Climbing thru Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, (MD) and have been for roughly the last month. It’s been interrupted by a number of other texts, including The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell, and the incandescent Consolation of Boëthius, and if I don’t get a move on, there will be other seasonal reads (esp. Tripmaster Monkey) to divert it. At the end of July, I finished Vineland (VL) for what apparently was the first time.
I don’t know if I can stand the wait. (See this, and this as well.) So much for the pattern; up until M&D, his books alternated between encyclopedic, historical sprawls and shorter, “contemporary” things focussing on NoCal. But the newest thing, said to be called Against the Day, is nearly a cool grand (992 pp), and judging by what few descriptions there are (including Pynchon’s own blurb), it is every bit as vast as the Big Three.
I finished V. It is the 20th century in microcosm. People are on obsessive quests for something they don’t understand, and which may be nonexistent; who believe their personal meaning-making can somehow illuminate the wider, meaningless universe – indeed, that simply because they make a connection between two things, they come to think that the connection exists empirically. The Authorities (governments, churches, corporations, aka “Them”) who are obsessed with the clean, the polar, the binary, the unhuman: plastics, robotics; who praise the individual, then crush it.
So, I finished GR last night. So much more beautiful and obscene than I could possibly have fathomed as a callow teenager. And I have glimpsed more finely now the roots for so many of the esthetic choices in my life. “Keep cool, but care.” The Shakedown is now between V. and resuming Sodom & Gomorrah a dozen or so pages on from where I left off. My mind is still reeling from GR, and there are more than a few overlapping characters and elements, so I may just have to dig in.
GR is still going strong: Slothrop is about to ditch his pig suit, so Marvy’s castration and the bombing of Hiroshima are only hours away; it is so much richer than I ever appreciated when last I read it, in the late 80s. Amazing what a difference of 19 years can make. The collective cultural deathwish; dehumanization thru the industrialization of everything; apocalyptic obsession with polarities: themes that have only gotten more terrifyingly relevant since August 6th, 1945.
So. The Proust has stalled. This is okay with me; I need time to digest all that has happened. I reached the end of Vol 3 at the end of January, and decided to take a few weeks off. I read Moby-Dick for what I think was the fifth time; then I finished The Master and Margarita, which had been an xmas present; then I drowsed thru Don Quixote; I put that down midway through while upstate last month, where I bought and read the incandescent Ginger Man by JP Donleavy.
The news of John Spencer’s death makes me very sad.
Ever since Bartlet walked out of the Oval, having signed over his presidential powers to the Speaker of the House, I have hardly watched the show because, to quote Sam, “they forgot to bring the funny.”
But for a few years there, that show was deeply important to me, out of all proportion for a television show. It was important to me the way the Daodejing is important to me, or Gravity’s Rainbow. And the role of Leo McGarry was pivotal to its importance. Leo was the basso continuo.
Raise a glass to his memory.