Expect the posts on this blog over the course of the next nine to ten months (and perhaps thereafter) to be sparse and intermittent. My new job, working for the illustrious AmeriCorps, has me out in the wilderness of the Grand Canyon State, far away from the internet, for eight days at a time, leaving only my days off of work free for pursuing this blogging hobby, days perhaps better spent exploring the treasure trove of wilderness right outside my doorstep in Northern Arizona. In other words, keep your expectations of future output on this site nice and low.

Considering Don DeLillo’s apparent premonitory powers - as evidenced in the gas spill in White Noise that presaged the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal or the eerie front cover, featuring the WTC twin towers, of Underworld - perhaps it’s unremarkable that he painted a fairly accurate allegoric portrait of the Iraq War (by way of a CIA agent’s soliloquy about why the Bay of Pigs operation failed) in Libra, a book he wrote in 1988 about Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination.

“The invasion failed because high officials didn’t examine the basic assumptions. They got caught up in a spirit of compelling action. They were eager to accept other men’s perceptions. There was safety in this. The plan was never clear. No one was ever responsible. Some of them knew a disaster in the works. They let it ride. They put themselves out of reach. They wanted it over and done. There was pressure to get all those armed exiles out of Florida and into goddamn Cuba. I’m not sure what anybody thought what happens after we drop them off at the beach. That’s where we came in. . . . What could I tell those men? I felt like a messenger of plague and death. Then the long slow fall. I wanted to sanctify the failure, make it everlasting. If we couldn’t have success, let’s make the most of our failure. That’s what we were doing at the end when we tried to keep things going. Just an empty exercise.”

On this day in which the President delivers his State of the Union address, and with apologies to the departed Saul Bellow, I hereby submit this open letter to Mr. John Forbes Kerry, a brief note in which I am all too flattering of him, really. After all, Moses Herzog addressed an almost exact replica of this correspondence to Adlai Stevenson (a more worthy politician than Mr. Kerry, in my opinion, though JFK deserves some respect for leading the filibuster charge, failed as it was, on the Alito nomination) after his defeat at the hands of Ike in 1952. I’ve changed only a few key words so as to make this excerpt from Bellow’s Herzog relevant for today’s purposes.

Dear Senator Kerry, Tyler wrote, gripping his seat in the hurtling train, Just a word with you, friend. I supported you in 2004. Like many others I thought this country might be ready for its great age in the world and intelligence at last assert itself in public affairs - a little more of Emerson’s American Scholar, the intellectuals coming into their own. But the instinct of the people was to reject mentality and its images, ideas, perhaps mistrusting them as foreign. It preferred to put its trust in visible goods. So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all. You might as well be working for them, I suppose. I am sure the “I voted for it before I voted against it” bit was painful, kissing the asses of the voters, especially in cold states like New Hampshire. Perhaps you did contribute something useful in the last decade, showing up the old-fashioned self-intensity of the “humanist,” the look of the “intelligent man” grieving at the loss of his private life, sacrificed to public service. Bah! The incumbent won because he expressed low-grade universal potato love.

“Rock and roll has a right to exist but only if it is melodious, meaningful, and well-performed.”

Pravda, October 1986

Reprinted in Tony Judt’s Postwar, Page 602

This made me laugh out loud in a public place, thus fulfilling a sufficient condition necessary for me to reprint it on this estimable and reputable blog.

NPR has also pumped its cred up a couple notches by gaining a new sponsor for “All Songs Considered”: none other than “Hipster Handbook”-approved Pabst Blue Ribbon. How cool is PBR now? About as cool as it was when Dennis Hopper’s Blue Velvet character Frank Booth said “Heineken? Fuck that foreign shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon is what you’ll drink tonight!”

