn't even be wasting my time in addressing such an egregious oversight. There is most definitely a "climax" and for the reviewer to have turned such a blind eye to the evolution of the two principal characters makes this "review" completely baseless and causes its writer to come off as sounding callous. On the contrary, the eloquent compassion with which Coetzee writes is quite moving.

Labeling the book as 'fiction' is another point that leaves the book at a loss. There is no 'true' fiction in the book. Of course, a critic should be pointing to the publisher, and not the author, for erroneous categorization of the book.

Aside from the fact that I don't know what "'true' fiction" is supposed to mean, the misidentification of the author with his narrator is unforgivable in a piece of writing that purports to be a literary "review" in a news publication.

Then there is the format of the book - three different modes of speech on the same page - that seriously interferes with the reader's struggle to connect coherently to the content.

But the reader can choose how he or she reads it, which lends strength to Coetzee's structural device. I was delighted at how, for nearly the entire first half of the novel, Coetzee has each segment come to a full stop on each page. This made it easy for me to read it one page at a time. But by the time the central crisis emerges, the sections are no longer self-contained. The text of each section spills over into subsequent pages, prompting a reconsideration of the reading strategy and enabling the reader to confront the shift in the action. It's cleverly done and mirrors the urgent pace at which events occur and the manner in which C begins to lose control of the rigidity of his thoughts and becomes more open to "softer" views.

Reviewers don't have to love the books they write about. But they should (at the very least!) understand what it is the author is attempting and discuss the work on those terms.

Sound familiar?

Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about 'a new Silas Weekley' or 'a new Lavinia Fitch' exactly as they talked about 'a new brick' or 'a new hair-brush'. They never said 'a new book by' whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

from The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, published in 1951

Transcending time

Once upon a time I contemplated taking a master's course on William Blake. There were so many aspects to his work that my undergrad English classes inspired me to explore, and I wanted to keeping learning about him. His theories on art and the imagination seemed to link him more closely to the metaphysical poets than the Romantics (in my humble opinion), and having been lucky enough to see an exhibit of his work at the Tate, I wanted to understand more about his holistic vision of reality.

I bought a used copy of Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake a few years ago, but have only now begun reading it.

Holy crap.

I'm only on page 68, but my mind has been officially blown. Frye is examining everything I've ever suspected about Blake, offering a refreshing look at one of the most misunderstood poets in the English language. The timeliness of Frye's work is also compelling. As he says in the preface,

I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.

Frye penned this passage in 1969. There's a special urgency to what he has to say as well, and this beautifully wise work of literary criticism (that also encompasses philosophy and theology) deserves a wide readership today. I look forward to continuing my journey through this spectacular book.

Recognition

From Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (see Literary Mama for an excellent review):

Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar: prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a previous civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly and without misunderstanding.

Midweek links

• The Bat Segundo Show may be no more. I can't even begin to talk about what this podcast has meant to me--especially as someone who lives outside the U.S. The loss is incalculable. Update, 18 July: There's still hope--lots of it.
  
• Open Book, a collaborative online "writers on writing" project by Slate and NYU, posts its maiden episode: an insightful interview with Junot Díaz. Although the interview feels a little rushed, I loved how openly in debt he is to his reading. While working on a draft, he thinks of the books he loves and if they would say, "This page can't hang out with us"--into the trash it goes. (via The Millions)
• Matthew Tiffany quotes from a recent interview with the inimitable Wendell Berry.
• Miriam Burstein discusses Jennifer Egan's The Keep, perfectly describing my own frustrations with it.
• Anne Fernald reads Woolf's letters and has her grandmother to thank.
  
• Tim of Baby Got Books questions potential misreadings of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances.

Rue du Départ

Notes on the fifth and final part of Against the Day (see also Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four).

~ p. 1074: Quite an eye-catching Freudian slip: "Reef, Stray, and Ljubica returned to the U.S. pretending to be Italian immigrants." Of course, it's not Stray (Reef's first wife), it's Yashmeen. Which makes me wonder if there's an alternate version to this story that didn't get completely edited out or if it was simply a proofreader trying to have some fun...

~ p. 1076: A worthwhile topic:

Jesse brought home as an assignment from school "write an essay on What It Means To Be An American."

"Oboy, oboy." Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father used to get just before heading off for some dynamite-related activities. "Let's see that pencil a minute."

"Already done." What Jesse had ended up writing was,

It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.

"That's what they call the 'topic sentence'?"

"That's the whole thing."

"Oh."

It came back with a big A+ on it. "Mr. Becker was at the Cour d'Alene back in the olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that."

