"Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon

I've spent over a month reading Thomas Pynchon's massive novel "Against the Day." I have lugged it from home, to work, to lunch counter, with little regard to the damage it was causing to my shoulder. I've gotten lost in it and become frustrated with it, I've gone back and forth to reread parts that I'd missed, I've visited Wikipedia to learn about Iceland Spar and the quaternions, I have struggled to stay awake and I have struggled to put it down, and I have thought "I am spending far too much effort on this goddamn book."

Now that I've finished it, I can sum it up by saying...well, it's certainly "Pynchonesque," and it's as complicated and annoying as everybody says it is -- an endless parade of major characters, diversions into dozens of apparently unrelated topics, too much movement from place to place, no real thread to hold it all together -- but it also has a greater proportion of Pynchon-gentleness and enlightenment than I've come to expect. The payoffs -- oblique as they can be -- are so bittersweet and human that you don't mind the coldly scientific obsessions so much.

Unfortunately, these "human" moments are all bundled together during the last 150 pages, and the more interesting and clear-headed moments are in the first 500. The 400 middle pages are somewhat tiresome, when you realize that MORE subplots are being introduced, one of which -- the onset of the first world war -- is a non-stop machine-gun of politics, places, and personages. It's simply too much to handle after the mathematics, strikebreaking, and empire-busting that you've already been through. The characters start to seem like bits of leaves thrown into world events and just blowing around, to Venice and back, to Venice and back, to Venice and back again.

All these criticisms could perhaps be applied to "Gravity's Rainbow," and I'm not sure if my less enthusiastic reception of "Against the Day" is due to the fact that Pynchon "already did it once before," or that "Against the Day" feels like a "Gravity's Rainbow" in which everything -- the paranoia, the dark-mystery-which-cannot-be-comprehended, the sexual escapades, the slapstick -- has been duplicated several times over to fill out an excessive page length, with all these things happening to multiple characters in sequence instead of just to Tyrone Slothrop.

Basically, my impression is that "Against the Day" is five or six novels that Pynchon started writing years ago, all subsequently linked together by unions, WWI, the drift from Victorianism to modernism, explosions, light, and the Tunguska event.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "Against the Day" is FULL of wonderful detail and characterization, and -- as I said earlier -- there's a growing gentleness to Pynchon's writing that is absolutely welcome. Whereas "Gravity's Rainbow" culminated in uncertainty and confusion, the characters in "Against the Day" seem to find comfort in companionship, children, and purpose, and the novel doesn't judge them; they did wild things and struggled for noble causes when they were young, and now they're settled down and are raising their children and getting a bit mellower. And that's pretty much The End.

When I was wallowing through 400 Pages of People Just Running Around Europe, I felt like I was reading a really crappy book. Now that I've finished it, however, I look forward to reading it again someday, so I can get a feel for what REALLY matters in the novel: the little moments like Cyprian's trajectory from hedonist to (I won't spoil it for you), the complex interweaving of the Webb and Rideout families, and -- floating high above it all -- the aging airship children who are struggling to find meaning when the "Boys Adventure Story" days are gone.

Teaching Kids to Suffer Well

I've been reading a 1903 collection of stories, facts, pastimes, and recitations called "Young People's Library of Entertainment and Amusement." I suppose that in the days before radio it was fun to dress up your kids and make them do "tableaux," but for the modern reader it all seems a little quaint and weird and oh-so-gaslight.

There are lots of interesting things about this book. It starts with collections of poems written by the likes of Pope, Byron, and Whitman, and while poetry generally leaves me cold I can't deny that these fellows knew their words.

The brilliantly-crafted excerpts from Shakespeare stand in stark contrast to the "recitations" which follow. These recitations -- most of them uncredited -- must have been the bane of the Victorian child. They're heavy-handed poems which can be entirely summed up by their chapter headings: "Comic," "Pathetic," "Descriptive," "Religious," "Temperence," and "Patriotic." It's interesting that the largest section by far is reserved for patriotic poems...I'll post a truly horrific one about the Spanish-American war sometime soon.