One thing that seems remarkable to me is the extent to which the President can shepherd his herd-animal followers in being outraged about specific issues and completely blithe about others. For example, plenty of Americans pay lip-service to the blows this country’s military has struck in the cause of Iraqi and Afghani freedom, yet when it comes to matters of life and death on a grand scale in Darfur, for the most part his supporters (not to mention everyone else) remain either ignorant or uncaring about an ongoing genocide that Nicholas Kristof, ever faithful to this important story, writes about this week in the NYRB. For all the words wasted championing the debate-shaping capabilities of the blogosphere, armchair pundits have not united to pool their overhyped powers to make Darfur a topic that the MSM gives any meaningful amount of attention. Instead, lefties talk about Abramoff corruption scandal and his Republican partners in crime, and those on the right talk about the degenerecy of William Blum, and how he proves how anyone to the left of John McCain is a willing accomplice of Osama Bin Laden. Important issues, I suppose you could argue, but relative to that thing we rarely speak of but promised not to ever let happen again, well, they seem like small beer to me. Here’s the last three paragraphs of Kristof’s essay, worth an entire read for sure.

The most obvious response to genocide—strong and widely broadcast expressions of outrage—would also be one of the most effective. Sudan’s leaders are not Taliban-style extremists. They are ruthless opportunists, and they adopted a strategy of genocide because it seemed to be the simplest method available. If the US and the UN raise the cost of genocide, they will adopt an alternative response, such as negotiating a peace settlement. Indeed, whenever the international community has mustered some outrage about Darfur, then the level of killings and rapes subsides.

But outrage at genocide is tragically difficult to sustain. There are only a few groups that are trying to do so: university students who have led the anti-genocide campaign and formed groups like the Genocide Intervention Network; Jewish humanitarian organizations, for whom the word “genocide” has intense meaning; the Smith College professor Eric Reeves, who has helped lead the campaign to protest the genocide; some US churches; and aid workers who daily brave the dangers of Dar-fur (like the one who chronicles her experiences in the blog “Sleepless in Sudan”). Some organizations, like Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, have also produced a series of excellent reports on Darfur—underscoring that this time the nations of the world know exactly what they are turning away from and cannot claim ignorance.

Sad to say, one of the best books for understanding the lame international response is Samantha Power’s superb “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide—even though it was written too early even to mention Darfur. But when you read Power’s account of international dithering as Armenians, Jews, Bosnians, and others were being slaughtered, you realize that the pattern today is almost exactly the same. Once again, the international response has been to debate whether the word “genocide” is really appropriate, to point out that the situation is immensely complex, to shrug that it’s horrifying but that there’s nothing much we can do. The slogan “Never Again” is being transformed into “One More Time.”

Ed Harriman has a sobering look at the reconstruction of Iraq in the most recent issue of the LRB. Money has been spent, but an untoward amount has been lining the pockets of CPA officials, Iyad Allawi’s apparently thoroughly corrupt American-backed interim government, and our reliable friends, the transnational reconstruction behemoths overcharging for materials and services provided (on paper at least - on the ground, it’s another story). At one point Harriman notes that Iraqis have cell phones, just not reliable electricity or clean water or decent hospitals. And really, I could excerpt any of the many paragraphs of the essay and each would be appalling in its own right. But I’ll just reprint the following and leave it at that. I just don’t know what to say anymore. Perhaps just one sentence will do the trick: “Revolution from above” is one overhyped piece of shit.

Reconstruction will cost considerably more than originally imagined. The American administration has committed most of its funds. The Iraqis have neither the money nor the expertise to run the projects that have been completed. There’s little transparency or accountability. To judge from the audits published so far, at least $12 billion spent by the Americans and by the Iraqi interim and transitional governments has not been properly accounted for. Almost three years after the fall of Saddam, the GAO reports, ‘it is unclear how US efforts are helping the Iraqi people obtain clean water, reliable electricity or competent healthcare.’ The Bush administration has decided to provide no more reconstruction funds.

The auditors who have discovered Iraq’s deepening financial crisis have been ignored. They asked the US ambassador and the US military commander in Iraq for their views. Neither replied. The US State Department was to submit estimates of how much it will cost to complete all American-funded projects in Iraq to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Office won’t discuss the matter. Earlier this month, Brigadier-General William McCoy told reporters: ‘The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq . . . This was just supposed to be a jump-start.’