~ p. 1077: A recurring theme:

"The world came to an end in 1914."

~ p. 1078: Kit is confronted with

a startling implication of Zermelo's Axiom of Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun.

"Because one emits light and the other doesn't, don't you think."

Kit was taken aback. "I don't know."

He spent awhile contemplating this. Zermelo had been a docent at Göttingen when Kit was there and, like Russell, had been preoccupied with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. He was also notorious around the beer halls for a theory that no expedition could ever reach either of the poles, because the amount of whisky needed was directly proportional to the tangent of the latitude. Polar latitude being 90°, this meant a value approaching infinity--Q.E.D. It didn't surprise Kit much that the peculiar paradox should be traceable in some way back to Zermelo.

~ p. 1081: Here is more evidence and an expansion of my theory from Part Three, p. 596 that the Afghani dirhan around Yashmeen's neck is the "ancient coin" of the novel's cover. Lord Overlunch explains Kit's visit to Shambhala via a certain stamp:

"I like to look at these all carefully with the loupe at least once a week, and today I noticed something different about this ten-dirhan design, and wondered if possibly someone, some rival, had crept in here while I was out and substituted a variant. But of course I found the change immediately, the one face that was missing, your own, I know it well by now, it is, if you don't mind my saying so, the face of an old acquaintance...."

"But I wasn't..."

"Well, well. A twin, perhaps."

I still tend to think that the dirhan is Yashmeen's and the image is Shambhala after all.

~ p. 1084: The Chums' wives are going to have babies and suddenly the writing has switched to the present tense:

As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity--it is an acceptance of sky.

Glorious life continues...as the novel ends.

~ p. 1085: "They fly toward grace."

Against the Day

Notes on the fourth part of Against the Day (see also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three).

Since I've finished, it's been interesting to think about how the multitude of characters and locations actually serve to diminish distances. Yes, it's a sprawling, expansive, huge novel--but reading large chunks at once really left me with the impression of the tightly knitted, interconnected nature of global community. Nothing happens in isolation, but is a consequence of other occurrences, decisions, and seemingly "random" events.

It's also interesting that although the focal point of the novel is World War I, we never actually see it take place. Rather, the narrative deals with the events that lead up to it and then the aftermath.

~ p. 735: Dally's dilemma about Kit:

What did she want? Wasn't this just Merle all over again? That alchemy, the magic crystals, the obsessive assaults on the Mysteries of Time, she'd really believed once that she had to get away from that before it drove her as crazy as her Pa, and now, would you just look, here she was getting it back, here was another lunatic, somebody this time leaving her, to go search for an invisible city over the edge of the world.

~ p. 738: Andrea Tancredi rails against the massive buying and selling of art (what Scarsdale Vibe is up to, because after all, everything comes back to chasing light):

"It's not the price tag," Tancredi cried, "it's what comes after--investment, reselling, killing something born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death."

~p. 744: An artist's redemption:

He was a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists, too much so for the world, even the seen world they were trying to redeem one little rectangle of canvas at a time.

~ p. 749: From Yashmeen's letter to her "father":

"For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it, and the tragic hour into which it is passing?

"Mathematics once seemed the way--the internal life of numbers came as a revelation to me, perhaps as it might have to a Pythagorean apprentice long ago in Crotona--a reflection of some less-accessible reality, through close study of which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given world."

~ p. 757: An amusing exchange:

"Fond of the English, are you sir."

"I love Gweat Bwitain! Lord Salisbuwy is my wole model!"

~ p. 761: The curse of Tamerlane's tomb

~ p. 762: "Invisible birds, collecting against the night, sang boisterously."

~ p. 777: Lieutenant Prance sets Kit straight on the matter of American history--how political or economic motives are exposed as religious ones.

~ p. 779: The Tunguska event becomes one of the central moments of the novel, affecting all characters and upsetting the balance of nature. It's fascinating how Pynchon explores the possible implications of a historical fact, tying together the various mathematical theories and ideas that coalesce throughout the story. Reading this list of literary references to the event, I was a little surprised by the connection that is made:

Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, puts forth a complex explanation for the Tunguska event, centering around the idea that an expedition near the North Pole unearthed a sentient geological being which, after being transported to the Tunguska area, proceeded to unleash rage-fueled destruction on the humans that transported him.

It looks like I'm going to have to reread it (someday), because I did not pick up on that at all. (This probably has something to do with the fact that it took me nearly a year to make it half-way, and then only a few weeks to finish the rest.)

~ p.782: Someone's conclusion about the Event's cause:

"Exactly what I'm saying. Time-travel isn't free, it takes energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from the future."

