Against the Day

Nearly a decade after Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon returns with Against the Day. I have not read this beast yet, but I have spent the last hour drinking coffee and reading reviews. They are not favorable to Pynchon's new novel, and some are almost angry at the 1,120 page length, lack of coherence, and seemingly plotless construction. The Guardian made me laugh by concluding "And the book itself has no particular reason to end where it does, other than perhaps the adhesive limits of book-binding glue."


The Pynchon enthusiasts are excited about it though. I have read many a great review of the novel, so I am encouraged that the decade-long wait won't dissapoint. You know what you are in for when you pick up a Pynchon novel, and there is a bit of understanding and perhaps preperation on behalf of the reader. It's just that Pynchon's novels get so Fucked up, and as a reader it is really difficult to not lose your way...sometimes competely. It doesn't help when the author doesn't help. Pynchon is an exercise in critical reading strategies.

Pynchon is a mad scientist, and I don't think the apparent flaws are by accident. I have read enough of his work to know he is too smart to not calculate his work. He knows what he is doing. Releasing a book without a clear plot line or adequate ending seems a propos with the rest of his work. The Pynchon canon is anything but conventional, and almost impossible to critique or assess.

Nobody really knows anything of depth about Pynchon , other than he used to be an engineer and he used to work for Boeing. There are some technical articles which can be found, and Pynchon has also contributed his fair share of album/book notes for such artists as Spike Jones and George Orwell. There are a few photographs of the author, but they are old. Nobody really even knows where he lives beyond a house somewhere in New York and maybe a flat in London. I once read about a guy who visited Pynchon's apartment, and inside he said there was nothing but bookshelves and books about pigs. In an effort to complicate this biography a bit more, and to further his post-modern stature, Pynchon appeared on the Simpsons several years ago, appropriately wearing a paper bag over his head. Several online sites offer monomaniacal Pynchon critique and enthusiasm, such as Spermatikos Logos which features, among other things, the brilliant illustrations of Gravity's Rainbow .


Pynchon did, however, surface long enough to write this blurb about his newest offering:

"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."

—Thomas Pynchon

And then he leaves the world with a 1,120 page monster to grapple with. And the reviews roll on and on. I generally only listen to critics when I trust their work (Menand, Denby, et al.), and even then it is only to complicate my own analysis. And when you wait nearly 10 years for a book, critics seem even smaller...
Luis Menand offers a very smart take on the new book, and in his own way is discouraged by the the publication:

From The New Yorker, Menand writes,
"Still, none of this is simple self-indulgence. From one point of view, perhaps a narrow one, there is an error of scale here. As we read, we are frustrated looking forward and forgetful looking backward—episodes open and fail satisfactorily to close, or, when they come back on line, we can no longer remember how they started. But compared with the hill in your back yard, Mt. Everest is an error of scale. The universe is an error of scale. Scale and form are functions of our capacity to perceive them. The preposterous length of the new book does include a vertiginous sensation, somewhat in the way of a "Where’s Waldo?" cartoon: the text exceeds our ability to keep everything in our heads, to take it all in at once. There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction—boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn. There are echoes of L. Frank Baum, Louis L’Amour, Raymond Chandler, John le Carré, "Star Trek," and even Philip Pullman’s children’s trilogy "His Dark Materials." This was all surely part of the intention, a simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture. As always, it’s an amazing feat. Pynchon must have set out to make his readers dizzy and, in the process, become a little dizzy himself."


The reviews are all over the place. The NYT book review was very kind, but most are unhappy with Pynchon's book. I don't think I really care, though. Critics are everywhere. But I do find myself trusting a few, so I do think I will wait for it to come out in QP. Besides, I still need to read V. and The Crying of Lot 49.

Grieving Shias

Recently got Raza Ali Hasan's Grieving Shias, a collection of poems published through The Sheep Meadow Press in 2006. What a read. The review by Stanley Moss is accurate, and I agree that with these poems the "architecture is American fusion, Mughal, post-colonial, colonial, sometimes peasant, sometimes Syracuse motel."

The first poem from Grieving Shias:

"Mourning and Other Activities"

You take the Faith and a horse--
reasonably Arab looking one--feed him
rusgullas and milk for a year.
While you fatten him you terrorize him
with different Asiatic techniques
into mildness and meekness.

Then you take a procession or two
out in the month of June
with the horse leading
properly bedecked with buntings and ribbons.
You mourn and cry your heart out in the heat.
Those of us who have faith
then crawl under the belly of the horse
whenever it comes to a stop.

Between the four brown hooves
take refuge from the sun.

I will not abandon my xoomei

Huun-Huur-Tu, the Tuvan throat singers, were at Grinnell College last night. They played at Herrick Chapel which has a beautiful, wooden and stained glass space. Very intimate. The acoustics were perfect, and there must have been about 150 people in attendance. Huun-Huur-Tu were solid, and I only wish Masha could have been there.

Tuva is a remote country located in southern Siberia. A thinly populated region of grasslands, tundra forests, and mountains about 2,500 miles east of Moscow; I've been told at its capital there is an obelisk which marks the geographical center of Asia, north of Mongolia. Tuva is the center from which all of Asia expands. There is evidence, too, that Native Americans originated in the geographic center of Asia and slowly migrated along the continent until they reached North America. An interesting idea, considering the music I heard last night had much in common with Native American songs. In part the melody, but it was the animism and spirituality behind the music that brought the songs full circle. (Huun-Huur-Tu was actually commissioned to write a few songs for the film Geronimo).