Travelling 1900 miles by bus in the U.S. is guaranteed to turn up some interesting stories and characters along that seemingly interminable journey, which in my particular case started in Bismarck, North Dakota and terminated in Flagstaff, Arizona. Thankfully, for most of the journey, I had two seats to myself, parts of North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming being desolate enough to guarantee an unpacked charter. But perhaps it was the nominal sense of privacy generated by such a sparsely populated bus which prompted one drunkard in that last state to sneak a bottle onboard in Gilette and thereafter yell inebriated obscenities at the in-bus movie (a pretty stupid Matthew McConaughey film called Sahara) before he was thrown off in Casper, which, fortunately for him, was his destination. Also in that fellow’s favor was the kindness of the stranger who attracted his sauced attention to the trail of money he had left on the floor in stumbling off the bus. I’ll freely admit I considered keeping the twenty-one odd dollars he had dropped for myself, but eventually thought better of it, maybe because of all the passengers standing witness to my would-be appropriation of the man’s drink (what else?) money.

Then, also in Gilette, was a guy at the station who very nearly ensnared me as an audience for his recounting of the various crazy news stories he’d recently run across. Overhearing his half of the conversation delivered to an apparently normal chef from D.C. on his way to the West coast, there were the missing prostitutes in Washington state eaten up by pigs, an ancedote which sparked about ten minutes’ worth of other animal-related tales, most of them obscene according to a generally accepted definition of the word. The disappearing prostitutes story drew the D.C. chef to throw in a story of his own, in which he related talking to a West Virginian father in front of the White House protesting the seizure of his daughter by CIA agents. According to the chef, this guy had damning evidence suggesting that federal agents had kidnapped his daughter as well as a slew of other missing young women from the area who were all now being used as sex slaves in some secret government program. As if all this wasn’t conclusive enough, one day the father just disappeared from his normal protest spot in front of the White House. Nobody ever knows what happened to him. Maybe he shared the fate of his daughter.

Surprising as it may be, those are about the wackiest elements of my bus trip that I can recall. Given the length of the journey, I expected to have gathered much more material, but for whatever reason, most of the people riding along with me were as docile and unremarkable as I was. Nevertheless, riding Greyhound (or any of its competing lines or subsidiaries, I’m not sure what to call them) is still infinitely more exciting (though also more excrutiating) than travelling by any other means. And cheap: $91 for 1900 miles is one hell of a deal. One gripe, though: even though Greyhound is consistently late, you can’t persuade the drivers to pull over at interesting roadside attractions, such as the site of the Ludlow Massacre or the Focus on the Family Post-Apocalyptic Compound (marked by its own official highway sign) outside of Colorado Springs.

But to share a few first impressions of Flagstaff, a city in a state I’ve never before visited.

• It’s frickin’ hard to breathe up here at 7000 feet, and if you don’t carefully watch a kettle of water on the stove, it will boil over incredibly quick and spill all over the range.
• Though I’ve always thought that university towns between the coasts were habitable refuges for people like myself, I only recently realized college students here (and elsewhere, I presume) are only marginally less annoying than the mostly ignorant rural white folk I grew up with.
• This town, even though the real estate market is incredibly expensive, is growing rather quickly, judging by all the new housing developments going up. Perhaps I should be thankful, though, that I’m able to live here now, before the place is completely gentrified and populated by mostly empty summer vacation homes.
• I really enjoy seeing the San Francisco Peaks whenever I look to the north. Not so appealing are the large, unsightly cell phone towers on Mt. Elden and its adjacent summits.
• Though the urban biking scene leaves something to be desired (it’s still better than any other city I’ve seen), there’s a considerable amount of high quality mountain biking trails within a short distance from where I live. Plus there’s a lot of unmaintained Forest Service which yield some very beautiful country.
• The Grand Canyon just eighty miles to the north and the red rock formations of Sedona just thirty miles to the south: pretty awesome. Add to that Monument Valley, Sunset Crater, the Painted Desert, and many more beautiful creations of nature all within a reasonable driving distance. I think I like it here already.