~ p. 793: Shambhala is revealed in the aftermath of the Event, but then so are the Chums:

What it would take the boys longer to understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world, and that for the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala, their protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before the earthbound day.

This is another thing I didn't fully realize: the Chums of Chance are fictional characters to this world of "real" people. Fictions within the fiction, finally exposed.

~ p. 794: The theory that Tesla had something to do with it is discussed. (The Tom Swift reference is particularly funny.)

~ p. 805: "As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucinaion, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day."

~ p. 809: A nice little history lesson describing the events leading up to WWI. (Much more intelligible than what gets stuck into history texts these days.)

~ p. 815-16: Yashmeen on the verge of her revelation:

Just for the instant, the matter was illuminated, unequivocally, something as obvious as Ramanujan's Formula--no, something of which Ramanujan's Formula was a special case--revealed why Riemann should have hypothesized one-half as the real part of every ζ(0), why he had needed to, at just that point in his thinking...she was released into her past, haunting her old self, almost close enough to touch--and then of course it was gone again and she was more immediately concerned with the loss of her hat [...].

I love Peter Keough's idea that the formula of the Quarternionist's beloved Hamilton (i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1) "relates to the structure of the book, each term in the equation applicable to each of the novel’s five sections". I think there's a lot more of this sort of thing going on, and (again) I'd love to read a mathematician's take on it.

~ p. 845: The European Question, "this bad daydream toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified."

~ p. 867: The description of Penhallow's painting, The Iron Gateway, expresses "his meditation on the fate of Europe" and depicts "shadowy multitudes trooped toward a vanishing line over which broke a hellish radiance." I'm immediately reminded of the vision of the future that the Chums saw from the Time machine--fictional fictional characters peering into the horror of reality.

~ p. 892: So there is doom and gloom, and then this:

"Who, 'Pert? Why she's the most naïvely trusting person I know."

"The woman gets jealous of oatmeal, Hunter." Dally had recently walked in on Ruperta with her face inches from a bowl of steaming porridge, addressing it in a low, vicious snarl [...] while her four-year-old niece Clothilda sat patiently nearby with a spoon and a milk jug.

~ p. 896: Ruperta nearly goes the way of Remedios the Beauty.

~ p. 930: "Frank respected this--who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love."

~ p. 934: Anarchists' Golf reminds me of Calvinball.

~ p. 936-37: The map depicting the Renfrew/Werfner "Interdikt" phosgene trap that Lew discovers in London falls into the hands of Cyprian, Yashmeen, and Reef:

Cyprian had been closely scanning the map with a Coddington lens. "Here then, the line-segment of interest seems to be labeled 'Critical Line'--Yashmeen, isn't that Riemann talk?"

She looked. "Except that this one's horizontal, and drawn on a grid of latitude and longitude, instead of real against imaginary values--where Riemann said that all the zeroes of the ζ-function will be found."

The connections don't simply describe each other, they infiltrate meaning.

~ p. 942: Jenny:

"This is our own age of exploration," she declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?"

~ p. 947: Henry Adams crops up again: there are "dynamos" connected to the Interdikt, tied to the eventual destruction of Europe. (I really do need to find out what else Pynchon has said about him. It's amazing how necessary "The Dynamo and the Virgin" is to understanding what he's up to in this book.)

~ p. 953: The Interdikt's true weapon:

"It seems that isn't a gas weapon, after all," said the motoros. "'Phosgene' is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent. [...] From military experience with searchlights, it was widely known how effectively light at that candle-power could produce helplessness and fear. The next step was to find away to project it as a stream of destructive energy."

"Fear in lethal form," said Cyprian. "And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once--"

"A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula."

~ p. 957: "The Manichæan aspect had grown ever stronger--the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by the unyielding doubleness of everything. Part of the discipline for a postulant was to remain acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the presented world."

~ p. 960: Father Ponko:

"When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as 'taking away' his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world."

~ p. 973: "Her love for Ljubica being impenetrable and indivisible as a prime number, other loves must be accordingly reevaluated."

~ p. 983: The meteorites of Mexico: "a gigantic one known as the Chupaderos, whose fragments, weighing in all perhaps fifty tons, had been taken away to the Capital in 1893." Which, of course, was back when our story began, at the World's Fair in Chicago.

~ p. 991-92: Once again, light as flesh:

"In the same way," amplified Günther, "that our Savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh among Christian peoples. It is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind."

~ p. 1018: The Chums of Chance "had voted, finally, to disafilliate."

~ p. 1020: "The corollary, Chick had worked out long ago, being that each star and planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy."

