Lawrence.com Mobile

Exactly.

"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

"I'm sure MINE only works one way," Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen."

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

Welcome back, kid.

You don't present yrself as much of a reader, but I encourage you to take a stab at _Against The Day_. Pynchon always rewards the effort.

Rob:

One of the great reads of my life, maybe as good as _GR_.

I don't think the post contains any spoilers, but I understand yr reluctance. I always assume w/ TP that I'm going to miss at least a quarter of the references, and that's probably the case w/ _ATD_, esp since I've not yet read _Mason and Dixon_, but even given that, one of the great reads of my life.

I think the rvws were tepid because Penguin sent the book to critics only two weeks prior to pub date, which in the case of a 1,000-page Pynchon novel is asking for trouble. It's such an odd decision that I think it must have been done on TP's instructions.

I don't pretend to understand the structure. I think a fully informed literary appreciation of _Against The Day_ will have to wait until the novel is reviewed by a critic who understands both American letters and German mathematics, a [John Updike+Bertrand Russell] type who can make all the math stuff seem easy as peach pie. When that critic appears, I won't be a bit surprised if it turns out that the plot discontinuities in _ATD_ are actually the result of the novel being constructed in strict accordance w/ an algorithm built of complex numbers.

It’s quite possible that I’m full of hooey on this point. The characteristic error of analysis is to percieve patterns that are not there.

Rob:

Do you have a favorite character so far?

I grew quite fond of Kit, and I fell for Yashmeen and Dally right away. I always connect w/ Pynchon's women.

Pugmax is stupendous, and better read than I.

MoL:

Thanks. I cut it way down. There was a short period when it reached 3,500 wds, but sound counsel intervened.

The math stuff is interesting, though, and I think central to the novel's structure.

The removal of the kid's posts has left the comments section looking oddly Pynchonian, a record of conversation in which one participant is only partly present, here and not-here, as if locked in another universe that aligns w/ ours only occasionally....

Pugmax would have the proper answer, I'm sure.

I really encourage all readers to pick up _Against The Day_. It is the only novel known to me that is about light.

PJ:
I disdain muzzles of all stripes and have made considerable noise to that effect 'round here. Had I been consulted, I would've told staff that I prefer the posts remain.

The decision to delete was made by site administrators who (I'm told) have a long history w/ the kid in question; this is apparently not the first time he's been kicked to the curb. As the poster himself observed (correctly) on another board, l.com is a private entity operated by the World Company, which possesses the unambiguous right to control their bandwidth however they please. If the worst thing the Man ever does to twiatitc is boot trainstop123456789/enginesroar/Brighter Than Lawrence/mordorsbane etc, well, I'll shake my finger at them--

shake-shake

--and call it good.

The object of the exercise was to prompt discussion of this astounding novel. The gems prompted by the kid--

"I can only aspire to be a poser. Just when I have mastered the dork component, I find my pseudo-intellectuality lacks pretention."

and PPID jerseys (_killer_ idea)--

well, those were frosting on the candy. My thanks to all.

lazz--

I don't think an intimate knowledge of Pynchon's previous novels is essential to _ATD_. TP regularly returns to certain characters and families--one can expect to find someone named "Bodine" in every novel, usually a sailor, and the Traverse family, at the center of _ATD_, has shown up before--but the novels are stand-alone works.

There is apparently a talking dog in _Mason & Dixon_, which I can only assume to be a forebear of the sublime Pugmax, but I haven't yet read _M&D_, so I dunno.

There's an unavoidable awkwardness in urging a 1,080-page book on one's friends. All I can do is repeat that this was one of the great reads of my life. It's a transcendent acomplishment. I've yet to see a rvw that begins to do it justice.

yikes!

"accomplishment"

hey guys, so you know i booted that guy for his repeated misogynistic postings on our lead story: http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/jan/22...

when he's booted there, he's gone everywhere.

i don't remove comments for just being pointless, annoying, etc. bc i don't want my own personal threshold to stifle comments. i figure readers can ignore pettiness... but i don't want them to have to stumble on the types of things that violate our use policy.

that said, this is hardly an exact science and i'm willing to consider changes that will keep the constructive commenters coming back. —phil

Thanks for the clarification, Phil. I noted the comments in question and expected that action would be taken, but I didn't realize that it would be global across all posts. Finger-shake w/drawn.

Geoff:

I loved both _V_ and _Vineland_, but I loved _V_ a little bit more, prolly because Benny Profane is the extradimensional brother from whom I was separated at birth. (A Navy thing....)

Either novel, btw, is an _excellent_ introduction to Pynchon for those readers a bit hesitant about _GR_ or _ATD_.

"...the purpose of allusion? Evocation, the possibility of recondite understanding, a sort of key to the work?"