One would think that, in order to suggest to a population that bicycling is indeed a viable alternative to driving automobiles anywhere and everywhere, widening streets about eight feet or so to add two bicycle lanes for cyclists traveling in opposite directions is a marvelous idea. This way there is no need for commuters on two-wheels to ride on sidewalks (thus threatening meek pedestrians weighed down by shopping bags) or being a royal pain in the ass to automobiles. Yes, one would most definitely think that (i.e., bike lanes are a good way of promoting more bicycling). It makes all the sense in the world. But by way of an Eggers-like diagram recounting my experience yesterday with a bike lane in Flagstaff, AZ, I will demonstrate that they (i.e., the civil engineers, those who use what is often termed “common sense,” and even well-meaning cycling advocates who have a hand in getting the local funds allocated to pay for bike lanes) are misled in their faith.

Some have said Flagstaff is a bike-friendly town (being a university town and containing numerous and popular crunchy institutions like Whole Foods and three, I think, microbreweries, for example), but I think I see more bikes perched front wheel-less atop SUVs or slung across the backsides of sportscars than I see being pedaled on the road. Flagstaff, like every other city in this country, is certainly
a car-friendly town. And the problem with bike lanes in a car-friendly town in which a sizable amount of people do not regularly commute via bicycle is that drivers do not pay attention to the bike lanes. They’re just empty corridors of space which may rarely feature a two-wheeled nuisance which causes any given driver to pull slightly across the center line of the road so as to ensure not hitting that nusiance and thus avoid scratching up the automobile’s paint job. That only happens if the driver even bothers to distract himself from his cell phone conversation, extended daydream, or intense search for a decent song on the radio long enough to proffer such a gesture.

A few days ago at about four o’clock in the afternoon I was proceeding down Beaver Street (see road outlined in crude illustration below) riding atop my freshly purchased Specialized Hardrock Comp Disc mountain bike and heading southbound in that street’s bike lane, which was adjacent to two other lanes meant for automobiles of one sort or another also heading southbound. As indicated below, there was a car slightly ahead of me in the left-hand lane, proceeding down the street at about fifteen miles an hour, given that we had both just been detained at a red light the intersection before, and now were only getting back up to normal cruising speed. Since this was a segment of the street that was slightly sloping downhill, I was able to keep up with the speed of traffic, though some cars were travelling maybe 5 mph faster than me. But unbeknownst to me, the chartreuse-colored SUV slightly ahead of me had its blinker on, signifying that the driver of that vehicle wished to make a right-hand turn to enter the parking lot to my right. Cruising along at a fairly decent clip, I noticed on my periphery that the chartreuse-colored SUV was indeed going to be turning very soon in front of me, therefore acting the part of a large, unforgiving roadblock waiting for me to slam into it. Very understandably, the SUV driver was completely unaware of my presence, since making a right-hand turn when one is in the right-hand lane does not usually involve looking back over one’s right shoulder to see if there are any potential hazards approaching from behind. So at this point in the swiftly unfolding scenario, I am panicked.

Thank God I ended up paying a little extra for the disc brakes on my bike, which are said to help you stop faster than traditional, caliper-style brakes. As such, when I instinctively squeezed my brake levers as fast as I could and with the most pressure I could muster, I stopped fast enough, skidding on the blacktop, to avoid ramming straight into the chartreuse-colored SUV momentarily askew and straddling the white line dividing the car part of the roadway from the bike part. I think the driver stopped here because of the tremendously loud expletive I yelled while skidding toward what I thought was going to be a major accident. In any event, I regrouped rather quickly, pedaled around the momentarily stationary SUV and continued on my way down Beaver Street, not looking back to see if the chartreuse SUV safely made its way into the parking lot without threatening the life of any other unsuspecting cyclist.