~ p. 1023-24: Miles remembers Ryder Thorn and what he wanted him to remember in Flanders, before the beginning of the end:

"Those poor innocencts," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at the beginning of this...they must have been boys, so much like us.... They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand 'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative--unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death."

This novel is (among many other things) a lament for World War I--something the world has never recovered from.

~ p. 1036: Living pictures:

"See, every photographic subject moves," Roswell explained, "even if it's standing still. It breathes, light bounces off, something. Snapping a photograph is like what the math professors call 'differentiating' an equation of motion--freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close. So we figured--if shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primative and release it back into action...even back to life..."

~ p. 1048: The potato-salad recipe discussion reminded me of Carl Solomon and the infamous food-fight incident at CCNY around the time (I think) Pynchon was at Cornell.

~ p. 1057: Lake's fate:

Instead she was alone with the sort of recurring dream a long-suffering movie heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant at last.

~ p. 1062: A technological advancement is simply the means by which love can be communicated.

Bilocations

Notes on the third part of Against the Day (see also Part One and Part Two).

~ p. 431: Light as a "secret determinant of history"

~ p. 437: Using Iceland spar to read by...and the polarization of light in time as well as space

~ p. 438: The Manichæans make an appearance:

"Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy, your mother's cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin--all these for the devout Manichæan are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness."

"But it's everything that matters," protested Chick Counterfly.

Indeed. I could go on about how the Manichæan heresy has invaded fundamentalist Christianity, causing many "Christers" to miss the entire point of the Incarnation and the holiness of day-to-day existence...but I won't. Chick said it all.

~ p. 452-53: On the nature of Time (beneath a whirling tornado)

~ p. 456: Roswell and Merle discuss the lure of light--and its future in the movies, "'the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock,'" how Time is "'vulnerable to the force of gravity,'" and the need of making gravity "'impervious to time.'" Merle asks why, and

Roswell shrugged. "It's that one-way business again. They're both forces that act in one direction only. Gravity pulls along the third dimension, up to down, time pulls along the fourth, birth to death."

"Rotate something through space-time so it assumes all positions relative to the one-way vector 'time.'"

"There you go."

~ p. 458: The connection to "'all those Æther folks'" is pointed out: "'We were all probably on to somethin then, didn't know it.'"

~ p. 471: Pynchon draws an interesting parallel between the mothers Mayva and Erlys (who ran off with a magician):

"All the time we were growing up," Frank said, "you wanted to run away and join the carnival?"

"Yes, and there I was with all o' you, right in the carnival, and didn't even know it." And he hoped he'd always be able to recall the way she laughed then.

~ p. 476 & 503: He has "Wall o' Death, Missouri, built around the remains of a carnival, one of many inspired by the old Chicago Fair" where our story begins. Have things come full circle? On p. 503,

The world, since the Chicago Fair of 1893, had undergone a sudden craze for vertical rotation on the grand scale. The cycle, Yashmeen speculated, might only seem reversible, for once to the top and down again, one would be changed "forever." Wouldn't one.

~ p. 498: Yashmeen's preoccupation with Riemann's "Zeta-function problem" has proven to be one of the most thought-provoking elements of the book. I know virtually nothing about higher math, but Pynchon has got me thinking that I'm capable of filling in the blanks of explanations he all but spells out. There are certain connections that I'm just not making...but then, Yashmeen herself is on the verge of understanding as well:

[S]he was not quite able to ignore the question, almost as if he were whispering to her, of why Riemann had simply asserted the figure of one-half at the outset instead of deriving it later.... "One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this," he wrote, "but I have put aside the search...after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective of my investigation."

But didn't that then imply...the tantalizing possibility was just out of reach...

...and suppose that at Göttingen [...] he had actually been unable not to go back to it, haunted as anyone since, back to the maddeningly simple series he had found in Gauss and expanded to take account of the whole "imaginary" mirror-world which even Ramanujan here at Trinity had ignored until Hardy pointed it out to him--revisited, in some way relighted the scene, making it possible to prove the conjecture as rigorously as anyone might wish...

(And it's only now that David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk goes into my TBR list...)

~ p. 525: Around the time I reached this page, I heard a reference made to Quaternions on Futurama and realized (I'm embarrassed to admit) that Pynchon did not just make them up. In fact, most of the fun of posting these notes comes from the discoveries of the real personalities and concepts that Pynchon writes about. It's been quite an education. I'd really love to read a mathematician's take on this novel.

~ p. 534: A Quaternioneer's lament:

"Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they know of God's intention--that space be simple, three-dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term, and a scalar as well--simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend."

