Readingthinkinglistening 11/29/23

Getting over overhanging trees

This week I only read (but finished) Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice. This is often described as “diet Pynchon” or “Pynchon for beginners” which I’m frankly not so sure about myself-probably Lot 49 is the one you want for the thing digested as simply as possible, and even then I think it misses out on some essential Pynchonian flavor, even if you do get the gist.¹ It’s very good though, a partial amendment to the postmortem on the sixties that was Vineland. I probably still think Vineland is the better book-he takes advantage of the 14 years between its mid-80s setting and Doc Sportello’s 1970 pursuit of the mystery that surrounds Mickey Wolfmann’s disappearance to give a more nuanced (if not jaundiced) view of the whole sixties thing-but IV is probably kinder to the new reader.

It was occurring to Doc now, as he recalled what Jason Velveeta had said about vertical integration, that if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and also sell them a program to help them kick? Get them coming and going, twice as much revenue and no worries about new customers—as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers.

One of the central themes of late Pynchon (“Late Pynchon” here meaning Vineland-Inherent Vice-Bleeding Edge rather than the two massive historical epics he produced before IV) is a certain type of small person’s helplessness before the complexity of modern life. This is I think what “the sixties” mean for Pynchon, a certain ability to withdraw, to opt out, an avenue of escape in which to exist unbothered, which is inevitably suppressed or eaten away in the end by its own rot, it’s own sin, the “Inherent Vice” of the title.² This is why he’s probably the most romantic of the major American postmodern novelists-Barth and DeLillo are in their own separate ways too cynical, Gaddis too openly pining for that old time religion, Morrison while herself a romantic perhaps too invested in a modernist way in community and ethnicity. If one can imagine Kazuo Ishiguro as Jane Austen without God, perhaps Thomas Pynchon is Charles Dickens without God, or rather with the strange, material-gnostic Deity of Herman Melville replacing God the Father.

This week I listened to “The Revealing Science of God” the first track of Yes’s 1973 LP Tales From Topographic Oceans, an album I’m only in the mood to tolerate about once every two years, but when the spirit moves, it moves. Prog was basically a bunch of guys who didn’t get the memo that the sixties were over, and just kept going with the experimentation bands were doing in 67-69 blending classical, jazz, & post-Beatles pop rock. I have a certain sympathy for this kind of spirit which I can’t explain. I think perhaps like hippie stuff in Pynchon it represents for me in some way an avenue of escape, however manufactured or passé-it’s worth remembering that Tales charted in the top 3 when it was released at the end of 73’-without which life is almost unbearable.³ TRSOD is good, probably the only unequivocally good track on the album, even if it definitely lacks some undefinable character of the other great Yes epics.

I also listened to Deftones 2006 album Saturday Night Wrist. Every Deftones album after White Pony is good but very samey, and I’d put Saturday Night Wrist in the upper quartile of that part of the discography. I might prefer Koi No Yokkan or Diamond Eyes some days, but others this one does the trick.

I’ve also been watching a lot of the Mike Judge or Mike Judge-derived animated sitcoms King of the Hill and Daria lately.⁴ Both are absolutely classic shows, some of the best of their genre. I had originally intended to write something extrapolating my thoughts about “Mike Judge-ism” as a worldview, but that can wait for another time, maybe even another Substack entirely.

Thinking: some barely existent thoughts on Taylor Swift:

I came down with something over the holiday that has me completely whipped and I want to pivot this blog away from “lukewarm presented as if hot takes about contemporary culture” so I’m afraid I really don’t have much for you today. Like everyone else I was floored by Sam Kriss’s incredible… thing about Taylor Swift the other day, and it’s got me thinking (a little) about my thoughts on her, which I must be honest, aren’t too many-as someone who was an (amateur) music critic in another life the entire phenomenon of the 2020s Taylor Renaissance is fascinating from a logistical cultural perspective, and I have the amount of nostalgia for her stuff through 1989 or so that I think everyone my age does, but I’d be lying if I said I’ve sought her out or thought especially deeply about her work outside of a few exceptions. I get why the resurgence of interest in her happened logistically-she dropped two acclaimed (critical) comeback albums and her beef with Scooter Braun-induced rerecordings are putting the songs everybody loved back in the public ear as new material again-I just don’t get what it means.⁵ If it means anything. Read

BDM

’s much more intelligent writing on the same topic and find out!

1. Pynchon works, broadly speaking in two modes-a sort of cosmic horror in which History itself is the indescribable presence that maddens its unwitting victims (V, Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day to an extent) and a smaller and more personal register in which more-or-less ordinary people have to stumble through vast conspiratorial systems they’re vaguely implicated in but ultimately largely unaware of. It’s not a perfect schema-ask me another time where Mason & Dixon fits.

2. Indeed, the most significant advance IV offers on Vineland is that Pynchon moves beyond blaming the end of “the sixties” on the political right to point the finger at technology itself, as indicated by the famous passage about ARPAnet from toward the end of the book.

“Down here in real life, compared to what you see in the spy movies and TV, we’re still nowhere near that speed or capacity, even the infrared night vision they’re using in Vietnam is still a long way from X-Ray Specs, but it all moves exponentially, and someday everybody’s gonna wake up to find they’re under surveillance they can’t escape. Skips won’t be able to skip no more, maybe by then they’ll be no place to skip to.”

3. The most negative mental states I have ever experienced have as a common denominator a sense of being trapped down here as it were, with no escape from the path (or paths) ahead of me, be they eschatological or nothing so mundane as my own inevitable mortality.

4. Daria is a Beavis and Butthead spin-off, and features something of his overall spirit, especially a certain snark, but the show itself had no involvement from Judge.

5. There’s a reason after all Great American Songbook era stars used to rerecord their signature material every decade or so.