Absolutely (imho). You've already encountered one of the biggest examples of Pynchon's comparisons of various categories of recondite knowlege. In _GR_ we are presented w/ parapsychological "truths"--the predictive powers of Slothrop's johnson, the eerie stuff going on at the White Visitation--in a story firmly contained by the physics of rigid moving bodies in conventional space. ESP is recondite; so (for most of us) is the ability to drop a warhead w/in 100 meters of its intended target from 2,000 miles away.

Just as _GR_ is "about" gravity, so _ATD_ is "about" light. (Pynchon takes his epigraph from Thelonius Monk: "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.")

Light is an even more esoteric subject than gravity, because (in a literary sense) "light" includes the whole electromagnetic spectrum, which is a formally out-there weird place. If you dig into the stuff being kicked around at the highest levels of cosmology and physics, you vy quickly encounter concepts as esoteric as anything ever spouted by La Blavatsky--only this stuff is _real science_. (Predictable, reproduceable etc.) Pynchon's narrative in _Against The Day_ takes these concepts to their logical literary conclusion, while incorporating curiously similar parapsychological/folklore concepts that predate the science by centuries. In his fiction, shamans and scientists are two sides of the same coin, or sometimes three.

TP is our only cosmological novelist.

Waylon:

I don't find TP at all dry, but many readers do. I cheerfully confess that the math in _ATD_ left me in the dirt, but I spent a little time hitting the books and soon picked up enough to make sense of what I was reading. I suspect the formal mathematical structure of the text is too sophiticated for me to understand, but the _literary_ power of the mathematical concepts is really tremendous. Thus I still have only the vaguest formal understanding of quaternions, but I picked up enough online to make _Against the Day_ go like... well, like a rocket.

Quaternions are algebraic equations, an extension of the techniques of formal mathematics, developed in the nineteenth century. They enjoyed an early scientific and philosophic vogue because of their utility in describing operations in hypothetical four-dimensional space. The ability to talk about spaces of more than three dimensions was suddenly important at the turn of the century, because Big Science was knocking on the door to announce that "space" and "time" are really one thing, "spacetime," so we now have to reconsider this whole "dimension" topic, and by the way now all the math has to be done over. Quaternions were an essential element in redoing the math. When Einstein and his posse turned to their mathemetician colleagues and said, "We are now ready to talk about a Universe of more than three dimensions--are you?", quaternions, filled w/ risque new elements like complex numbers (a la "the square root of minus one") and division-by-zero, were a big reason that the math people could say, "Yes." These are the years when modern math got juiced.
[more]

Spacetime waits for no equation, and it wasn't long before quaternions were yesterday's popstars. The new math developed fast once the initial breakthroughs were out of the way, and soon quaternion analysis was left behind. Quaternions were allasudden a bit fuddy-duddy, and fell out of mathematical favor altogether when even more powerful jazzed-up exotic algebras were developed in the early twentieth century. Those initial quaternion-inspired mathematical visionaries were early-adopters, the intellectual equivalents of the first-generation internet enthusiasts who bought TRS-80 personal computers, hooked them to telephones, caught first sight of the coming Great Transformation and then watched in amazement as the land they pioneered was overrun by an army of newcomers equipped w/ slicker, more capable second-generation gear. (Pynchon imagines turn-of-the-century students of then-new techniques of vector analysis looking at quaternionists rather the way one looked at a Betamax owner in 1997. "Yes yes the picture is marvelous, and of course this one came first, pioneering and all, but it's as big as a house and I've seen all six Beta tapes, and he does get a bit glassy-eyed when he starts talking about the thing, not healthy really....")

The new math arrived w/ the Modern, indeed, was a precipitating agent of the Modern, a big reason that that the twentieth century was so much more wonderful and terrible than the nineteenth. Pynchon's quaternionists, these early adopters, these proto-Moderns, were among the vy first people _ever_ to rigorously think about the possibilities of startling new models of the Universe, and they did so before any sort of clammy orthodoxy had settled upon the new thinking.

This business of crazy powerful math, extra dimensions, mysterious radiations of unknown origin, a Universe far different from that imagined by Euclid and Newton--all of this was a _real_ paradigm shift, and Pynchon's hotshot math kids, frontier tinkerers, weapons merchants and secret agents saw the shift before anyone else. They saw it when most people were still travelling in buggies and men in the American West still wore guns on their belts, when much of the world still groaned beneath the heels of illiberal kings and sultans, when people were just beginning to grasp--although probably not to understand--that it was now possible to build machines that fly and electric boxes that transmit the human voice across miles of empty space.

I don't pretend to understand what Pynchon's _really_ doing at the deepest structural levels of _ATD_. As I said above, I'm inclined to think the plot is algorithmic. But as a _literary_ device, a perspective from which to view the essence of the age--the essence of The Day--it works like gangbusters. It's not everyone's cuppa tea, I know, but boy howdy it's a nice break from Another Novel About Academics and Their Mid-Life Crises. TP's characters have MLCs too, but tend to respond by walking through walls of shooting someone.