~ pp. 535-36: There is no way I can not quote this:

"Heaviside was once termed 'the Walt Whitman of English Physics'--"

"What...excuse me...does that mean?"

"Open question. Some have found in Heaviside a level of passion or maybe just energy, beyond the truculence already prevailing among the different camps in those days."

"Well if Heaviside's the Whitman," remarked a British attendee nearby in a striking yellow ensemble, "who's the Tennyson, you see?"

"Clerk Maxwell, wouldn't you say?" suggested someone else, as others joined in.

"Making Hamilton I imagine the Swinburne."

"Yes and who'd be Wordsworth then?"

"Grassmann!"

"I say, what an amusing game. And Gibbs? The Longfellow?"

"Is there an Oscar Wilde, by any chance?"

"Let's all go to the Casino!" someone invisible screamed.

~ pp. 538-39: More of Pynchon's little jokes:

"Cambridge personality Bertie ('Mad Dog') Russell observed," observed Barry Nebulay, "that most of Hegel's arguments come down to puns on the word 'is.'"

Due to its "'altogether disquieting square root of minus one,'"

"If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the 'real' world, change your length, enter an 'imaginary' reference system, rotate up to three different ways, and return to 'reality' a new person. Or vector."

From one who practices this:

"Each time I become somebody else. It is like reincarnation on a budget, without the element of karma to worry about."

~ p. 543: The phrase "against the day" has a variety of meanings and interpretations, depending on when it appears in the story. This seems to be a central one:

"It's a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn't make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting."

~ p. 554: Ryder Thorn visits Miles from the future and tells him that

"Flanders will be the mass grave of History."

"Well."

"And that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately."

"The Flemish."

"The world."

The foreshadowing of WWI runs all through the novel, but this is one of the more specific moments.

~ p. 558: The inevitable next step emerges: "'A weapon based on Time.'"

~ pp. 564-5: The terrible weapon is described and it involves light, lenses, and calcite (Iceland spar).

~ p. 571: Luca Zombini's process of creating doubles is a result of a three-dimensional mirror:

"We pass from a system of three purely spatial axes to one with four--space plus time. In this way time enters the effect. The doubles you report having produced are actually the original subjects themselves, slightly displaced in time."

~ p. 577: Hunter Penhallow agonizes:

"Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?"

~ pp. 579-80: Penhallow on art (to Dally):

"The body, it's another way to get past the body."

"To the spirit behind it--"

"But not to deny the body--to reimagine it. Even"--nodding over at the Titian on the far wall--"if it's 'really' just different kinds of greased mud smeared on cloth--to reimagine it as light."

This leads into a discussion of a story about Jesus from the "Infancy Gospel of Thomas" that reminds Dally of "that Pentecost story in Acts of the Apostles":

"Apostles are meeting in a house in Jerusalem, you'll recall, Holy Ghost comes down like a mighty wind, tongues of fire and all, the fellas come out and start talking to the crowd outside, who've all been jabbering away in different tongues, there's Romans and Jews, Egyptians and Arabians, Mesopotamians and Cappadocians and folks from east Texas, all expecting to hear just the same old Galilean dialect--but instead this time each one is amazed to hear those Apostles speaking to him in his own language."

Hunter saw her point. "Yes, well it's redemption, isn't it, you expect chaos, you get order instead. Unmet expectations. Miracles."

~ p. 596: Is this describing the coin shown on the jacket cover and the page preceding Part One?

Today [Yashmeen] wore an ancient coin, pierced and simply suspended from a fine silver chain around that ever-fascinating neck.... "It's an Afghani dirhan, from the early days of the Ghaznivid Empire. He gave it to me, for luck."

Is Pynchon slipping us a good-luck charm against the day?

~ p. 613: Lamont Replevin and his religious persuasion:

"They worship it, this empty space, it's their highest form of worship. This volume, or I suppose nonvolume, of pure Akaša--being the Sanskrit for what we'd call Æther, the element closest to the all-pervading Atman, from which everything else has arisen--which in Greek obviously then becomes 'Chaos,' and so down to van Helmont in his alchemist's workshop, who being Dutch writes the opening fricative as a G instead of a Chi, giving us Gas, our own modern Chaos, our bearer of sound and light, the Akaša flowing from our sacred spring, the local Gasworks. Do you wonder that for some the Gas Oven is worshipped at, as a sort of shrine?"

~ p. 616: Yashmeen:

"Lenin himself is said to be writing a gigantic book now, attempting to refute the 'fourth dimension,' his position being, from what I can gather, that the Tsar can only be overthrown in three."

