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Saturday, July 15, 2006
Untitled Thomas Pynchon
This information shot across my radar a few weeks back, but I didn’t believe it until today.* You can now pre-order your very own Untitled Thomas Pynchon (Hardback).
I’m not sure what to make of Amazon’s description (or its purported source):
Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
*I was burned by Time in 1997. Some fool wrote a feature about the publication of Mason & Dixon, The Gospel According to the Son, and the “forthcoming” Salinger novel.
Comments
Scott, thanks so much for this heads-up. Can I confess that I got a bit sad seeing it, though? Nothing in particular about the description, mind you, just that feeling that this could be his last novel. Say what you will about Pynchon, the world could always use one more book by the man. It’s like the sadness I felt after finishing Morrison’s *Love*, only there, it was the simultaneous notions that (a) this could be her last novel, and (b) it felt like it was written quickly, as if she wanted to get a few more books out there rather than pour over any single work.
He’s not that old, is he? He’s only 69 or 70, I think. Plus, he’s “known” to sit on nearly completed material for decades. That’s if you put faith in the rumor that Mason & Dixon was completed, if minus a final polish, before he “hastily” (by his standards) cobbled Vineland together. That said, I wish he’d pull a Vollmann and crank out three 995 page novels every year for the next ten, instead of one every ten years.
You know what we should do? A M & D or Vineland reading group. I haven’t read Vineland since, well, ‘97, in preparation for M & D. (Because really, what I need now is more on my plate. But “more fun,” I think I could handle that.)
Wait… a reading group like that would actually be about literature. Would that fit with the mission of this site? (Maybe you could center it at Acephalous.)
Not quite. We’d still invoke tons of literary theory to justify our positions. (I came this close to name-dropping Judy Butler. Crap. See what I mean?)
I organized a *GR* group and, a year later, a *M&D* group at Penn. A Valve event on Pynchon could be great: just imagine a graphic layout featuring Time Magazine’s photo of MPs cramming sausage down the throat of The Rocket Man.
You’re familiar with this project, I take it. I still receive emails from Zak on occasion, so I could get him to donate one of them for the occasion. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve worked on and/or written about Vineland, haven’t you? I’ve only read it twice, and would love to re-read it. (Hell, there’s no reason the Valve shouldn’t be hosting regular reading groups ... and we would’ve been already, had I not been hit by a car and fallen three months behind in everything.) So would you be game? No serious responsibility, really, just one person posting once per week in a quasi-seminar format. (Feel free to say “no,” since I’m insane for even considering tabling the very suggestion of this offer.)
A *Vineland* event sounds great to me. I’ve read it a few times. The first was in 8th grade, when I came to Pynchon after reading his blurbs on Tom Robbins novels. Needless to say, I didn’t understand a thing in the book. I returned to it in my second year of grad school, when I commuted to Rutgers for a seminar with John McClure on “Postmodernism and Postsecularism.” Then I had to re-read it for my qualifying exams in grade school Year Three. And finally, I taught it last fall in a class on forms of identity in literature since Frank O’Hara. Basically, in each of these cases, I was reading “for” something, so it’d be nice to read it simply for itself.
So Scott, I followed your link to the Acephalous link to the Zak Smith illustrated Pynchon project, where I then followed a link to Smith’s home page. One of the links there indicated that he’s performed in some pornography and so, intribgued, I followed that link. Sure enough, there he was, tats, piecings and all, performing in a porn clip ("Lovers of Loving Love"), with a young lady of similar aesthetic proclivities. That site, Burning Angles, had other clips as well; more tats and piercings.
But, more than that, more style. The world of porn, I assume, is vast; but this is easily the most stylish and interesting porn I’ve seen on the internet. The sensibility that sets it apart from most internet porn is not, as far as I can tell, interested in redeeming social value. It’s something else. Better videography, more interesting editing, punk rock on the sound track, and More Fun. Really, more fun.
It’d be interesting to see what DH Lawrence would make of this stuff. Rather doubt that it fits into any category in his universe.
Not sure how it fits into the category scheme of my universe either. But somehow it does seem of a piece with some of the stuff I’ve seen over at YouTube—none of it pornographic. That Tasha-Dishka “Hey Clip"—two young Israeli women lip-synching, air-guitaring, and dancing to a Pixies tune. Stylish, long legs, long hair, pouty lips, smiles, no tats and piercings (that I can see), no porn. The videography and editing is amateur, but stylish, and seems of a sensibility with the Burning Angel porn. Same kind of fun.
What’s this got to do with Pynchon? Don’t know. But the world goes on. And it’s all here on the internets. (Note, there’s a clip at Burning Angels called “Meet the Internet.” It features a young woman who claims that she invented the internet, not Al Gore. What kind of porn sensibility is at all interested in such things?)
"It features a young woman who claims that she invented the internet, not Al Gore.”
That is good to hear, since I invented Al Gore.
Like the Clash, Pynchon is the only writer that matters. But the material sounds too much like V, likely with less economy. Been there, done that, Tom.