I have to keep reminding myself that these recitations are intended for children, because even though the language is sophisticated -- when not imitating the cloying baby-talk of a four-year-old bein' aw tute an' gwown up -- the moral messages are entirely one-dimensional: a flawed person has an encounter with a saintly person, and then Jesus takes the saint to heaven and the flawed person says "Now I'm a changed man! Don't make the mistakes I made! Eat your spinach!"

I don't expect real-life ambiguity or deep philosophy from a book written for ten-year-olds, but I can't help thinking that Sunday School stuff was always sort of like that, and probably is today. These recitations -- whenever they try to tackle pathos or any sort of moral question -- are based on the really horrible assumption that we're all born with a spiritual debt, that if we suffer a lot then we'll become more saintly, and that it'll all be worth it for us when we die.

Pardon me if I disagree, and if I think that the ideas of original sin and redemption make the world a crappier place. I also disagree with the contradictory and entirely cloying presentation of small children in this book as "little angels." When I see a small child, I know that she isn't above crying extra-loud in the checkout line in order to extort candy, which is something an angel would never do.

And I don't understand how all humans owe an automatic spiritual debt EXCEPT when they're small. I assume the cutoff age is puberty, but such things are sadly beyond the scope of this book.

Today's Etymology: Buff

The August 30, 1927 New Yorker is trying to convince me that the term "buff" -- as in "enthusiast" -- came about in 1865, when New York's first paid fire department was organized. The older volunteers who USED to fight the fires still wanted to help out, so they'd sleep overnight in the fire houses, waiting for a chance to rush off with the official firemen and help put out fires.

Since the fire department wouldn't give them any bedding, the fire enthusiasts slept in heavy buffalo robes...hence "buff" as a term for somebody who is enthusiastic about something (eg. "film buff").

This sounded like a load of bunk to me, but it appears (in my short pre-work researches) to be pretty much true.

Toronto the Good

I guess that my long walk through 45kph winds on Monday night has done me in: sore throat, muddled head, developing cough, and excessive saliva. The second possibility hardly bears thinking about: maybe the bat spit I touched in the summer has finally worked its way into my nervous system. Cujo was a St. Bernard, after all.

To comfort myself I'm reading "Toronto the Good," written in 1898 by Evening Telegram journalist C. S. Clark. He wrote the book to counter claims by city planners that Toronto was "the city on the hill," a booming utopia. By exposing crooked police, useless morality laws, fawning presses, corrupt financial enterprises, gambling, prostitution, and the general awfulness of women, Clark's book is well-remembered...though he himself appears to be forgotten.

This is just as well. My initial impression (partway through the book) is that Clark is a crotchety, nasty old bastard. He obviously has a narrow range of tolerences and interests, and anything that falls outside that range -- certain types of literature, for instance -- is unspeakably awful. But not REALLY "unspeakably," because he chooses to speak about it...endlessly. Bitterly. Impotently.

The thing is, I haven't figured out yet if the book is serious, satirical, or sarcastic. And herein lies my problem with the common writing style up to 1930 or so: I can never tell if they're joking or not. Part of this is because I don't understand some of the references -- some of them are only implied instead of being stated outright -- and also because satirical writing was much more subtle and dry at the time. Not to mention some words had a slightly different meaning; off the top of my head: "rise," "reach," and "brilliant."

But the big issue has to do with sentence structure. Run on sentences were not just acceptable, but par for the course. I've spent some time trying to figure out why Victorian writing gives me such a headache, and I think it's because it tends to be written like this:

"Short sentence proposing something. Another short sentence of exactly the same length that ramps up the emotional level somewhat. A third short sentence to let you know that the author really means it. An incredibly long sentence, with, awkward punctuation, that provides a useful logical link, which works towards proving the point, with a digression, and this is related to another earlier point, and you'd better believe it reader, the final logical link in the chain, and now I've proven the point with a long-winded final sentence fragment including a chuckle at the whims of humanity.

"A new paragraph about something completely different."