~ p. 633: Another joke at Bertrand's expense--a certain mural depicts: "a mischievously hydrophobic Bertrand Russell actually entering and departing the scene, depending on the viewer's position and velocity." Yes, that's right--rabid Russell.

~ p. 675: Vectors fail Kit: they "had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers."

~ pp. 678-79: "At the moment the two were on their way to see the comic operetta Waltzing in Whitechapel, or, A Ripping Romance, based loosely, and according to some reviews tastelessly, on the Whitechapel murders of the late '80s."

~ p. 681: This, of course, brings up a whole government conspiracy that links Franz Ferdinand's ascension to Jack the Ripper,

"working under contract. Considering that he disappeared from London around November of '88, and Mayerling was at the end of January '89--time enough for Jack to get to Austria and become familiar with his target, yes?"

"They were shot, Max," protested Werfner with exaggerated gentleness, "not butchered. Jack was not a firearms person, the only similarity is that the list of suspects in the 'Ripper' case is also long enough to populate a small city [...]. Hundreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid--what can this mean?"

"Multiple worlds," blurted Nigel, who had floated in from elsewhere.

"Precisely!" cried the Professor. "The Ripper's 'Whitechapel' was a sort of momentary antechamber in space-time...one might imagine a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories...."

~ pp. 685-86: The Truth about Renfrew and Werfner. Despite all of the clues, I didn't see it coming. The answer to the mystery is even the title of this section of the book (!). And Light is at the heart of it all.

~ pp. 687-88: This extends into the Cohen's explanation:

"We are light, you see, all of light--we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day [...]. When we lost our æthereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to"--grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and forth--"this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light."

He explains how they try to regain

"that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction...." He paused at the door. "Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey."

This is a key to understanding Yashmeen's pseudo-corporeal condition, and reminds me of the Genesis story of man being made "in the image" of God. If he is light, so are we. But it seems that all threads of this novel lead back to this--the fascination with light and its uses (for both good and evil). Again, science and religion weave in and out of the ideas expressed--some supernatural, some science fiction. But Pynchon makes the "fiction" bit seem very possible.

I was also strongly reminded of lines from Edgar Lee Masters' poem, "Emily Sparks":

That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,
May yield to the fire of you,
Till the fire is nothing but light!...
Nothing but light!

~ p. 689: The railroad as the key to the "gigantic ten-miles-to-the-inch wall map of the Balkans," as it defines

"patterns of flow, not only actual but also invisible, potential, and such rates of change as how quickly one's relevant masses can be moved to a given frontier...and beyond that the teleology at work [...]."

Iceland Spar

Notes on the second part of Against the Day (see also Part One). As I continue reading the fourth part, putting down these stray thoughts has really helped me get a better handle on the numerous things Pynchon is up to.

~ p. 125: the mythic "extra man" (someone's doppelgänger?) appears aboard the Inconvenience

~ p. 126: How Iceland spar polarizes light

~ p. 127: "Of course he would leave--that was only fortune-telling--it could not interfere with her love."

~ p. 131: An academic argument for the colonization of Time (and "'additional dimensions beyond the third'"): "'Why not?'"

~ p. 132: The math of Time travel

~ p. 133: The Librarian on Iceland spar:

"It's the genuine article, and the sub-structure of reality. The doubling of the Creation, each image clear and believable.... And you being mathematical gentlemen, it can hardly have escaped your attention that its curious advent into the world occurred within only a few years of the discovery of Imaginary Numbers, which also provided a doubling of the mathematical Creation."

~ p. 143: Throyle explains bilocation and how the shamans' "'notion of time is spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.'" Interestingly, this is also the perspective of light. In other words, if one were traveling at the speed of light, past and future would merge into "a single, timeless instant" (or an eternal now). Light is completely "present"--as well as being both particle and wave.

~ p. 176: Lew and the social invisibles:

There was always some Forty-seventh Street, always some legion of invisible on the one side of the account book, set opposite a handful on the other who were getting very, if not incalculably, rich at their expense.

~ p. 198: "Web found himself crying out the names of his sons. From inside the pain, he was distantly surprised at a note of reproach in his voice, though not sure if it had been out loud or inside his thoughts. He watched the light over the ranges slowly draining away."

~ p. 228: Madame Eskimoff on how she records her séances:

"We take electros of the original wax impressions immediately after every sitting. Part of the routine. I have listened to these tonight already several times, and even if details are here and there obscure, I felt it a grave enough development to summon you here."

I immediately thought of William Gass quoting Rilke:

"The coronal suture of the skull...has...a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder.... What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally...along the coronal suture, for example." At the present time technicians have done something similar for the movement of the heart, so that death is seen as a straight line, or heard as a continuous drone.