The point I hoped to make in this post is that bike lanes, while a seemingly “everybody wins” fix to the “problem” posed by those of us not wealthy enough nor responsible (nor lazy?) enough to use an automobile for day-to-day transportation, actually pose dangerous problems of their own. The scenario I outlined above is just one of those problems; awkward situations also arise when there’s both a turning lane and a bike lane leading up to a stoplight, when one is seguing from a street with a bike lane to one without, and so on. Better than segregated bike lanes, in my opinion, is no bike lanes at all. But the problem there is that if there aren’t any bike lanes, a not inconsiderable amount of drivers are personally offended - honking and cursing to make sure this is known to the offender - at anyone who dares to venture onto the roadway with a bicycle and act like they’re just another automobile, which I find to be the best of all possible solutions. Along this line of thought, I remember reading a Salon article a while back about counterintuitive traffic flow designing, which can be summed up as follows:

In practice, it’s about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

But even if this is the most beneficial way of harmonizing the competing chis of impoverished cyclists and lazy-ass SUV drivers, I don’t see Flagstaff, good city that it is, adopting such a schema anytime soon. Plus, here in the U.S., we haven’t even accepted the metric system yet, thus refusing to adopt even the most unarguably rational method of social organization (can you label it as such?) known to man. So I’m not holding my breath.

Well, this whole thing was an unmitigated disaster, you might say, yet even those need closure, at least the according to the way I see things. At the same time, I don’t care much for living in the past, so I’ll be snappily brief with my remarks on each of the following books I decided to read last year. By my unofficial count, I only read 32 out of the 52 I had planned, but given my duties as a schoolboy, I can take solace in the fact that I read many more books than that, even if they weren’t on this list. Anyway, not to be discouraged by my failure to finish what I started in 2005, I’ve now decided to read 75 books in 2006, a feat that should be made easier due to the cessation of those said schoolboy duties, considering a freshly minted A.B. in history (however useless it will turn out to be) was just recently placed in my hand.

1919 - John Dos Passos

The second of the two books in his U.S.A. Trilogy, 1919 has Dos Passos’s characters dealing with the aftereffects of the Great War. Joe Williams, a sailor wanting to settle down but never able to, and Ben Compton, an agitating labor leader, are perhaps the two most vivid characters, yet all the major players here are participating in an arena much larger than themselves. And their everyday, individual activities very much comment on the context they’ve been thrown into. Dos Passos’s short little profiles of some of the most colorful characters (Jack Reed, Randolph Bourne, Paul Bunyan, and Joe Hill, not to mention TR and “Meester Vilson” and J.P. Morgan) of the early 20th century are simply brilliant, more lively and informative than any encyclopedia article could ever be. All in all, a fascinating examination of the post-WWI experience of American expatriates. For my money, Dos Passos has more to say about this time period than his more famous contemporaries ever did, even if I have yet to be smitten with the “Camera Eye” passages.

The Body Artist - Don DeLillo

You might call this minor DeLillo, the kind of book any great novelist might knock off after straining his capabilities to the utmost in writing Underworld (a book of which I’ve read about 800 pages, considering I’ve inexplicably been drawn away from it thrice, twice around page 300 and once around page 200) though it bears the stylistic imprints for which he’s become so well-regarded, especially his handle on rendering late 20th century dialogue, with all its false starts and trailings-off and ill-placed sputters and stops. A good little book worth a quick look-see. I read this six or seven months ago, enjoyed it alot, and can only now recall the basic plot elements, so I expect myself to pick it up sometime in the near future for a couple hours worth of enjoyment, though perhaps I should get myself through all of DeLillo before that happens.

