Selection for Feb/March 2014

Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus

We tried "Sea of Hooks" and it didn't work out. So now we'll try "Leaving the Sea" by Ben Marcus. Marcus is my hero and this is his new book of stories. "Sea of Hooks" was bad, so now we're "Leaving the Sea"...get it??

Brittle

BRITTLE
What makes a person brittle? Pain can make you brittle, being like glass or clay, being dropped too many times, being fired at too high a heat, being thrust into the cold, being forced -- all these but also this: an insistence on beauty can make a person brittle.


BRITTLE
And all that pushing away of the unbeautiful will make you brittle.





Sea of Hooks
pg. 59

Updates and Apologies

We're not dead, but it's hard to find time to read during the holidays. We'll be back on schedule soon. SORRY.

Some thoughts on the book so far:

- Slow starter for me. The fragmented narrative took a long time, say 50 pages, to get rolling. It's hard to care about the plot when it's all chopped up.

- I feel like I can't breathe when I'm reading this book. As a reader, I want chapters. I hate to admit this because I like to read weird stuff, but the structure of this book is maddening. It's about 5000 little paragraphs, each with its own title. They aren't split into chapters. They just keep coming, one after the other, and they're just short enough that you could always just read one more, so stopping feels impossible, even when you don't want to be reading.

- Around 100 pages in, this thing gets real dark and even has elements of a horror novel.

- I like this book, and so far it's been weird and poetic and pretty good. I think the problem is that I want it to either be weirder, or more poetic, or just be a regular book. The fact that it's somewhere in between is driving me nuts. It feels like the author is a poet who is trying really hard not to write poetry and maybe he should just write some poetry already.

More later.

Selection for Dec/Jan 2014

The Meaning of a Line

On the surface, Mason & Dixon is partially a buddy comedy and partially a dual character study. But at heart, it's the story of a line.

The basics (from wikipedia (where else?)): From 1763-1767, Mason (an astronomer) and Dixon (a surveyor) used celestial measurements to form an accurate, east-to-west, 233-mile-long line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and a north-to-south, 83 mile-long line between Maryland and Delaware. The boundary was to settle a border dispute between the colonies and crown. It would also become a key demarcation line in struggle over slavery in the states.

 Along this line, M&D created "the Visto." An arrow-straight, astronomically precise line of cleared trees and milestones. Basically a perfect, clear line, due west, through the wilderness.

Of course, there was some complicated math to be done at the corner, leaving a technical no-man's-land called "The Wedge." All of this is real. (The wedge is now officially part of Delaware.)

Now, the true focus of the book is the physical and psychological effect of the line. Drawing a line creates a boundary were there was none. It creates two distinct groups where there was only one. It labels those above the line "Northerners" and those below "Southerners." It creates a road, easily passable, where there was no safe passage before.

It also has spookier aspects. It serves as a channel for flow: of good and evil energies, of commerce, of ideas. Upon coming to the line, all things are drawn along its length.

Also consider, it is a 233 mile long line, marked with piles of stones each mile, inscribed on the face of a spinning planet. Thus it is a giant, rotating antenna, sending or receiving - what exactly?

The precision, the flow, the labeling and defining, the connecting, the separating, the sha.

The lesson being: To draw a line is to change the world. (?)

BONUS FACT:

The US-Canadian border is not just a line on a map. There is literally a 20-foot wide swath of cleared trees running for the full 5000 plus miles.

See more here: http://www.7dvt.com/2013why-there-slash-trees-u-s-canada-border

And here:  http://io9.com/this-is-the-totally-bonkers-story-of-the-us-canada-bord-512961402

Long Haul

The book is a doorstop but I'm almost done...193 43 pages to go. I wanted to finish by the end of November. Possible, but unlikely.

List-style plot updates:

* Feng Shui on a Continental Scale
* Wolf Jesus
* Captain Zhang
* Mason and the Time Loop
* Tenebrae and Ethelmer: Kissing Cousins?
* Strange Sounds in the Forest
* Church in the Cave
* George Washington
* Ben Franklin
* The Electric Eel
* etc.

Vaucanson and the Automatic Duck

Almost everything in Mason and Dixon is based on historic fact. Pynchon takes a lot of liberties but the foundation is always true.

Near the middle of the book we meet an automatic duck, a piece of machinery, an automaton, created by one M. Vaucanson, who discovers how to love (the duck), quickly evolves beyond the bounds of its mechanical being and falls in love with a french chef. While the story of the duck's discovery of love and subsequent evolution are pure fiction, Vaucanson and his Canard Digérateur, or "Digesting Duck" are real.

Canard Digerateur

Jacques de Vaucanson was a french inventor in the early 1700s. Famous for creating highly complex automata and mechanical devices, including the first completely automated loom. (wikipedia). He designed the Canard to "eat", "digest", and "defecate."

It didn't actually look the picture above. Here's the real thing:

This is Pynchon's approach. Blending fact and fiction. You can't trust anything. The most absurd passages turn out to be fact, and when you think you have the whole truth, it turns out you don't know the half of it.

In other news:  I'm only halfway through this book, so we're going to stick with it for another month. OK.

Cheap Shot

Upon being insulted by Dixon:

" '-- Inexpensive Salvo,' Mason notes."


Funny, yeah?

Pynchon's Comedy

Pynchon likes to use his giant genius brain to make lots of low-brow dirty jokes.  Here's a funny article from Slate about it:  http://slate.me/1evZQJm

Pynchon's books are dripping with his sense of humor. High brow, low brow, super subtle, and slapsticky. One can practically see a smirking Pynchon typing out each sentence, even the more straightforward ones.

All light from the outside vanishes as something fills the Doorway.
"Gaahhrrhh!" it says.

Mason & Dixon is written in a pseudo-Olde English style, with random capitalization and lots of apostrophes. For example, in this passage, Dixon is expressing remorse for an altercation in his past where he threw a man at a dart board.

 "I admit, 'twas the improper way to test thee for Cranial Acuity, - I ought to have ta'en the Board from the Wall, brought it to thee, and then clash'd it upon thy Nob, tha Bugger."

You can almost hear Pynchon giggling when he types "clash'd it upon thy Nob."

Paranoia vs. Removal-of-blinders

Mason & Dixon are on an island in the southern latitudes to observe the transit of venus. They climb the hills to the island's interior and look out at the sea, remarking that the water appears higher than the land, as if poised to swallow the island. Our narrator says:

"For anyone deluded enough to remain down at sea level, there must come a moment when he finds himself looking upward at the Crests approaching."

This sentence is not about waves. It's classic Pynchon telling us dummies to get our heads out of the sand and look around. To question everything. To see the hidden power structure behind the seemingly random events of the world. And then to see even deeper to the hidden power behind the power. And on and on.


"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

Look up and see the coming waves before it's too late!

Trust no one!

Open your eyes, sheeple.

Etc, etc.