It is of course a fanciful project: to fill the world's cracks with needles that will let us hear those cracks speak.

~ p. 237: Anarchists as Trekkies! This is classic Pynchon:

This person 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.

Also acknowledging sci-fi fans as a subversive element?

~ p. 242: Renfrew on Werfner: "'keen-witted but unheimlich'". Thanks to Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, I know that this last word means "uncanny." That whole digression of his about this word was one of the best parts of the book (that and "Echo"). I really should reread it sometime (and toss in The Whalestoe Letters while I'm at it).

~ p. 250: The complex combination of light, Iceland spar, lenses, and mirrors "'reveal the architecture of dream,'" allowing one to see into the Invisible.

~ p. 251: Miles sets them straight (yet again):

"As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church-grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine--to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem."

~ p. 256: Pynchon describes artillery fire as "abolishing Time":

what they saw "now" in the sights was in fact what did not yet exist but what would only be a few seconds from "now"

~ p. 257: More mama jokes:

"Hey, Lindsay, you can still catch 'em if you hurry," taunted Darby.

"Or we might send in pursuit your maternal relation, Suckling, one glimpse of whom should prove more than sufficient fatally to compromise their morale, if not indeed transform them all into masonry--"

"Well, your mother," riposted the readily nettled youth, "is so ugly--"

"Gentlemen," implored Randolph [...]

Apparently, these date back to Shakespeare.

~ p. 306: Merle's idea of Iceland spar's potential is similar to Tesla's ideas for electricity. In this reading, "anarchy" simply means offering something that would make life easier for all--except the Powers That Be.

~ p. 312: "If she was not to be the great lost love of his life, she could've perhaps been the great unlistened-to commentator upon it."

~ p. 323: The true Anarchists revealed as Vibe's bombers.

~ p. 324: Kit's new direction:

"Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his 'Spectral Theory,' which requires a vector space of infinite dimensions. His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time."

~ p. 354-55: Magician Luca Zombini:

"Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to."

His trade also involves strategic uses of the Nicol prism, double refraction, and the ubiquitous Iceland spar, which

"Doubles the image, the two overlap, with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate them in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way, capisci?"

Of course, this creates other problems. Like having multiple versions of the same person roaming the world simultaneously.

~ p. 370: How music trumps Anarchist theory:

"Yet I've noticed the same thing when your band plays--the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain."

"Sure," agreed "Dope," "but you can't call that organization."

"What do you call it?"

"Jass."

~ p. 375: Ewball Oust on Iceland spar in Mexico:

"Espato is what they call it down there. Sometimes you hear espanto, which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending."

"Like looking at somebody through a pure enough specimen and seeing not just the man but his ghost alongside him?"

Ewball regarded Frank with some curiosity. "Plenty occasions for goose bumps down in those drifts as it is. Espantoso, hombre."

~ p. 377: Pynchon invokes Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury:

They climbed up the red-brown mountainside, into sunlight and purple artemisia, where wild dogs wandered the roofless stones, till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds were blown to long, fine parallel streaks, the city below, spread east to west, stunned as if by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor--the passion of Christ, the windless hush...even the stamping mills were silent, even Silver itself taking its day of rest, as if to recognize the price Judas Iscariot received. Sunlight in the trees.

~ p. 391: More Iceland spar: "And there was this deep glow, though not enough ambient light in here to account for it--as if there were a soul harbored within."

~ p. 410: G.K. Chesterton references?:

The boys found their way down to West Symmes Street and into the Ball in Hand, which proved to be a particularly low and disreputable haunt.

For some reason, this line made me think of The Man Who Was Thursday's Gabriel Syme and The Ball and the Cross.

~ p. 415: Does Mr. Ace reveal the true motive of the existence of the Chums of Chance?

"You are not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime?"

The Light Over the Ranges

"What better place for the keepers of the seals and codes to convene?"

I've reached the half-way point of Against the Day. This last line of p. 542's section gives me as good an excuse as any to celebrate the achievement by posting my scribblings thus far. Since reading Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, I've often thought of how she took a kitchen knife to The Making of Americans (in order to make it more manageable) and have considered following her example with Against the Day. But this sage hardback is too lovely--I couldn't bring myself to do it. So my progress is slow...but it is progress!

What follows are musings from the first of its five parts:

~ From the very beginning, with his Thelonious Monk epigraph ("It's always night, or we wouldn't need light") Pynchon lets the reader in on the extended riff that awaits--a jazz-like work of digressions upon multiple themes (the nature of reality, existence, and truth being just the beginning).