I likes it.

I should note that quaternions are on the comeback trail in the digital age because, according to the testimony of a number of people who make their living doing things I don't pretend to understand, quaternions are ideal mathematical tools for the generation of 3-D CGI programming.

[Cue off-camera maniacal laughter from the shades of Thea von Harbou and Rudolph Klein-Rogge....]

By the way, it is said that deep in the bowels of the European Alps dwells the _Tatzelwurm_, a mysterious crypto-reptile looking something like a Komodo dragon minus the back legs. It can see in the dark, it's lightning fast and it grows as big as a man. The _Tatzelwurm_ kills its victims, including humans, by emitting a foul cloud of incapacitating toxic gas before lunging in for the ripping work. It has big claws and teeth and green blood.

There's a _Tatzelwurm_ in _Against The Day_, and it talks.

Hey PQ - I'm away in DC land, but will return soon...meanwhile...welcome back. Haven't read the book, but will try to do so on your recommendation!

It's often said that _GR_ is "about" entropy, and that Slothrop's odd disappearance is a narratization of the tendency of all physical systems to fall into ever-increasing states of disorganization. (OK, "chaos." There. I said it )

On the other hand, the man is a _novelist_, and the first rule is, "There are no rules." I don't think TP will ever permit himself to be _entirely_ contained by a formal schema.

So I'm, uh, contradicting what I posted above about "strict" algorithmic structure. So be it. I contradict myself. (I am vast, I contain multitudes etc.) It's prolly best to maintain a healthy skepticism about _any_ sweeping critical assertion about the Pynchon Universe, most especially about this originating here.

As I said, the man blew up my head 30 years ago, and I've been looking for alla pieces ever since.

Thanks, LL. Watch yerself out there in Washington. Makes Pynchon's Universe look like an elementary school playground.

Sorry, Waylon. I usually do a better job of keeping this under control, but it's a helluva novel.

"While I am guilty of playing on and perpetuating some of the sillier riffs around here..."

You can dark roast that again.

I think we should insist on "no nicknames." We should be referred to by the full team title on all occasions, and dorkily correct ppl who refer to us any other way. We should be tiresome about the hyphen, and somehow incorporate beanies.

Yes! The Esoteric Doctrine passes into the hands of yet another potential convert!

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! [hunched over rubbing hands w/ delight]

Cauthon should serve as the team owner, and attend all owner meetings waving a slide rule in a faintly menacing manager while muttering about "XML protocols" and "bad code."

Lazz will set the line every week on the basis of an algorithm derived from the works of a Portugese novelist whose work has not yet been translated into English.

As the catcher, I will select pitches for Spaceman by rolling a 12-sided die. I'll require batters to complete a short essay examination on Robert Musil's _The Man Without Qualities_ prior to stepping into the box, said essays to graded by the second baseman.

I think Jill should design jerseys, beanies and vinyl pocket protectors, which will be our team merch. We should try to get a shoe deal w/ Florsheim.

So am I.

Patrick,

Reassuring to find out you are still with us! Please send updated contact info as soon as feasible.

Good thing you got out of the high country so you could excape the shitty winter weather!

Don M.

WOW - the master is back. There hasn't been a blog with this many comments made to it in quite awhile! Congrats. And yes, the DC and surrounding area folks are in another world. One I do not want to visit again for a long long time.... I have rarely been around so many extremely rude (unhappy) people....and that's not even counting the strangers stuck in the parking lot they call the 395/295/95 Beltway! I did see copies of said novel being sold in the airport kiosks. Only one left, so they must be going well.... I, however, did not buy it there. Better to bring my money home with me!

ladylaw,
The reason there are so many comments? Two-thirds of them are Quinn's. It's sickening.

I didn't count them up, but still 50 comments is not shabby...Still glad he's back!

WHOA, what's this. I click to see what the hell would inspire 71 comments and I see my name in lights, tiny little pixelated lights.

I would totally design merch for your crazy-ass team (I DID make this one: http://www.shamelessbastards.com/ronwils... after all)...but only if we can play kickball, dodgeball, or soccer instead. Ping Pong? Scrabble?

ALSO, OhioJayhawk, I agree with reasons #127 and #128 and wager I'd agree with the previous 126. Me and my cocked-eye thank you for the props.

and then this, hey...quinno, you can type 24374289 words in a comment but yet you abbreviate "your" and "perhaps"? Two letters? Really? Explain.

-The Pretentious Psuedo-Intellectual Grammar Polizi

Is the "art scene" on there somewhere? Cause I have some bones to pick and it's high on mine.

And no, I was probably wee and in Topuka no less. But whenever I get down on Larryville, I just think....well, I could be living in Topeka.

Ah...the Sanctuary...I remember..... Time marches on. Indeed.