Anyway, I'd love to be able to present some pieces of wisdom I've gleaned so far -- some interesting insights into early Toronto life, for instance -- but all I've learned so far is that C. S. Clark probably had very few friends and that women shouldn't write about anything other than fashion (and those who do write about anything else have "acidulated" faces), that "bucket shops" were places were you could gamble on the stock market without actually BUYING stocks, that (literally) all police officers were scoundrels, and that the Evening Telegram has the BESTEST writers in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD, which is no coincidence because Clark writes for it.

Okay, here's something interesting: C. S. Clark REALLY HATES people with cute names, and he wonders repeatedly "how people, presumed to have good common sense, could expect children possessed of such names to live." As an example of the sorts of cute names that people had at the turn of the century, here are the awful ones he culls from obituaries (to prove -- I think seriously -- that people with such names die sooner):

• Prince.
  
• "A laboring grinder in a concern where I once worked called his son Earl. The child died in four days."
• Queen Victoria Lockwood Warner (AKA "Queenie," a very popular "cute nickname" of the period).
• "Li Hung Chang Jones is the fearsome name with which a heartless father has burdened his helpless and unoffending offspring."
• "Birdie" Bates (another common nickname).
• Dorathea Beatrice (Queenie) Chambers.
• Emeline (Emmy) Gladys Davis.
• Irminie Savage.
• Zenith Gertrude Longley.
• Abraham Lyncoln Ulysses William McKinley Graydon. Not to be outdone, a neighbour called his child Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson James Monroe William Jennings Bryan Vaughn. "At last accounts both infants were doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances."

As a sidenote, these "Coles Canadiana" reprints are priceless.

The Right Book For an Overturned Life

During these overturned weeks, immersed in moving and holidays and endless work stuff, I've been plowing through a few books to help keep myself centered.

I started out with Gulliver's Travels which -- excuse me -- is mostly just annoying. Yes I recognize that literature has changed an awful lot in 250 years, and I also understand that it was conceived as a social satire and not an adventure story. But yikes, Jonathan Swift simply cannot make a point and then move on...he needs to bludgeon you with a single idea for five or six pages, slyly winking at you in the meantime -- "Get it? Get it?" -- before he moves on.

I suppose my mistake was approaching it as a novel -- with, say, a plot and at least one interesting character -- while it's really more of an upside down essay. "Our European government is wacky," sez Swift, "and so are people in general!" Well, no kidding. I know that. But I'm having to FORCE myself to finish the damn book.

In the meantime, during my first few nights at my new place, I found myself craving a COMFORTING book. A book that doesn't ANNOY me. So I retreated to the basement and dug through the boxes that I previously kept squirreled away in my storage locker, boxes containing hundreds of short horror anthologies...and a few scary novels as well.

The one I settled upon is a book I find myself re-reading every five years or so: Shadowland, by Peter Straub. It has been part of my imagination since I was very young and it never fails to amaze me: an ambitious (but not particularly long) combination coming of age story, fairy tale, adventure serial, philosophical treatise, and absolute nightmare, with an ending that STILL shocks me and fills me with deep sorrow.

On reflection I realize now that the book is, like many of Peter Straub's books, incredibly sloppy -- basically a collection of great ideas and set pieces. Shadowland only "works" because it never tries to resolve itself. It's an early example of the "Metahorror" field that would briefly eclipse the straight-forward hacks like Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz: the reader drifts along with a plot that keeps unexpectedly diving off the path, into a 1950s prep school, a train ride through the midwest, a scary house in Vermont, field hospitals in WWI, England during the 1920s, Los Angeles in the 1980s. My more critical mind recognizes, now, that a convoluted path does not automatically make a coherent or meaningful novel, and much of the dialog that seemed deep and inscrutable to me in the past now seems to be what it REALLY is: random, random, random.

But I love the book regardless. The ideas don't gel, but they're wonderful ideas. The characters are perfectly fleshed, and I think that "The Collector" -- a homicidal rubber bodyguard with "blowtorched features" that hides in the bathroom mirror -- is still one of the scariest things around. While kids are so Harry Potter mad, why doesn't somebody turn it into the great movie it could someday be?