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Bob Dylan wrote in his Chronicles that just like Dostoevsky, he too plied his trade as a means of making money to pay off creditors hounding him down in the ’70s. Fascinating that both, separated by only slightly more than a century, could create such masterpieces (Dylan’s being Blood on the Tracks) simply by trying to pay their bills. What to say about Raskolnikov - that “former student” who spends most of his days deliriously draped across his couch in his ship’s cabin of a room - that hasn’t been said already? Not much, I fear. But that won’t stop me from revisiting this book from time to time, though, as with DeLillo, other unread Dostoevsky works await, specifically The Demons and The Brothers Karamazov.

Indecision - Benjamin Kunkel

If Kunkel did not edit n+1, I probably would never have read this book. Had Jay McInerney not written a decidedly positive review of it in the Times (that bastion of insiders in the business of embracing a small coterie of more insiders and then creating the necessary preconditions for the perpetuation of this cycle through the means of a dominant ideology indoctrinated in those who receive the concomitant spoils and so on…), I probably would never have read this book. Then, had not A.O. Scott’s laudatory profile of Kunkel and his co-editors not been the tipping point that led me to utilize the interlibrary loan service at my university, I, again, probably would never have read this book. But I did read it, even though I don’t have much to say about it now. If this guy’s the second-coming of Dave Eggers, then I think a reasonable person could reach the conlcusion that we’ve been had by whatever monolith of literary opinion it is that issues such statements. Here in Indecision there are signs of the author grasping in an upward direction, toward something maybe great - maybe only good - but whatever Kunkel was shooting for, he didn’t hit it. There is one scene in the jungles of Bolivia (I think that’s the right country) where we see the devastation that oil drilling has wrought on the environment, and there are a few remarks made during Dwight Wilmerding’s abulinial existence in New York that make an argument justifying my reading of this book. Oh, and the whole democratic socialism thing - I liked that, too. After all, who doesn’t like democratic socialism? And along those same political lines, I really liked the magical fruit that, when eaten, inflicted upon the consumer all the pain felt by the people who worked to get it to that person’s mouth. But Kunkel, as fiction writer, doesn’t deserve all the hoopla he’s taking, a fact that wouldn’t be so tragic if it didn’t mean that he was taking attention away from other less-famous writers with more remarkable belletristic capabilities than he himself possesses.

The Merry Month of May - James Jones

As a college student with radical hopes hovering always in the back of my mind (even though they’ve faded away as I’ve grown slightly older), May 1968 always held my fascination whenever I ran across tidbits about it. First, there was its moment of conception, sparked by the French government’s closure of the Cinematheque Francais, curated by one of the most interesting characters in film history, Henry Langlois. (This was briefly touched on in Bertolucci’s most recent return to 1968 in The Dreamers). But aside from that, there remained the possibility that not only could students play an instrumental role in nearly overthrowing their country’s government, but that they could do so cooperating side-by-side with the working class, which did its part occupying factories and going on strike. From what used to be a more ignorant perspective than the still-romantic one I possess of May 1968, this seemed like a promising model from which to build a present day revolution of our own (me and my fellow naively and self-consciously radical students, that is), if only by stealing their wonderful slogans (”It is forbidden to forbid,” etc.). If there is one worthwhile comment about May 1968 shared between Bertolluci’s film and Jones’s book, it’s that things were much messier and less authentically free and redemptive than aging academic radicals would probably like to admit. You can’t escape petty human squabbles over sex and power whether you’re working on a large canvas or a small one, and Jones, though not a brilliant writer, is fairly adept at getting this point across. Also handled well are the observations an expatriate like Jones would make, such as his lament of the French government’s decision to replace the old paving stones of the streets (thus eliminating a craft that Jones beautifully describes) with blacktop. And lastly, there’s the aftermath of the failed revolution, the dispersal into Eastern mysticism or ultra-individualism compatible with the further development of capitalism. Pick your poison, but neither has a promising endpoint.