~ As I mentioned many moons ago, the first page's mention of the "World's Columbian Exposition" in Chicago made me go back and reread Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (from The Education of Henry Adams). Does anyone know if any comparison of this work has been made to Against the Day? It would make a fascinating essay (or even book!). Electricity would only be the beginning... (I've just discovered this Adams group discussion. In the introductory post, Jennifer Schuessler remarks that "Adams’s ideas of inertia and entropy profoundly influenced Thomas Pynchon". Ah ha! I'll put any further developments into another post.)

~ p. 19: Zip:

"There's lights, but there's sound, too. Mostly in the upper altitudes, where it gets that dark blue in the day-time? Voices calling out together. All directions at once. Like a school choir, only no tune, just these--"

"Warnings," said Riley.

~ p. 20: Penny:

"Nobody saw any projectiles, but there was...a kind of force...energy we could feel, directed personally at us...."

"Somebody out there," Zip said solemnly. "Empty space. But inhabited."

~ p. 24: Miles' confession:

"Sometimes [...] these peculiar feelings will surround me, Lindsay...like the electricity coming on--as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how...how everything fits together, connects. It doesn't last long, though. Pretty soon I'm just back to tripping over my feet again."

~ p. 33: Tesla is bound up in this, of course--his "World-System" of free energy gets the usual reaction:

The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla's name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit.

(This reminds me that I should try to read Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else soon. Her interview at Bat Segundo's was fun to listen to.)

~ p. 34: Of course, Edison's name isn't far behind--also,

"Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan's access to all Tesla's engineering secrets. And he has operatives on the spot [...]".

~ p. 48: The hilarious (previously cited) scuffle with Franz Ferdinand.

~ pp. 49-50: William Blake's Jerusalem makes a logical appearance as an adapted hymn out of "the Workers' Own Songbook." A former professor of mine has a personal theory about Blake pre-envisioning quantum physics in some of his more complex (esoteric?) work. So it makes perfect sense to me that Pynchon generously includes him here. Makes me think that there's much more method to his "madness" than this sprawling novel divulges at first glance.

~ p. 58: Tesla's experimentation linked to "the luminiferous Æther"? The substance "'which can vibrate light...be sheared into positive and negative electricity'" and takes the form of a "religious question."

~ p. 60: Interesting to compare Lew and the Anarchists and their "church" (and Blake hymns) with Merle and the Ætherist community--"maybe as close as Merle ever came to joining a church."

~ p. 73: Merle becomes "sidekicks" with a "ball lightning" named Skip. Light communicating...

~ p. 97: Kit Traverse works for Tesla and considers himself a "Vectorist."

~ p. 99: Kit sees into

the Invisible, and a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, "Water falls, electricity flows--one flow becomes another, and thence into light. So is altitude transformed, continuously, to light."

This becomes a life-altering experience and the

vectoral expressions in the books, surface integrals and potential functions and such, would henceforth figure as clumsier repetitions of the truth he now possessed in his personal interior, certain and unshakable.

The faith-like language Pynchon uses suits the work perfectly. It blends well with the idea of "Word" being at the beginning of existence--Word and Light both taking on continuous reverberations of meaning in Pynchon's universe.

~ p. 104: Tesla to Kit:

"The same began happening to me also at your age," Tesla recalled. "When I could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it's always finding the time, isn't it."

"Sure, always something.... Chores, something."

"Tithing," Tesla said, "giving back to the day."

~ p. 108: "As, no longer named, one by one the islets vanished from the nautical charts, and one day from the lighted world as well, to rejoin the Invisible."

~ p. 110: Miles drifts...

Wandering corridors of the spectral, Miles had begun, increasingly, to alarm his shipmates. Mealtimes too often were apt to revert to exercises in deep, even mortal, uncertainty, depending where Miles had been that day to procure his ingredients. Sometimes his cooking was pure cordon bleu, sometimes it was inedible, due to excursions of spirit whose polarity was never entirely predictable from one day to the next. Not that Miles would deliberately set out to wreck the soup or burn the meat loves--he seldom got that overt, tending more to forgetful omissions, or misreadings of quantity and timing.

~ p. 114: The first mention of Iceland spar:

Ordinary light, passing through this mineral, was divided into two separate rays, termed "ordinary" and "extraordinary," a property which the Japanese scientists had then exploited to create an additional channel of optical communication wherever in the layered structure of the pearl one of the thousands of tiny, cunningly-arranged crystals might occur. When illuminated in a certain way, and the intricately refracted light projected upon a suitable surface, any pearl so modified could thus be made to yield a message.

I hope to post on part two ("Iceland Spar") later this week--more bread crumbs to help me find my way back to present meaning.