While looking for heavy books to help me soundproof my bedroom wall, I came face-to-face with William T. Vollmann's seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down. I tried to read it a few years ago and ended up totally confused. I vowed to learn a bit more about Caesar, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Trotsky before trying it again.

Halfway through the first volume I'm recognizing my crucial problem. Vollmann is an unconventional storyteller who -- I believe -- doesn't care much that other people don't perceive things exactly the way he does. When he writes a novel this isn't a problem; it's all part of the strange world (AKA "Vollmann's head") that you step into when you pick up his books. But when he writes a 3,500 page essay covering all facets and permutations of human violence...well, the reader wants to UNDERSTAND what Vollmann is saying. But Vollmann, full of digressions and poetry and personal obsessions, doesn't try to conform to what we expect in an essay. His chapter headings are obscure, his references scattershot, his digressions just plain confusing.

Fortunately I realize this now. The book must be read S-L-O-W-L-Y, without any skimming. I also realize that he has a horrible tendency to refer back to complex ideas -- ideas that he never presented as being particularly important at the time -- using a personal shorthand that's really freaking annoying. We have the "Machiavellian Caveat," for instance, which Vollmann paraphrases as "Never turn the other cheek or they'll take your head off." He talks about "the Asian woman" and "the tortured woman" as though we should remember who they are. When he keeps making offhand references to people, events and philosophies -- in a book that is JAM PACKED with such things -- and he doesn't bother to refresh your memory, you wind up getting lost in outrageous paragraph excerpts like this:

We heard Hobbes insisting that since my great-grandfather once agreed to form a commonwealth, I thereby agreed and will always agree to every new act of government; hence "no Law can be Unjust;" but I cannot remember giving my consent to anything so sweeping, and if Hobbes did it, I beg him to bind only himself, not me, nor my comrades who are likewise discontented; like Ivan Karamazov, who found himself dissatisfied with an order of divine providence under which any child on this earth might be tortured, we must be able to announce that we reject our entrance ticket; like the pseudonymous commanders of an insurgent group in Mexico, we must be able to say whenever and to whomever we will: "Our objectives are for the people, with the people, and against the government. We are ready for anything." By the Machiavellian Caveat, mostly we are not. "No government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people," says Gandhi, but he then adds the bitterly necessary qualification, "voluntary or forced." Force may partake of outright violence, craft or mutual obfuscation. Possessing all little power in their popular assemblies, the Roman plebians, for instance, knew not how to reject the whole ticket, although by means of riots an ill-omened corner of it might get torn away, and they could shout demands at gladiatorial shows...

YARGH! To make a single point -- that governments exist because people are either afraid of governments or because governments and pundits tell us we're part in a pre-birth binding contract with them -- Vollmann referenced Hobbes, Dostoevsky, Mexican insurgents, Machiavelli, Gandhi, and Roman plebians. This wouldn't be so bad if the next paragraph didn't reference ANOTHER bunch of groups and individuals, and so on, and so on. Vollmann is suffering a wealth of information, and he doesn't seem to notice that the REST of us aren't as familiar as HE is with his sources.

Knowing this makes the book easier to understand, however. I realize now that the KEY to understanding "Rising Up and Rising Down" is by paying close attention to the "mini-chapter" headings, and keeping them in mind while reading the chapter itself, so I'll gradually figure out which direction he's heading in and arrive there with him. Then, when he finally makes his point (more or less clearly) I'll also better understand how he got there.

You might ask "why bother?" Other than not being able to admit defeat after conquering all his OTHER books, it's because his insights ARE very interesting, and needing to WORK to understand them makes them that much more fascinating. I don't necessarily agree with all his points so far -- I've always been a bit nervous about his gun fetish, for instance -- but it's still cool to see how HE arrived at his conclusions, and he's nothing if not rigorous in explaining his methods (that's the whole point of the book, in fact). And besides that, his experiences and interviews make great reading, the unpretentious photographs from his travels have a way of grabbing your head, and the historical information is welcome too.

Will I manage to finish the whole thing? Maybe not. But at least it's making me think about things: what do *I* stand for? Why would I ever "rise up?" In defense of self, homeland, earth, animals? Hmmmmm...