The Old, Weird America - Greil Marcus

It was a long time coming, yet during this past summer events led me to fully discover the alternate universe (what Marcus calls “The Old, Weird America”) contained within Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes. And not just the two-cd set abortively issued by Sony, but the four disc grandaddy of all bootleg albums, A Tree With Roots, which collects all the songs, warts or gems, from those remarkable sessions at the Big Pink. Marcus’s prose strikes me as the genesis to which the high-quality music writing at, say, Pitchfork can trace itself back to. He’s a constantly entertaining writer who might occasionaly overstretch a metaphor, but I can’t think of anyone else who could capture, like him, exactly what it was Dylan and Hudson and Danko and Manuel and Robertson and company were doing during their fruitful collaboration. Tom Waits said Dylan is a planet to be explored, and one could say the same of the Basement Tapes. Thankfully, I ended up buying Marcus’s book - as opposed to checking it out from the library, my usual means of literary consumption - so it will be a faithful companion as I dig my way through these treasures over the years. Marcus also places the bootlegs in context, noting that they could never have existed had not The Anthology of American Folk Music not been issued by Folkways. Again, as I make my way through that six CD collection, I’ll be occasionally looking back to this book.

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

One of the very few books released in 2005 that I read this past year, it was a fairly decent one. Murakami’s magical realism advances the plot without feeling completely artificial, and six months on, when I’ve forgotten all but the bare essentials of the plot, I still vividly remember the Hegel-quoting prostitute as well as her Kentucky Fried Chicken pimp, Colonel Sanders. Some of the other details might fall prey to the problems posed by the kind of genre fiction (something resembling sci-fi) this book reminds one of, yet all in all, a rather good read, and I see more Murakami for me in the future.

Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon

To see the misdirected falterings of a writer who would soon thereafter become pretty damn good at his trade is quite a hope-enriching experience. The first two stories are almost wholly shit, so disappointing that it’s not worth listing their titles; the third, “Entropy,” is almost unreadably bad; the fourth and fifth, “Under the Rose” and “The Secret Integration,” are very close representations of the Pynchon we’ve come to love. I don’t have the back at hand, so I can’t quote the dates of their publication, but something quite drastic happened in the mid-’60s whereby Pynchon really came into his own. If he were a baseball player and showed such marked improvement in such a short time I would say that his newfound success couldn’t have come about through any means except performance-enhancing drugs. Since writers don’t really have anything of the sort, all I can do is scratch my head. And the mostly self-effacing introduction provided by Pynchon is also very good, one of the few nonfiction works of his we have (and one of the even fewer sources providing any biographical information about him whatsover). In other words, the only reason to pick this book up is: (1) to entertain thoughts that if Pynchon started out this bad, you too can be a world-famous reclusive novelist some day! and (2) to read the essay and two good short stories I listed above. Otherwise, it’s nothing more than unremarkable juvenalia.

V. - Thomas Pynchon

Quite a remarkable first novel, and though it shows both its date of conception as well as hints attesting to its author’s search to find his own voice and come into his own, this is a book definitely worth a second read, though I imagine it will be years before I find myself drawn back to it enough to do so. The two narrative paths hacked out by Benny Profane (a schlemiehl and a human yo-yo) and Sidney Stencil (searching in vain for V., whose natural habitat, grandly enough, is the state of siege) are quite entertaining, with stops in Baedekerland (turn-of-the-century Cairo, postwar Malta, Südwest Afrika, etc.) and the crocodile (or alligator?) infested sewers of NYC (replete with an exiled priest entering a rat named Veronica in the most intimate of ways), just a few of the intruiging environs explored by Pynchon. This remained my favorite Pynchon novel as I progressed through most of his work: more ambitious than Lot 49, more internally coherent than GR, less annoying than Vineland. Given time to reflect on it, I still find it a very strong book, though I’ve definitely been able to chart the ways in which Pynchon has improved upon his craft since this first work.

Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Oboy. I finished Gravity’s Rainbow after two or three weeks of constant engagement with it, plodding through it at about 25 pages per hour if I was lucky. As I read through the last few pages of Gottfried being strapped into Rocket 000000 and being launched into that rainbow-like path over the English Channel I felt oddly empty inside, pretty convinced that the journey was more integral to the whole experience than the conclusion.