This place which apparently has so much to do with American Indians is about a 4 hour plane ride from Moscow, and I hope to one day go there and see and hear the landscape for myself. The reports all say the land has shaped the music, and last night I fully understood that meaning.

The music of Huun-Huur-Tu is that of a nomadic people. In the traditional sense they are farmers, and herders of reindeer, ox, sheep, and cattle. The physical location is an isolated steppe, virtually unheard of 25 years ago. The physicist Richard Feynman was the first to become fascinated by its orientalism mystique. Feynman had a recording of xoomei that he sent to a friend, but had no real, solid idea of where the sound came from. Apparently Feynman had a stamp collection with "exotic" stamps from Tuva, and became very enthusiastic about finding this place. Although in the throes of cancer, Feynman’s search was on, but the maps didn’t represent the physical location of Tuva. It didn’t exist to anyone in America for sure, and to those in the West of Russia during the Soviet reign it was nothing more than myth. It did indeed exist; Feynman finally found it. But, after an exhaustive paper trail to secure a visa, Feynman unfortunately died just weeks before the Tuvan government granted the long awaited paperwork.

After his death, Ted Levin finished the trip in his friend’s memory. In the film Ghengis Blues there is a scene in which a Tuvan car has the bumper sticker "Feynman Lives!"

From Scientific American.com, Levin, et al. describe the xoomei sound: "For the semi nomadic herders who call Tuva home, the soundscape inspires a form of music that mingles with these ambient murmurings. Ringed by mountains, far from major trade routes and overwhelmingly rural, Tuva is like a musical Olduvai Gorge--a living record of a protomusical world, where natural and human-made sounds blend a remarkable singing technique in which a single vocalist produces two distinct tones simultaneously. One tone is a low, sustained fundamental pitch, similar to the drone of a bagpipe. The second is a series of flutelike harmonics, which resonate high above the drone and may be musically stylized to represent such sounds as the whistle of a bird, the syncopated rhythms of a mountain stream or the lilt of a cantering horse." This is a good description. The instruments were made from animal hydes; the strings were horse hair, and one instrument which resembled a maraca was made from a horse scrotum. One instrument, the byzaanchi, was played like a cello, but doubled as a hunting bow.

During an intermission I had the opportunity to meet Sayan Bapa, one of the founding members of Huun-Huur-Tu. We stepped outside and he bummed me a pungent, Camel filter. The kind that begs for a strong brandy or hot tea. We made small talk about Tuvan music, his music, and Russian music and influence. We talked briefly of Russian politics, and he was kinder to the imperial power than I would have imagined. He said there was a period in early 1990-91 when things got rough for Tuva and Russia. When Tuva felt the presence and weight of the Kremlin. But Sayan said it has been over 40 years of Russian domination, and it was "ok." I believed him when he said this. He had a genuine way of talking to me. And after pondering the downfall of so many Soviet republics after the fall of communism, I didn’t feel like pressing the point. There is a delicate balance between colonizer and colonized, and the two countries have apparently found it. Plus, there is an art to making conversation during the brief moment a cigarette affords; and if you time it properly you can just about solve the riddles of the world.

I told him about my trip to Russia and he asked why I went there. (They always ask why I went there: "what took you to Russia?") I told him about my wife and our travels from Moscow to Samara to St. Petersburg and all the villages in between. I told him about my current house in Ames being "full of Russians," and he laughed at that repeating the line, "house full of Russians." It always signifies chaos of some kind when Russians congregate. And those that know really know. I told him my mother-in-law was feeding me well, and he laughed again with admiration, adding, "If she loves you she will feed you well."

We talked of traditional music and he spoke to me of female vocalists in his region. He said there is a rising movement of female throat singers, and that their sound was really beautiful. We discussed how hard it is to find "good" traditional Russian music, and he said the current state of Russian pop was "bullshit." I would have to agree. He invited me to his manager’s van, where his stuff was, and he gave me a copy of a band from Northern Russia called Va-Ta-Ga (English phonetics). He said they are friends of his and their music sticks to a traditional progression. Seeing as the xomuz (mouth harp) is part of Huun-Huur-Tu’s repertoire, I went to my car and retrieved a copy of Daniel Higgs’s Magic Alphabet. An entire album of solo Jews harp experiments. Right now Higgs is off to Tuva, and I hope Sayan enjoys it. I know driving home south on IA-146, at 11:30 pm last night, I found Va-Ta-Ga to be one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time.

And so is Huun-Huur-Tu. I finally got around to asking Sayan if his band would play Orphan’s Lament. He smiled and said it was one of his favorite songs and they would. We crushed out our cigarettes on the brick wall behind us, and shook hands and went inside. The band took the stage and launched into the greatest jams I’ve ever heard on horse hair, and 3 songs in played Orphan’s Lament. I was glad they did so. The sound filled the wooden church room well.

The little places in the world are where some of the biggest weight comes from. Not only in rhythm, but in spirit and community. The band ended with a song called "Aa-Shuu Dekei-oo." The song, Sayan explained, is about the Tuvan way of life: "how we live, breathe, and believe." The song was strong and proud, and when it was over, without a doubt, the crowd knew where Tuva was.