I think one can certainly say, without reservation, that Pynchon was and is a brilliant novelist. And I can extend that and easily hold the position that GR was written by a brilliant novelist. There are definitely a slew of memorable characters and scenes I don’t think I’ll ever forget, for better or worse: Slothrop being force-fed the hideous English excuse for candy; Malcolm X raping Slothrop; Brigadier Pudding’s meticulously described corpophagia fetish, which ultimately leads to his demise (e. coli will get you every time if you eat the feces of others and don’t take antibiotics); Plechazunga and Raketemensch; Richard M. Zhlubb; Pynchon’s endless fascination with the kazoo; Major Duane Marvy getting castrated; and one could go on an on, this book is so densely populated. And if someone asked me if I planned on re-reading GR, I would respond without hesitating, “Absolutely.” But you knew a “but” was coming and here it is. But the question is: does this pastiche of brilliant renderings add up to something greater than the simple sum of all these parts. The problem is, I can’t answer that now, and can’t foresee myself ever answering it in the future. My relationship with this monstrosity will continue to be tortured, I fear, even after I read it for a second, and maybe even a third (if I live long enough), time.

Vineland - Thomas Pynchon

This is probably Pynchon’s worst novel, though I would argue that you can see the ascending vapor trails of his growth as a writer present throughout. Compared to V., for example, there is a slightly more apparent intent to explore human relationships in a more meaningful, less hysterically realistic way (see the interactions between Zoyd and Prairie, for example). But the vitriol against the Reagan administration here is so concentrated and well, everywhere: you can’t escape it and it is pretty shrill. Most of Pynchon’s readers, I would imagine, would be so inclined so as to already be well aware that the 1980s was sort of a lost decade, and Pynchon’s examination of the failure of the 1960s might have been more palatable had it not been accompanied by such an ax-grinding resentment of those who played an instrumental role in pissing away its promises (i.e., the people David Brooks would call bobos) - in my opinion, these targets are game much too easy for an author like Pynchon to set in his sights. I also read a review somewhere that complained Pynchon had been watching way too much TV leading up to this book. That’s most definitely true and a sad commentary on the seventeen years that elapsed between the publication of GR and this disappointing follow-up. Second-rate Pynchon is more nourishing than a lot of other writers’ first-rate efforts, though I don’t see myself ever coming back to this book.

Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

In terms of beginning-to-end coherence and Pynchon’s ability to focus his power in, this is undoubtedly Pynchon’s greatest work, one that reads remarkably easy, considering the faux 18th century style in which it is expressed. There are sections in this book which still confuse the hell out of me (namely any part involving the Jesuits), but with Pynchon, those moments of being utterly lost always tend to fade into the background anyway, leaving the vast majority of this book a great pleasure to read. It’s filled with modestly amusing puns (most of which comment upon the present day), memorable characters who show up for a scene or two (e.g., the inimitable “Mechanickal Duck,” Benjamin Franklin rendered as a dance-partying hipster, George Washington and his cannabis habits and large appetite, a Were-Beaver, a young man who, to the horror of his famly, turns into a dandy at the sight of a full moon, and so on), incredibly lively coffeehouses and pubs, and of course, an extended discussion of Big Issues. Here those are slavery, transnational corporations and globalization, the single-minded extension of rationalism, mapping and borders, relations between Native Americans and colonists, and lastly, the idea of America, “that Rubbish-tip of subjunctive Hopes,” as I believe it is called in one famous passage. A place that occupies the dreams of Englishmen. Then there’s the Line, “a Conduit of Evil,” that the sureveyor and the Royal astronomer mark out between Delaware and Pennsylvania. And it’s the deep friendship between Mason and Dixon that is perhaps the most touching element of the entire novel, certainly the most ably rendered relationship Pynchon has ever created. I read somewhere that Pynchon signed a contract in 1973 that spoke of a novel exploring Mason and Dixon’s time in America. Twenty-four years was a long time, but this product was worth the wait.